I think someone estimated that if IQ were entirely genetic, whites have 100, and US blacks have 85, then African blacks should have 80, which still isn't close to Lynn's estimates.
If both this and Lynn's study are accurate then this would imply that the IQ difference in sub-saharan Africa is 2/3 genetic and 1/3 environmental, right? Since ~20 of the 30 points are explained by genes and 10 are not.
Of course, either study could have noise or methodological flaws making the difference greater or lesser.
Right. If African Americans average 85 (although that may have gone up a little over the decades) and are 20% white, while whites average 100 and are 100% white, and if IQ is 100% genetic, then Africans should average 82.
That's not too far above Wichert's African IQ estimate, which would imply that IQ is 80% or more nature. In contrast, Lynn's lower IQ estimate for Africa implies that nurture plays a big role in the gap between African-Americans and Africans.
Doesn't Lynn's IQ measure also suffer from the IQ/g discrepancy that causes the Flynn effect?
That is, my understanding of the Flynn effect is that IQ doesn't exactly measure g (the true general intelligence factor) but measures some proxy that is somewhat improved by literacy/education, and for most of the 20th century those were getting better leading to improvements in apparent IQ (but not g). Shouldn't we expect sub Saharan Africans to have lower IQ relative to g (since their education and literacy systems are often terrible)?
And then the part about them seeming much smarter than a first worlder with similar IQ makes sense - they'd do equally badly at tests, but in their case it's because e.g. they barely had a chance to learn to read rather than not being smart enough to think of the answer.
(Or a slightly more complicated version of this - e.g. maybe they can read fine, but never had an education that encouraged them to consider counterfactuals so those just don't come naturally).
There is also psychometric bias. I know that cremieux corrected for psychometric bias in the Israeli PISA results and it went up a lot of points. I don't know if he ran the analysis for other countries.
I guess a bad education system can cause psychometric bias.
In general, item-level data for between country comparisons are lacking. For this reason, it is difficult to evaluate measurement bias. Remember though, that bias does not necessarily cause a bias in the mean gap, nor does it always favor the higher scoring group, it may favor the lower scoring group. For this reason, some researchers like Russell Warne prefer to just speak of IQ score gaps, since we don't know the degree to which the international gaps are due to general intelligence specifically. Not yet anyway.
It's a common assumption among people who participate in acrimonious debates over the average test scores data from around the world. But as I've been arguing since 2002, the much lower scores seen in sub-Saharan Africa than among African-Americans suggests that impoverished nurture plays a role in holding down African scores.
The high correlation globally between IQ test scores and school achievement test scores suggests to me that both nature and nurture play a role in both kinds of scores.
The variation due to heritability is often taken to be something like 50-70% when considering the US black-white gap. What percentage could we judge the variation between US whites and sub-Saharan Africans to be heritable? It has to be lower at least.
Is there a way of mathematically estimating what the same magnitude of Flynn Effect would do to SSA scores if they were exposed to the environmental components that caused it?
A reasonable point. However, all the national IQ datasets use corrections for Flynn effect gains, so as to keep things comparable over time. Since we lack proper ratio scales, arbitrarily, British Whites were set as 100 IQ, and everybody else is scored relative to them. It turns out that the gains across cohorts are approximately the same speed everywhere, so the countries have (so far) kept their relative gaps.
If the Flynn effect is correlated with better nutrition and living standards, then when you see graphs for life expectancy stalling out or going downwards, and increasing numbers of people on unhealthy lifestyles, that would be the expected consequence.
Recent studies actually indicate that the Flynn effect has plateaued or even reversed in many developed countries. Norwegian military conscripts have been declining in IQ since ‘75. In Denmark, there was a minor rise in conscript IQ between ‘59 and ‘79, then virtually no movement for about 20 years then a minor drop more recently. A study of British teens between 1980 and 2008 showed decline of more than 2 points. In the U.S. a large Northwestern University study focusing on ‘06-‘18 saw a reverse Flynn effect as well.
This all jibes with my personal, general impression that people (including myself) seem less sharp than they did 30 years ago.
I'd be curious as to what portion of that decline is plausibly attributable to recent immigrant groups, or was this looking exclusively at the indigenous population of norway/denmark/britain? I guess you'd expect some nonzero dysgenic effects over the same period regardless.
The selective service datasets should be less affected by this since immigrants will only have to do it when they become citizens.
Still you'd want to look at country data from time periods with relatively little immigration. Eg Denmark only had a few percent immigrant population by 1990 so you can trust the plateau data from Denmark as not being caused by immigration.
PISA test data break out school achievement test scores for natives, first generation, and second generation immigrants. In most countries other than Australia and Canada, immigrants have the net effect of lowering the national average.
Environmental cadmium has been increasing over time. I'm not sure how large the effect is. And, of course, the reduction of environmental lead might have an opposite effect. They are things to control for if possible, in any case.
I think that's true. It is also very strong evidence for environmental as opposed to genetic factors. Nutrition, education, and all the other environmental factors increased massively in Europe post-WW2. Even running water in private homes in rural areas, or electricity, are to a large extent 20th century innovations. (Yes ancient Rome had water pipes, but making them out of lead sort of disqualifies them again.)
Life expectancy, which is an ok proxy for environmental factors, also seems to have stalled if not reversed.
In experimental economics, it is well understood that it is not enough to translate a questionnaire for it to work in a place like rural Malawi. You need to do a lot more work to, say, elicit risk preferences in a meaningful way. This would presumably also apply to an IQ test. Clearly, if you just translate the test, your results would be pretty meaningless. Then again, you shouldn’t assume that it would be possible to reach a point where understanding is as good as in the West, as that would require average IQ levels to be the same. If I were to do this, I’d try to measure several different proxies of IQ and see how they compare with results from Western countries. If all proxies are roughly equally lower, it would be good evidence of an underlying difference in IQ. At the opposite extreme, if some are much lower but others are roughly the same, it would be evidence that there are no IQ differences.
As I pointed out in my 2002 review of Lynn and Vanhanen's "IQ and the Wealth of Nations," it's unlikely that the genetic potential of the descendants of people in sub-Saharan Africa is only a maximum of 70 IQ or whatever they currently score, because their relatives in the US score 15 points higher. On the other hand, IQ tests weren't designed to predict genetic potential, but instead individual potential. An adolescent in Malawi who scores a 70 on an IQ test is likely to grow up to be about as economically productive as a Westerner who scores a 70.
> An adolescent in Malawi who scores a 70 on an IQ test is likely to grow up to be about as economically productive as a Westerner who scores a 70.
How do you measure that? If you look at income, the westerner will likely earn much more money, just from being allowed to work in Western labour markets.
>if you just translate the test, your results would be pretty meaningless.
Not to worry: many efforts beyond this have been made; it's understood in psychometrics as well. In general, IQ tests are not considered to be very culturally biased, or at least not as far as anyone's been able to show (e.g., people tend to get the same questions wrong, rather than a differential in "cultural suitability" becoming apparent).
It's been a while since I had all the data at my fingertips, and people like Sailer or Kirkegaard will be able to discourse upon it more adroitly than I anyway, but if there's pushback I'll try to dig up what I've previously written re: cultural bias on IQ tests.
(Particularly amusing was when an especially "culture-neutral" IQ test was touted across Tumblr as finally closing the "IQ gap", because Africans scored higher than whites or Asians. Eat it, racists! ...Except they were interpreting the results wrongly: Africans had scored /lower/, just as in the other---[presumably,] evil white supremacist---IQ tests. I wish I could find my screenshots of the fallout---I believe Scott's old Tumblr had a post about it too---but I've lost them with my old hard-drive.)
>If I were to do this, I’d try to measure several different proxies of IQ and see how they compare with results from Western countries.
Unfortunately, even many proxies aren't available for African nations, but this has been tried---as far as possible---with stuff like e.g. African emigrant university admissions tests (obvious sample bias here, but when it's all you've got...), PISA and the like, etc. The results are roughly about what you'd expect.
I don't even know what 'culturally non-biased intelligence testing' is supposed to mean if intelligence has any effect on culture or vice versa. IQ tests just (attempt to) measure cognitive phenotype, disentangling causative factors comes afterward.
I'd interpret it as something like the difference between "look at this sequence of pictures and see which of these other ones should come next" and "which of these English words can be both a noun and a verb?", or something...
...although it is hard to imagine that there are very many ways to "culturally bias" a test without including obvious "general knowledge" elements; I've never actually encountered a different operationalization of the concept.
Here's what I wrote in my 2002 review of Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen's "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" on the nature vs. nurture issue:
"A clear example of how a bad environment can hurt IQ can be seen in the IQ scores for sub-Saharan African countries. They average only around 70. In contrast, African-Americans average about 85. It appears unlikely that African-Americans' white admixture can account for most of this 15-point gap because they are only around 17%-18% white on average, according to the latest genetic research. (Thus African-Americans white genes probably couldn't account for more than 3 points of the gap between African-Americans and African-Africans.) This suggests that the harshness of life in Africa might be cutting ten points or more off African IQ scores.
"Similarly, West Africans are significantly shorter in height than their distant cousins in America, most likely due to malnutrition and infections."
There has been a big increase since I wrote this in 2002 in NBA players from Africa, but also in 2nd generation Africans raised in Europe (e.g., Giannis and and the half-black Wemby). Growing up African in a basketball-crazed first world country like Greece, as Giannis did, seems pretty close to the nature-nurture sweet spot for NBA talent.
There is an interesting study of a district in Kenya where life improved notably on most measures between 1984 and 1998 (e.g., more electricity, more schooling, better nutrition, better healthcare, and other good things), and the children's IQ scores rose by an average of 11 points:
I don't think anyone (including Lynn) disputes that there's room for environmental improvements in SSA or that these aren't hobbling cognitive development in various areas.
The question is what the target for social metrics like GDP or PISA scores or homicide rates are supposed to be if we're never getting to 'equal', and if you can convince blacks themselves to, shall we say, moderate their expectations.
I believe the current best explanation of the Flynn effect is that it doesn't represent a true intelligence gain. It's not measure-invariant, which is the statistical test used to validate that IQ tests are actually measuring IQ. Flynn effect gains are concentrated in visuo-spatial abilities and so may represent the effects of an entire population learning to drive or watching tv or some other culturally-pervasive skill.
That being said I suspect that the 60 IQ figure would probably respond rapidly to modern nutrition, literacy, or general familiarity with test taking. My guess is that African American IQs roughly represent the genetic potential of sub-Saharan Africans.
> My guess is that African American IQs roughly represent the genetic potential of sub-Saharan Africans.
I think that if you did an experiment where you took a sample of African American babies and sent them to be raised in Asian American households you'd find that there were still gains to be had.
Something as simple as a cultural value of "someone randomly hands you a test -- do you try really hard to do your absolute best, or do you just sorta do it casually while thinking about something else?" can make a huge difference on an IQ test.
Existing twin and adoption studies disagree with that. I agree that childhood performance can be influenced (somewhat) by environment, but the current consensus is that shared environment accounts for ~5% of adult IQ variance in the US.
5% isn't that small. If we raised all black babies in Asian households then maybe we couldn't get them to 105 or 100, but could we get them to 90?
I don't think the ceiling has been reached. If we could get pregnant women to stop using alcohol and drugs we could probably buy a few more points. If we solved childhood malnutrition then a few more points after that.
Ninety might be a reasonable ceiling. Look at racial IQ scores by SES. The white-black gap only closes by about 5 points at the top. I think that represents the most you can achieve with environment. Five percent is, in fact, pretty small.
The Minnesota transracial adoption study failed to show any benefit for black children adopted by white parents.
I think there is a good chance that African-American culture has developed some dysfunctional tendencies over the last 60 years, more than some other black cultures.
As I recall from grade school, black boys who did well in school were told that they were "acting white", and beaten.
I suspect that the research on "motivation" hasn't involved randomized trials on the effects of physical violence and ostracisation from one's community.
This might be the worst place to ask this, but I’m guessing something like People’s or Times Magazine. 100 IQ is the modal IQ, so presumably something mainstream and popular is what’s targeted to them.
I'd have to know -more- than I do now to love People magazine. Whenever I see a copy, at a grocery check out line or in a dentist's waiting room, the cover is filled with names of people I've never heard of. That they're usually only given by first name doesn't help.
I guffawed and then text-messaged my buddy a quote of the paragraph. Scott so rarely goes for cheap potshots, so it's fun when he uses the opportunity to indulge his grudge.
He has every right given how he was treated by some specific people at The New York Times. But I was nonetheless disappointed, since I expect better from Scott than to tar many guiltless Times workers collaterally. That and a cheap joke undercuts what was otherwise a serious post.
I enjoy a well-executed cheap shot as much as the next guy, but I really hope people don't explicitly hold this view w.r.t collective employer reputation!
What's your response to a zealous prog attempting to cancel someone for working in finance, or tech, or defense, or fossil fuels, or real estate development, or health insurance, or anything explicitly right-wing? Overestimating the power of reputation effects is a real horseshoe move these days.
> I was nonetheless disappointed, since I expect better from Scott than to tar many guiltless Times workers collaterally . . . a cheap joke undercuts what was otherwise a serious post.
I don't think you'd hold either of these positions in other circumstances. That is, if the target was aligned more toward your political enemies, would you really still take a single-line (less!) throwaway gag as seriously "tar[ring the] guiltless" and "undercut[ting ...] a serious post"?
I dunno; I just have a hard time imagining anyone really thinks either of those things---that a single, less-than-one-line, obvious joke "undercuts" the substantive points around it, or that the targets need to be worried over.
A classic moment in the ACX NYT discourse was when Scott referred to a headline about a survey on minimum wages that said "Most Economists Don't Think Minimum Wages Reduce Employment". The result of the survey was roughly 30% said there's a reduction, 10% said not, and 60% said unsure
These are both good points. But the other major factor that I think should be reassuring about Lynn's estimates (and other cross-national IQ estimates) is that when you look at "non-problematic" sources that seem like proxies for IQ (e.g. World Bank data, educational performance), you see the same pattern as Lynn and others' IQ data.
It's easy for people to quibble about each and every IQ measure (and so people do), but that we see the same pattern of results using otherwise uncontroversial data sources should be reassuring.
My concern is that when we see a CIA fact book page about GPD per capita next to an IQ chart for the same country, the inclination is to think "they *deserve* to be poor because they're dumb." The people most likely to say this are also the people who oppose foreign aid. They oppose interventions even in our own country.
I'm not thinking of GDP per capita, I'm thinking of measures that are more cognitive.
I'd question how strong or universal "the inclination is to think "they *deserve* to be poor because they're dumb."," based on observing a correlation between national IQ and GDP per capita.
But, even so, I think it would be important to acknowledge that association and acknowledge that it is very plausibly at least partly causal. Even on an entirely environmentalist view of IQ differences, it's important to acknowledge that the proximal cause of poor outcomes is that the populations, in fact, have lower ability. Otherwise one will incorrectly assume that if you e.g. merely give currently-low-IQ people access to laptops or move them to richer countries or remove this or that other barrier they will be able to perform at the same level.
All good points. It's just that the reason Scott's post is "controversial" is that there really are racist people with influence in our politics who really do want to pursue pure social Darwinism. So it requires extra pushback (IMO).
The Enlightenment is, in my opinion, a good example to keep in-mine, where people gave up their old racist, prejudiced ideas based on religion and ignorance.
Then they turned right around and stated the Same Old Racist conslusions, only now it was "Scientific." Written examples abound.
"The nineteenth-century Anglican Priest Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) was a significant populariser of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Kingsley was successful in this regard because he developed such diverse connections throughout his career. In the 1840s he associated with Chartists and radical journalists; in the 1850s and 1860s he moved freely in scientific circles and was elected Fellow of the Linnean Society of London in 1856 and Fellow of the Geological Society of London in 1863. In 1859 he was appointed Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen. In 1860 the Prince Consort was willing and able to secure Kingsley appointment as the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University and he subsequently became tutor to the Prince of Wales. Thereafter he was frequently invited into high Victorian Society. A friend of `Darwin's Bulldog' Thomas Huxley, of the eminent geologist Charles Lyell and a correspondent of Darwin, at every turn he sought to promote Darwin's ideas as theologically orthodox, a life-long campaign in which he was eminently successful."
From a letter to his wife, dated July 4th, 1862, when he was on holiday in County Sligo:
July 4.—".... I have done the deed at last — killed a real actual live salmon, over five pounds weight. This place is full of glory — very lovely, and well kept up....
"But I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don't believe they are our fault. I believe there are not only many more of them than of old, but that they are happier, better, more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful ; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours...."
Yes, the poor English: nothing is ever their fault. And now I had better quit before I break into a rollicking chorus of 'The Wolfe Tones' Greatest Hits' such as "A Nation Once Again" and "Come Out Ye Black and Tans".
The Enlightenment did a lot of good in a lot of areas, but it also spawned the Blank Slate as a fundamental political theorem (despite never actually having a particular basis in evidence or experiment), and the writings of Rousseau and the Reign of Terror can be considered a prelude to Marx and Mao.
The question is what kind of pushback is more effective. Personally I think it's entirely possible that the whole concept of applying IQ worldwide is a poor one to begin with - after all it's just a proxy metric, not the thing-in-itself we want to measure, so there's many ways it can fail and cultural/learning differences are obvious ones. But some people are so desperate to push back they deny that IQ can ever measure anything at all, call the g-factor itself racist as a concept and basically go all in into "you should not even suggest that there is something as human intelligence differing between individuals at all". Which is sort of insane and patently false. There is a point where pushback that is too obsessed to denying the opponents' arguments on a level as fundamental as possible just regresses to the point of trying to gaslight people about very obvious truths, at which point it just loses credibility and risks dragging down its entire enterprise.
Scott's post seems to be along the lines of "you don't need to deny these results even to be anti-racist, you can in fact point out that they are evidence of problems you already care about (namely: non-white countries having been driven into conditions of poverty and deprivation by colonial exploitation)". Of course it's still entirely possible that the results are false and wrong (I'm not that convinced myself), but his point is, you don't even need to concede that if they were true THEN scientific racism would be correct. They're not evidence for that.
I teach a university level course in psychology, and one of the modules we cover are the biological effects on intelligence. We review the IQ differences between racial groups in the US, and discuss possible causes. We almost always end up coming to very similar conclusions to those you outline.
> problems you already care about (namely: non-white countries having been driven into conditions of poverty and deprivation by colonial exploitation)
It's true enough that implied audiences accept such things as gospel, but the exclusive fixation on the cardinal sin of colonialism is about as silly as IQ denial. Poverty and deprivation are the human default throughout history, not the curse inflicted by White Devil (of course, he is often guilty of perpetuating and exacerbating them). The millionth excoriation of colonialist exploitation won't create a modicum of actual wealth, and "progressives" would do well to turn their attention to that instead of perpetual grievances and redistribution.
Fixing the problem (were that possible) would deprive the activists involved of substantial status and power gained by whining about this. This is true for many, if not all, of society's problems.
> of course, he is often guilty of perpetuating and exacerbating them
I mean, that's the core non-insane claim. Then of course all sorts of wilder ones get tacked on sometimes, and the question of why some areas of the world just suffer from worse economic outcomes to begin with is straight up ignored (I've seen Jared Diamond's famous suggested answer from "Guns, germs and steel" labelled as racist, which is kind of absurd since its whole point was to counteract racist narratives - no one does anyone any favours by denying that colonisation could happen because Europe obviously WAS leaps and bounds above other continents in military technology and productive capacity). But the fact that industrialised countries DID in fact exploit those regions and DID in fact stunt their economic development in doing so by funnelling out their resources and sometimes DO still keep messing with them for geopolitical or economic reasons is obviously kind of relevant to the whole thing, even if you think that without that messing those areas would still suffer a certain degree of poverty and underdevelopment for unrelated (geographical, cultural, climatic) reasons.
That's what I've been arguing since 2002, but it's not like the Southern Poverty Law Center has thus announced, "Steve Sailer's moderate reasonableness should be a model for thinking about this topic."
Your complaint seems to imply that you would rather people believe things that are false so long as this leads them to favor your preferred policies. I find this stance even more offensive and outrageous than the object level policy differences.
But what policy conclusion should we derive from this? My conclusion is that one very good way to promote global GDP would be to invest in better educational infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa.
There's some truth to this, but there's also the question of sustainability, especially if the population of SSA quadruples over the next century while the tax-paying populations of investor nations keep shrinking.
Did you have any specific people in mind who are powerful in politics who believe this way?
I think you're failing to model these people's minds.
Your mention of *deserve* is interesting to me because that is related to moral fairness. Fairness is a kind of value that liberal people tend to focus on. I think liberals who focus on fairness are actually the kind to believe that dumb people do not *deserve* aid - precisely the reason it is important that there are no dumb people to be found!
Reactionaries might talk about IQ differences to explain hiring disparities in certain industries. Those reactionaries are not saying dumb people deserve to lose the job. They are not saying smart people deserve the job. Reactionaries do not believe jobs are status trophies to be allocated fairly. Fairness, and "deserve" is a strictly liberal concern.
That is just one example but the same is true for international aid or any other kind of policy that involves tradeoffs. In the case of aid, these people simply do not believe aid should be allocated fairly. They probably believe it should be allocated effectively or something.
I mean, Trump himself is a fan of the “racehorse theory” of people. It’s part of why he didn’t won’t to allow people from “shithole” countries and wondered why we weren’t attracting more people from Norway. He’s also talked in speeches about the “good genes” of his supporters and “bad genes” of immigrants.
Sure, allocate aid effectively, but that’s not the nuanced argument being made by Charlie Kirk and other MAGA influencers. Trump listens to people like that, not Scott Alexander.
Not wanting immigrants from low-IQ countries, absent an effective sorting mechanism (i.e., legal immigration, which Trump doesn't oppose), is perfectly reasonable under the assumptions above---not evidence of some sort of "they deserve to suffer, mwa ha ha!" mentality.
> Those reactionaries are not saying dumb people deserve to lose the job. They are not saying smart people deserve the job.
Okay come on, where did you get that idea? Do you think reactionaries don't value justice? Everyone, regardless of political ideology, believe that there are people that deserve things and people that don't. The only exception are those few eccentrics that don't believe in free will.
You can deserve things through your own choices, but I have difficulty saying that someone deserves a job (or whatever) for being smart, because being smart is an accident of birth, not a choice.
Does someone deserve to be poor because they're stupid? No, that doesn't make sense.
On the other hand, you can simultaneously believe (a) being stupid will cause them to be poor, and (b) no injustice has been done.
Is it fair that a smart person also gets to be rich, and a stupid person also gets to be poor? There's a big difference between those who say "no" and those who say "this question is meaningless".
I don't think reactionaries are totally indifferent to concepts of fairness and merit and desert, it's just they don't believe that merit generalises in a universal manner across all possible status hierarchies. The smartest, most loyal, and most hard-working man in all of China might make a wonderful leader for his own country, and a terrible leader for, e.g, Japan, depending on where his ultimate loyalties lie. This is part of the problem with the H1B debate.
Do the rich deserve to be impoverished because they're smart?
Unless you're a hardcore equalising communist, some non-zero portion of a person's income is going to be attributable to their own talents, and unless you believe in global government, there isn't going to be a wealth-redistribution mechanism that scales across all nations. Under HBD assumptions, this means that some countries who are mostly filled with genetically handicapped people are going to be very poor relative to others.
Sure, you could have some non-zero level of charitable redistribution, at both the national and global level, and I'm not entirely unsympathetic to that goal. But then we need to settle on some workable target for how much poverty-alleviation would be satisfactory, precisely. If HBD is true, then we're never getting to equal, so... what should the per-capita income of Malawi be relative to Singapore, under ideal conditions, and what levels of wealth transfer would be involved?
> Do the rich deserve to be impoverished because they're smart?
Does anyone deserve anything? Everything about someone's early environment, including their genes and the culture they live in, is not under their control. So they haven't done anything to "deserve" anything good or bad their get out of it.
Later in life people do have more control over their environment -- but only based on their foundations laid down in their early life.
Some people might be cleverer than others and so earn more money. But they didn't make themselves clever. One might argue that some people work harder than others and so deserve wealth from that. But maybe they only work harder because their genes and early environment cause them to do so.
So "deserve" is empty, meaningless. The most we can say is that society can get good results if it rewards some behaviours (like increasing overall wealth) and punishes others (like murder).
If you're defining some behaviours as socially beneficial to reward and others as socially beneficial to punish, then you're defining standards of desert.
In any case, go ahead and solve for maximum global utility integrated over the next 1000 years under the assumptions of HBD and homo sapiens being an evolved primate motivated by self-interest with mostly parochial spheres of moral concern (which are close to being the same thing.) You can't alleviate suffering without funding, have to get funding through tax/charity, tax/charity has to be derived from incomes derived from work being done, people are motivated to work by keeping at least a substantial fraction of their income, and all long-term effective political/institutional hierarchies require decentralised delegation of local authority. Solve for X and I'm fairly confident it's going to look roughly similar to the picture I painted.
You know, barring some more radical scenario where benevolent AGI takes over the planet or we genetically engineer all humans to be saints, or something. I don't know if physics forbids this, exactly, but I wouldn't bet on it happening either.
I agree with what you've written here and above, and also with what Ponti* up there has written---they don't seem to be in any sort of tension, to me (see below).
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*...well, sort of. I think that "deserve" is, in fact, a meaningful concept, and the considerations Ponti Min outlines don't preclude this; e.g., perhaps Person A has responded to poor environment by becoming a murderous savage, and Person B was able to overcome the inclination under the same conditions: neither chose what they started with, but I'm comfortable allotting blame to one and praise to the other. We can argue over some Pure Ultimate Philosophical sense of "deserve", I guess---but for all practical purposes, everyone acts as if deserts are a thing, and acting this way leads to the promotion of "good results" anyway (so the concept is perfectly cromulent even by the standard alluded to at the end of P. Min's comment).
Hence, I'm not really sure what the user's point was meant to be, or how s/he thought it contradicted yours.
> and unless you believe in global government, there isn't going to be a wealth-redistribution mechanism that scales across all nations.
Georgist land value tax says hello.
A state capable of resisting territorial conquest and regulating commerce to any meaningful degree - which, granted, not all manage, but it's still a pretty low bar, difficult to credibly claim even the most dumpster-fire of a country couldn't *someday* achieve it - is ipso facto capable of allocating land-use rights, and assessing and collecting the portion of rent which is primarily attributable to the value of the location, rather than to personal efforts or accumulated capital.
Then that location-value revenue (modulo other state expenses, monetary supply concerns, etc.) can simply be handed out to citizens on a pure per-capita basis. Those with greater aptitude would then presumably make better use of what they get, and suffer no automatically scaling tax burden for having done so.
Georgist land tax is just a mechanism for adjusting how you appropriate wealth from your population in the first place with (in theory) minimal damage to incentive structures. It does nothing to solve the two problems I mentioned (vast, genetically-driven differences in ability to generate wealth in the first place, and the inefficiencies of attempting to scale central governance.)
I don't think people think "they deserve" to be poor. I think it's more along the lines of "this explains why they're poor and why sending them aid probably won't change that." Which seems like a reasonable thing to think.
Deserve ain't got nothing to do with it, as a quotable man once said.
You can't deserve to be poor because you're dumb, because you didn't choose to be dumb. However one might look at the data and draw other conclusions which may or may not be justified, such as:
1. It is not surprising that these countries are poor, because the people are dumb
2. Being dumb is the main reason that these countries are poo
3. There is no point in doing anything to help the economic situation of the people in these countries
or alternatively
4. We should try extra hard to help these people since they're dumb
I don't know what "deserve" has to do with it, but since the application of human intelligence is the primary source of wealth one would expect IQ to correlate to GDP per capita. This has very little to do with whatever principles of distributive justice one might prefer. The only difference it makes is that it refutes any claim that the richer countries got that way by plundering the poorer ones, but that's not a necessary premise to support foreign aid or domestic welfare programs. The popularity of things like disability benefits demonstrates that people will actually support taking care of people who can't take care of themselves.
What's problematic is that IQ is designed as a proxy for intelligence and people tend to assume it is one; what these results show is that it's only a halfway decent proxy within a specific cultural and socioeconomic context and the relationship breaks down when you apply it to very different countries. In other words the "IQ test" at the national level becomes equivalent to a school achievement test. But if you phrase it that way (people in poor countries score lower on standardized tests) it's no longer controversial.
> What's problematic is that IQ is designed as a proxy for intelligence
More precisely it was designed as a proxy for academic ability. That is to say, they asked people as load of questions and kept in the tests that questions that were well-correlated with how well the test takers did academically.
> In other words the "IQ test" at the national level becomes equivalent to a school achievement test.
Raymond Cattell was developing 'culture-neutral' IQ tests back in the 1950s, and there are even tests that don't rely on a formal written education to be evaluated (picture tests, raven's matrices), but unless you think culture and education have zero influence on intelligence or vice versa I don't see why the two should be uncorrelated.
IQ tests evolved to measure potential for performing in the modern world.
The first American IQ test, the Stanford-Binet, was introduced in 1916 by Stanford professor Lewis Terman in what became the heart of Silicon Valley. Lewis's son Fred Terman, Dean of Engineering at Stanford, is probably the best candidate for Father of Silicon Valley, although others point to Fred's friend William Shockley.
My point is that early IQ test designers correctly guessed in which direction life was moving, which helps explain the Flynn Effect: the world has gotten more like what some Stanford professors hypothesized it would a century ago, so subsequent generations have more practice dealing with machine logic and the like in daily life, so they score higher on IQ tests than their forefathers.
By the way, all these people are considered deplorable eugenicists today: e.g., Lewis & Fred Terman Middle School in Palo Alto had its name changed to that of a city councilwoman who introduced bike lanes to Palo Alto, rather than a compromise proposal to drop outspoken eugenicist Lewis's name from the school and just name it after Fred Terman, because the hereditary taint of eugenics is disqualifying unto the seventh generation or something.
Not surprisingly, the former Terman Middle School had the highest test scores of any public middle school in the state of California. It's almost as if real estate values in Palo Alto are so stratospheric because Stanford and its offshoots like HP and Google have successfully carried out the Termans' strategy of finding and recruiting smart people.
They... don't. Some people will latch onto anything that means they don't have to think about a world in which intellectual ability varies on anything but a purely individual level, though (and some don't even like to admit /that/).
I find the impulse people have, these days, to obsessively focus upon "group justice" a very strange thing. It isn't hard to find folks that are perfectly willing to contemplate that Person A has a higher (genetically-mediated) "IQ ceiling" than Person B---but suddenly, this becomes a huge issue if we say Group A vs. Group B... even though anything unfair about the latter situation is also unfair in the former, and no one extra is hurt by it (groups don't have sentience, as far as I can tell---only individuals).
The data is---for now, anyway---available to anyone who wants to look at it; and yet many will go around saying stuff like "I bet those dumb white supremacist psychometricians never considered that the tests could be CULTURALLY BIASED!" without ever themselves considering if /maybe this was, in fact, considered---and obviated./
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Similarly, you'll have people---as in these comments---saying stuff like "well, even if IQ does turn out to have a genetic component that varies between groups, we shouldn't let this get out because what's the point? this knowledge can only be used to hurt people!"... but they've either never tried to reason this out, or else did so poorly.
For example, perhaps knowing this could prevent resources from being wasted---could be used to prioritize interventions that don't depend upon a blank-slate premise? Or: if differential performance between groups is a thing not amenable to environmental influence, what does that say about legislation predicated upon the idea that it /is/---could one perhaps end up penalizing certain segments of the population over and over (because the results keep coming out unequal so clearly their environment still isn't good enough)?
Etc., etc. It's all very tiresome, though, and I have to stop scrolling because otherwise I'll waste all day replying in anger to people down here.
(Very few legitimately irritating comments encountered so far---except the comment you replied to, heh---but that's because SSC/ACX readers are generally a cut above; I know I'll run into infuriating takes eventually, though...)
I don't rule out the possibility of different genetic groups having differences in in their average genetic potential for intelligence. In fact, at least some small difference would have to exist if any of the relevant alleles differ in frequency in the two populations. The thing is, "genetic potential for intelligence" is nearly impossible to measure. You would have to find populations that differ genetically but are the same in all other ways. You certainly couldn't divide up by *country* which correlates only loosely with genetics and introduces tons of confounders. All the results I've seen (and admittedly I am not familiar with all of the literature on this) don't do any genetic testing, but base their claims on proxies like location or race that have obvious correlations to environment. You write off cultural bias as a solved problem, but culture certainly affects intelligence (by any definition for which you can devise a working test). If you're trying to measure the effect of genetics then whether the test is culturally biased is not really the issue; the culture, not to mention other factors in the environment like nutrition, can also be "biased".
I didn't choose my words carefully enough when I said these results "show" that IQ testing is a poor proxy for genetic intelligence potential when the variation in environments is large enough. Rather, these results reflect that fact, one which should have been obvious to begin with.
And to address your second section, the point is not that we have to hide information if we don't like it. The problem is people are trying to convince the public to trust in bad science that has been concocted to support their preferred policy approaches - namely, they want to ignore inequality of outcomes, so they pretend it can all be explained by genetics and there's no point trying to fix it. Whether or not trying to create equitable outcomes is a good idea (I think sometimes, but it's a tough problem), the science simply doesn't support the claim that it's all due to genes.
>I don't rule out the possibility of different genetic groups having differences in in their average genetic potential for intelligence.<
Then you're a good deal ahead of many other people, and we may not really disagree very much!
>The problem is people are trying to convince the public to trust in bad science that has been concocted to support their preferred policy approaches ... so they pretend it can all be explained by genetics<
/Are/ they? Most of the bad science on this issue that I've personally seen goes the other direction. There is an extremely strong bias against this sort of research, such that the fact it still exists at all is an indication of how strong the case is.
>they want to ignore inequality of outcomes<
I think, rather, people on "my side" have no problem acknowledging inequality of outcome; they just think it is a poor metric to use in assessing the "fairness" of society. If you have groups that will not achieve equality of outcome with other groups /given equal opportunity/, the question becomes: "is it fair to let them sink or rise to the level they are able, or are we on the hook to give unequal opportunities until outcome doesn't systematically differ?"
>The thing is, "genetic potential for intelligence" is nearly impossible to measure. [...] All the results I've seen (and admittedly I am not familiar with all of the literature on this) don't do any genetic testing, but base their claims on proxies like location or race that have obvious correlations to environment.<
I think that the first part of this isn't correct---depending on what exactly we mean by our terms and what standard we apply (it's been done to the same standard as, say, "genetic potential for height")---and that the latter is based upon a misapprehension regarding a) the correlation between race & kinship/ancestry, and b) the necessity of genetic testing for group membership at all (i.e., if we're interested in systematic differences between racial groups, "race" isn't a proxy; there may or may not be between-group variation, but if there is, whether or not your testees [haha] cluster tightly or loosely, in re relatedness, is a different question)...
...but I also think it doesn't matter too much---as mentioned below, as long as we agree that "a little of column A, a little of column B" is probably (or, failing that, at least /could be/) the case, in re group differences in ability, then I'm fine with that and don't much care where exactly the line ends up being drawn.
IME, it's a bit of a motte-and-bailey situation: the vast majority of anthropologists, psychometricians, population geneticists, and so on will report that they believe current between-group differences are most likely both environmental and genetic in origin (i.e., given equal environment, gaps would close but not entirely). But /in practice/---in our public & political discourse, say---you must hold to an "it's entirely & completely due to differences in environment" position. (I've seen it happen more than once that a hapless scientist or academic will fly too close to the sun, and say something insufficiently environmental-y enough... then the media/X-twitter feeding frenzy begins, of "DR. X SAID [GROUP] IS /GENETICALLY DUMBER/ THAN [GROUP]!!!" These days, most know not to touch the topic with a 20-foot pole, heh.)
>the science simply doesn't support the claim that it's all due to genes.<
I don't believe anyone holds this position... but I'm not sure whether I'm nitpicking here (i.e., if your position would be the same if we substituted "mostly due to genes" or "half due to genes"), or whether I'm advancing an important counterpoint (i.e., if you would be surprised to learn that most hold some position between "50/50" and "80/20", and/or to find that the science /does/ support the revised claims).
>I didn't choose my words carefully enough when I said these results "show" that IQ testing is a poor proxy for genetic intelligence potential when the variation in environments is large enough. Rather, these results reflect that fact, one which should have been obvious to begin with.<
No worries; I've probably made many statements that could be picked apart by an uncharitable interlocutor, heh. (E.g., heredity really doesn't have separate "genetic" and "environmental" components that can be disentangled in any given instance, so to speak of it this way isn't strictly correct---but everyone knows what one means anyway. I hope...)
I think I interpreted your statement to mean "IQ tests don't really measure intelligence"---although it's been a while, so I'm not entirely sure, heh---and I, of course, think IQ is a pretty /good/ proxy for what we mean when we say "intelligence". I also think that the evidence supports a contention of "some of the tested IQ difference between racial groups would vanish given equal environments, and some wouldn't"---but the exact proportion doesn't matter so much, to me.
What gets /me/ upset is those who will refuse to credit the notion at all, so that various interventions in society become a never-ending treadmill: all of any differential in outcome must be due to environment, so we must change environment; hmm, we still see unequal outcomes, so we need to give further preference to the lower-performing group; hey, the outcomes are still unequal even looking at populations like "Harvard students"---...
...sooner or later (sooner, usually), the idea "well, the better-performing group must be /doing something bad/ for this situation to obtain" is hit upon. But---in the case wherein we're dealing with a difference in outcome that isn't caused by some societal bias or inequality of opportunity---it will persist, and persist, and persist, and the "it's racism!" must become more and more totalizing (unconscious racism! systemic racism! everyone's a little racist! racism in tech, nation built on racism, math is racist, grades are racist, racism is racist---wait a sec...) as it appears that this problem is /even more insidious & deep-rooted than we feared/, and the societal interventions must become more & more drastic...
...and I don't think it ends up anywhere good. (YMMV, of course, as to how much of this treadmill you think we've already seen; I, obviously, think we're already running at a good pace.)
Anyway, /that's/ the reason I think it's important---not because I'm married to "IT'S 100% GENETIC", but because I think "IT'S 100% ENVIRONMENT" a) is definitely not the case, and b) becomes, when an article of faith, a pernicious influence.
>1: Isn't It Super-Racist To Say That People In Sub-Saharan African Countries Have IQs Equivalent To Intellectually Disabled People?
>
> No. In fact, it would be super-racist not to say this!
Yes! If any good at all comes out of the ongoing scandal of Pakistani rape gangs in England and the English legal system's long track record of enabling of them out of a fear of appearing racist, it will be discrediting this viewpoint once and for all. (Or at least for the next 20-40 years or so. That seems to be as long as it takes even the worst of ideas to pop back up anymore.)
You seem to imply that the legal system is still enabling grooming gangs, whereas they are being investigated and brought to justice. The fear of appearing racist certainly did exist; as did other problems such as the police not believing the girls involved because they were from poor parts of the cities; but social workers, the police and the legal system now seem to be effectively investigating these crimes. (Or as effectively as the legal system works in general, anyway).
Yes, they are *finally* being investigated and brought to justice, but only after the problem had raged on for well over a decade, only after people who tried to bring the issues to light were ignored at best or legally persecuted at worst, only after Elon Musk stepped in and used the world's biggest megaphone to make the problem impossible to continue to ignore.
Continuing with the enabling at every turn, until you are compelled not to do so by overwhelming outside forces, does not earn you any credit for finally doing the right thing when you are only doing the right thing because you were compelled to do the right thing by outside forces.
If the investigations were effective, it wouldn't still be going on ten years later.
Look at the middle section of the article: "What inquiries have there been?" It's a long list of investigations into the problem, that found there clearly was a problem, and that it was being covered up by people in positions of authority who should have been fixing the problem. And then there was another investigation a few years later that found the same thing. And then another one. And then another one.
What there never was was people putting a stop to it.
One thing I don't quite get here is... Musk is trying to use this to attack Starmer, who is a little left of center by US standards and that's some kind of red flag to a bull apparently.
But why isn't "Starmer's political opponents have been in power for over a decade now and drove all the failed investigations you describe; go kick them for failing the kids" being used as a rebuttal to specifically anti-Starmer rhetoric?
"we should expect blacks everywhere to have an IQ of 85, since they all have the same genes"
AFAIK, that is far from true. While "white" may be a descriptor for a group of somewhat similar genetic backgrounds, having common anchestors not too far in the past, "black" is different, grouping populations of similar skin color, but common anchestors diverging way further back in time.
That's true for people from coastal West Africa (e.g. Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast), but much less so for other parts of Africa. Many African population groups are more closely related to Eurasian peoples than to each other, and internal genetic diversity is AIUI higher than the difference between non-African continents. (Caveat: not a geneticist, my impression of the field may be wrong. I tried summarizing it here: https://www.deviantart.com/concavenator/art/Human-Genealogy-1100506801 , but do note the generous corrections in one of the comments.)
"Based on the 1274100 people who completed an IQ test at BRGHT, the average IQ of people in Nigeria is 96.40. With this IQ score, Nigeria ranks #169 on the list of countries by average IQ."
Obviously self-selected, but better than 69!
As to how we stack up on that site:
"Based on the 1274100 people who completed an IQ test at BRGHT, the average IQ of people in Ireland is 101.56. With this IQ score, Ireland ranks #75 on the list of countries by average IQ."
Since I despise Lynn's fudges, I'm choosing to believe a stupid website over anything he pulled out of his arse.
There are at least eight different sources listed for Nigeria in the NIQ dataset, including four from researchers with visibly African surnames, so I think we can rule out racial bias as being an overriding source of data contamination here. You don't have to take my word for it, go read the original papers.
Nigeria has a national test for college admissions. The highest scoring Nigerian state is one that's all Igbo. The lowest scoring states are in the Muslim north. Nigeria has big regional affirmative action preferences for northerners to keep southerners from getting all the spots in public universities.
> Nigeria has big regional affirmative action preferences for northerners to keep southerners from getting all the spots in public universities.
How does the system work? China does this too, except that they give big regional affirmative action preferences to... everyone. Chinese universities have much larger admission quotas for local students. ("Local" being defined by province.)
The Chinese will happily tell you that in the absence of the regional-quota system, all of the universities would fill up with people from Fujian. Interestingly, the top university in Fujian, Xiamen University, does not appear to be one of the very top schools in China overall.
There's also Chisala's arguments about Scrabble and Nigerian immigrants in the US/UK which make it extremely implausible that the average IQ is so low.
How? Pakistani immigrants to the US are very intelligent. Pakistani immigrants to the UK are not. Immigrants never give you a good read on what the average person who didn't emigrate is like.
Getting into the US or the UK from Nigeria is very difficult. What would you expect of those people?
Most black Africans, including all the major ethnic groups of Malawi, are the descendants of the Bantu Expansion, when Bantu-speaking peoples, starting from about 4000 years ago, spread out from central west Africa and almost entirely replaced the indigenous populations of eastern and southern Sub-Saharan Africa (and the Bantu peoples are the largest branch of the larger Niger-Congo linguistic family, which covers most of tropical West and Central Africa). The Malawians are not so different from the ancestors of US blacks as to make it a specious comparison.
Yes. Afro-Americans derive about 70% of their ancestry from Niger-Congo-speaking peoples, who are about as genetically similar to eachother as native Europeans.
Right. The Bantu, along with their West African relatives up into, say, Senegal, are rather genetically homogeneous. For example, Lagos, Nigeria and Lusaka, Zambia are about 3,500 miles of bad road apart. Yet, as Harvard geneticist David Reich notes:
"…the frequencies of mutations in groups in Nigeria and in Zambia are more similar than the frequencies of mutations in Germany and Italy despite the former two countries being separated by a far greater geographic difference."
Pretty much all linguistic and cultural groupings are also genetic groupings (albeit imperfectly correlated) too, outside of colonial languages that have converted more conquered imperial subjects to speaking the language than there are members of the ethnic group whose original language it was. With the Bantus in particular, to the degree that they have absorbed admixture from Pygmy- and San-like populations, or other highly divergent human groups that once existed on what is now Bantu-occupied territory, they will be somewhat more genetically diverse than comparable linguistic groups in other parts of the world. But from what I gather, the fate of the pre-Bantu Sub-Saharan African populations tended to be extermination rather than absorption a lot of the time, with the net result that the Bantus are not _so_ genetically diverse as to make a comparison between Malawians and tropical West Africans unfair.
Well, whites and African blacks come from the same genetic background, too.
American blacks will be closely related to some African blacks, but not necessarily all.
All humans come from anchestors in Africa. Some left thousands of years ago and became white, others stayed, but those that stayed didn't all remain closely related, AFAIK.
So the distinction between whites as a genetic population vs African blacks as a genetic population is misleading. The latter is a group so wide it should include whites when we talk about genetic anchestry. We just overlook it for reasons of skin color and geography, which are not good shorthands for genetic anchestry.
It's like saying one is different from two, and two comes out of the group one-to-five, so one is different then the group one-to-five. Well, that is true, but not what we mean, and misleading.
People like to say this, but the truth is that Descendants of American Slaves (e.g., African-Americans whose ancestors arrived via the Atlantic slave trade) are pretty homogenous in ancestry (other than their share of white admixture). Most are descended from Iron Age farmers who expanded over much of Africa, roughly the western half of the continent, from a spot near the Cameroon-Nigeria border, mostly displacing the hunter-gatherers who had lived there previously.
As we know, genetic differences within Africa are huge (because humanity spent so much time there that it had time to diverge, while far fewer groups exited Africa), so it would be interesting to learn if there are also wide IQ *differences* between these different African groups.
Potential example from Sweden: Ethiopian immigrants are _far_ more successful than Somalians, although at least part of this is likely cultural (Ethiopia is Christian) and social (Somalia is a failed state)
there are other differences. ethiopians are more likely to be immigrants, and more likely to come via selective channels like for education or employment; somalis are more likely to have come west as refugees. selection effects often dominate between-group comparisons, and i think this is no exception
The Christian Igbo do well on the Nigerian college admission test and the Muslim northern Fulani do not.
The Igbo appear to be culturally a little like the Parsis in Bombay: a minority group who welcomed the British Empire and molded their culture to emphasize European learning. In contrast, the northern Muslims did not look avidly on the new culture introduced by the British.
Whether the Igbo were seen as smarter than other Nigerians before the British Empire introduced the chance of European-style schooling seems to be up in the air. David Hackett Fischer's recent book on the African origins of American blacks notes that American slaveowners had differing opinions of the Igbo's economic potential. Slaveowners around the Chesapeake Bay sought out Igbo slaves, while slaveowners further north and south didn't like them. So, I dunno...
But it's not a single genetic background, is it? Africa is more genetically diverse than almost anywhere else on Earth (which makes sense: it's the only place where humans did NOT go through the bottleneck of "whichever group decided it made sense to go explore all that other land north").
That actually makes your argument stronger. If the measurements are even half accurate (which TBF seems a big point of contention and probably should be dealt with much more in depth), then why would you see such homogeneous results across a vast region that has a significant genetic diversity, if the thing measured was genetic? Makes no sense. But what that map does is correlate almost perfectly with a map of GDP.
It makes perfect sense. Compare: "Why would you see such homogeneous skin color across a vast region that has a significant genetic diversity, if skin color is genetic?" Skin color is a genetic trait common to the entire population, in spite of all of the genetic diversity, and the same could easily be true for intelligence.
Yes, why would a human population that started out dark-skinned in the first place retain an obviously adaptive mutation to high UV irradiation in an area with high UV irradiation? One can not possibly guess.
Does this take into account race mixing? Given our history, almost all US blacks are actually mixed race, but still count as "black". Some quick googling tells me the average U.S. black has about 20-25% European DNA. If the effect from DNA to IQ is linear that's not enough to explain the gap, but the effect might not be linear, and regardless I think this merits some discussion as a potential counterargument for the pro-genetics side.
Until recently, most people who self-identified in the US as black tended to have some but not all that much white ancestry, the great majority being, say, 3% to 35% white. There weren't all that many Americans outside of Louisiana (and to a lesser extent South Carolina) who were more than 50% African but less than say 90+% white.
This is due to the workings of the One Drop Rule in America, which strongly encouraged marriages to not cross the color line. In Brazil, in contrast, there are plenty of people who are, say, 75% white and 25% black.
Recent studies of racial admixture have found a modest IQ gradient depending upon percentage of white admixture among kids identified by their parents as having two African-American parents. But because most historic African Americans are pretty similar in terms of their white admixture percentage, it's not that easy to see in daily life. My impression is that people sincerely disagree on this question of whether you can notice a Light and Bright pattern in daily life.
Of course, the admixture studies, while they could have (but didn't) falsify the hereditarian hypothesis, don't prove it either because perhaps the world in some fashion favors fairer-looking African Americans.
My impression is that whites in America don't pay much attention to subtle differences in apparent racial ancestry between blacks: e.g., I've seen lots of movies starring Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, and Morgan Freeman, but I couldn't tell you who is fairest and who is darkest. I just have them mentally categorized as African-American.
I'd imagine blacks, on the other hand, pay more attention.
It seems to me that this should cause more confusion regarding what to make of Lynn's data. The (almost) only thing that the extremely diverse black people have in common genetically is some genes that make their skin dark. It would be extremely surprising if those same genes also had something to do with IQ.
Or on the reverse, it would be quite surprising and serms unlikely that the genetic mutations that make Europeans and Asians light skinned would also make them smarter.
Yeah, big mistake there. I think Razid said once that there is more genetic similarity between a British and a Japanese than some people living in the same savannah, that speak different but related languages. The genetic diversity in Africa is huge.
Technically true but the vast majority of black africans share bantu ancestry and they are the ancestors of african americans. There are a couple of big groups in NE Africa - the Horn of Africa. The big variation is given by tiny groups like the Bushmen and pygmies.
So most africans are pretty similar but a few are very distinct.
Vast majority of African Americans derive ancestry from the Yoruba people from West Africa and not Bantu people. This is a fairly easy fact check that I don’t think even a low-IQ NYT reporter would have missed.
Much of Africa's diversity is in earlier branches of humanity as pygmies or San, but most of population is product of late expansion of agriculturalists and pastoralists. Slaves shipped to Americas were of some mixes from Western Africa and it doesn't seem that different countries of destination got different mixes of countries of origin.
David Hackett Fischer's recent book African Founders uses the outstanding data that now exists about where African-Americans come from, but doesn't find much of interest.
Yes, though with some caveats. There is an ancient DNA boom happening currently and we're still in a phase of much discovery, but generally speaking the data is pointing in a direction that a distinct population of people went somewhere roughly around the area between the arabic peninsula and the black sea, underwent a rapid (in historical terms) evolutionary adaption towards northern climates, and then from there spread west and east, which developed into modern caucasian/asian classifications. The people who stayed behind in africa are the ones we consider black (subsaharans at least, mediteraneans, even if they have very dark skin, often have had considerable caucasian admixture for centuries).
This means that yes, subsaharan blacks have a much higher diversity than either asians or caucasians. But at the same time, they all collectively lack the highly functional adaptions that caucasians and asians share, so especially if you compare all three groups, blacks will often end up collectively being the outlier. But for IQ in particular I agree; There is good evidence for significant diversity.
>But for IQ in particular I agree; There is good evidence for significant diversity.
Like which evidence? Igbos seem much higher in IQs, but they do not have their own country (it's hard to win war of independence when all countries in UNSC except one are against them).
Countries are in general a bad classifier in Africa. Tribal/ethnic groups are much better, of which Igbo is one.
Most regions in africa have a multitude of tribal/ethnic groups with significant genetic diversity, and these groups also consistently perform differently when tested. Especially in africa this is likely partially due to environmental factors and selection effects, but together with the mounting evidence towards the very high polygenicity of IQ and that the test score differences can also be seen for immigrants from these groups in western society, it's quite unlikely to be entirely.
We are discussing here a dataset for countries not ethnicities. Do you have one for the latter?
High genetic differences doesn't mean high genetic differences in IQ. High genetic diversity means they sit in one place for tens of millenia and do not evolve. Most of this variance doesn't affect phenotype at all.
I was replying to a post relating to a specific claim that all africans are likely to have the same IQ average since they share the same genes. That claim is false, since the assumption is false. That Scott's article is overall about Lynn's dataset has little bearing on the the statements veracity. In addition, since the tribes have distinct geographic spreads, we still expect some considerable variance on the country level, which is what we see. That variance will just be horribly mangled since, as said, the country-level is not a very good lens.
On the second paragraph, that may be a claim one can make. Given the large diversity of environments in Africa, I find it wildly implausible to say the least. In addition, most studies on evolution in general, especially the well-known Lenski lab 50.000 generations e-coli study, show that evolution pretty much never stops, and that even in equal environments, while the direction of evolution might be broadly similar, many functional differences will develop.
There is also the problem that under most mathematical models of evolution the expectation under weak/absent selection pressures is not stagnation, but regression, since genetic drift dominates, and genetic drift in turn is dominated by LOF (loss of function) mutations. See the concept of mutational load if you're curious.
I'm actually not aware of *any* country in modern Africa which corresponds to actual tribal/ethnic divisions among population groups, because modern borders are based on colonial divisions which had nothing to do with those, and after decolonization, the various countries of Africa decided that reorganizing borders according to ethnic divisions, given decades of history maintaining borders and infrastructure set by colonial powers, was unfeasible.
Well you would ask yourself why there is no such thing that some African country got such mix of tribes so their average IQ is >85. With so many countries, wouldn't one, just by accident, get it?
I don't think that follows at all. It depends on what the distributions of the different tribes/ethnic groups is like and what averages are more common among them.
States within Nigeria represent tribes to some extent. Here's a Nigerian op-ed with data on Nigeria's college admissions test and how much scores differ between the most Christian Igbo state and the most Muslim Fulani state:
Yes, but whether this changes the conclusion depends on how long it takes for selection effects to impact the genetic component of IQ. As it turns out, SSC posts suggest this can happen pretty fast!
IIUC, this implies that for any populations that diverged much more than a handful of centuries ago, if their environmental influences are similarly impactful, then selection effects should push them towards a similar level of genetic-component-of-IQ, even if the specific genes and specific environments are very different. It shouldn't matter too much whether the divergence happened 1kya or 5kya.
It would be interesting if there were large IQ variations between comparably-unrelated-to-European-people populations in Africa living in societies with similar levels of wealth, economic development, and exposure to Western culture and education. Are there?
Though if you put your thumb on a globe when looking at historical sources of immigration to the US, that's less true than you'd think. A remarkably large fraction of the "white" "blood" (that is, ancestors circa 1500) were from a zone of Europe from Ireland to Germany, roughly 500 miles. But given the patterns of the slave trade, a remarkably large fraction of the "black" "blood" in the US comes from a zone of West Africa that is ... roughly 500 miles. Africa has tremendous genetic diversity, and there are "black" Americans who carry almost all of it, but on average, US blacks are a narrow sample of that diversity. (I once read somewhere that the burliest people in the world happen to be West Africans, and given that slaves were taken to be used in heavy field work, it's not surprising that the savers focused there.)
Leaving aside more recent arrivals from Africa like the Obama line, African-Americans appear to be a pretty representative sample of sub-Saharans from, roughly, the western half of America. I recently reviewed David Hackett Fischer's "African Founders" about where African-Americans came from in Africa, hoping to find "Albion's Seed" like regional patterns. But, instead, African Americans tend to be fairly mixed from most parts of western Africa.
E.g., the Gullah of the Sea Islands in South Carolina, whose dialect is the most African of various African American dialects and who appear to have mostly lived there at least since the trans-Atlantic slave trade was banned in the early 1800s, are a mixture of people from Senegal and from Angola, which are a long way apart.
I've been looking for years for evidence that African-Americans include descendants of the more exotic sub-Saharans such as Pygmies and Khoi-San, but haven't found much.
Harvard geneticist David Reich points out that the popular talking point that Africans are the genetically diverse people doesn't really imply what people think it implies.
As you probably know, but would almost certainly appreciate knowing on the off chance that you don't, Clarence Thomas's first language was actually Gullah.
There were probably also selection effects involved in enslavement and transport across the Atlantic (which had a high death rate) as well as admixture from rapist slave owners.
I've always thought it weird that people will assert that IQ tests just measure your parents' income and then say that countries with three-digit GDP per capita, widespread malnutrition, and limited formal education can't possibly have very low IQs.
Of course, it's not true that IQ tests just measure your parents' income, but obviously there's some level of environmental impoverishment that can lower IQ, even if it's far below the poverty line in wealthy countries like the US.
Agreed, except for the bad faith. I think they've convinced themselves that they do believe it, but it doesn't actually govern their expectations. Or they've just never noticed the implications.
I think "never noticed the implications" is the most common. Most people rarely think through their models of the world to actually take note of what they predict and how this does or doesn't align with their observations.
Right. I've been pointing out the evidence that nature and nurture both play a role in African average test scores for 23 years, but my taking a moderate, reasonable stance on this controversial question has yet to make me all that popular.
I think you are right "bad faith" is the wrong term, it is well described by Hanania in the below article. For instance there are lots of people who believe in body positivity and would praise their friends for it but would be horrified if you said they looked plus-size, it is sort of sublimated preference revealed under even light examination.
Are you sure that's true though, I would think the much more common alternative belief to 3 is:
3'. Anyone wanting to research and talk about differences in mental development between US blacks and other racial cohorts is probably motivated by racial animus or sinister goals.
That's a bailey version of a response that I've seen a lot. But it doesn't make sense in a lot of contexts where it's deployed.
For instance, if there's an employer (let's say in Tech) who has a 1% black workforce. Would those same people accept 1 and 2 above and agree that this employer is making a rational decision to only hire qualified people and that black people, owing to 1 and 2, are far less likely to be qualified?
The implied further argument is the OP's #3, rather than yours. Otherwise disparate impact would not be a thing and all interventions would be about poverty and pollution or whatever.
A 1% black workforce doesn't in itself prove anything. Even accepting that the objective of an employer is simply to hire the highest IQ employees, we'd still need vastly more detailed data including on distributions and local demographics to tell if 1% is the expected proportion of black people in a truly colour-blind (but myopically IQ-obsessed) company.
(I personally think such a statistical approach is on a hiding to nothing and that it would be better if everyone focused more on fair hiring methods rather than on achieving or defending specific hiring outcomes.)
In any case though the implied further argument is not OP's #3 in my view. It's that big companies have the power to reduce #2 by giving more people more opportunities and therefore they should. It's that it's part of their social responsibilities and will help create a world where #2 is not true, and – once in that ideal world – #3 will hopefully follow. A degree of idealism is at work, which many find preferable to the fatalism of using stats to limit aspirations and influence perceptions of an individual just because of the group they are in.
It's almost certainly that. Ask someone who doesn't believe in IQ or in real IQ differences what their reasons are, and mostly what you get is a summary of racist science that was used to justify exploitation. I think what you have here is a population of people (at both ends of the political spectrum) who have very low trust in the power of objective research to drive policy agendas.
This doesn't make them right, but it does mean they have what appear to them to be rational reasons for opposing certain forms of research. The risks outweigh the potential gains, in their view.
A huge fraction of well-educated people are simply ignorant of the social science data on racial differences in test scores and crime rates. For example, Bowdoin professor Tyler Austin Harper is a bright and fair-minded guy, but in his review in The Atlantic of Richard Hanania's book on affirmative action, most of his ire was concentrated on a few of Hanania's lines that assume that racial differences in average test scores exist. Harper simply didn't know about the social science findings, nor, it appears, did his editors at The Atlantic:
As someone who does believe in IQ as a concept but not as a useful one, I wonder why so much interest is in the differences between African and whites. Seems like some sort of obsession to me.
And that too, who is white? When did we become white?
Why not be interested in why East Asian IQ's are higher than we whites. That's fascinating to me. And what about Indians. Do Hindus have a higher IQ than Muslim Indians. That would seem rational. And how do they score against Africans?
So many interesting comparisons to be made and all you bang on about is whites are smarter than blacks.
As I sais, I think IQ is a useless concept to measure people's abilities. I actually used to administer real IQ tests like the WAIS and there are so many reasons why a test does not explain anything about what intelligence is. Clearly not, if you look at the stable geniuses who are going to be taking over the free world and makeing it more free.
Most HBD-interested parties _are_ interested in higher East Asian IQs. But surely the reason the white/black gap is so salient is that that is the one which underlies most of the racial grievance politics in the US - far more people are outraged by the fact the blacks are underrepresented in prestigious occupations and the ranks of the wealthy, and overrepresented among arrestees and victims of police violence, relative to their population numbers, and are agitating to tear down meritocratic and law-enforcing institutions for those reasons, than are outraged about any analogous white / East Asian gaps. Therefore, if you are a fan of keeping crime under control, and of allocating high-stakes, cognitively demanding positions to the people most capabale of fulfilling those duties well, it is of particular importance to have good information on whether average intelligence differences, rather than racist discrimination, accounts for the disparities observed.
The "Who is white" question is of course a valid philosophical question, in a Sorites paradox sort of way, and stems from the human tendency to lump things into a finite number of discrete categories rather than dealing with the complexity of smooth, continuous gradations (note that we do this with literal colors too, of which there are infinitely many possible locations on a color chart, but that does not make concepts such as "blue" or "green" vacuous), and there are countries where any racial classification system quickly becomes untenable given the amount of admixture (e.g. Brazil, where, regardless of whether you call yourself "white", "black" or "mixed", almost everyone has some non-negligible European and Sub-Saharan African Ancestry), but for the USA, you can pretty much just use "what race people say they are on a census form" as a workable proxy for any purposes where you need to compare outcomes vs racial ancestry.
Hmmm in Australia we have a similar problem with some people asserting that the first people here, some of who are having trouble choosing to use their intelligence to adopt our western way of intelligent life, are blamed for their unintelligent choices.
I like your philosophical explanation of whiteness but I want some specific estimations from the HBD people about how this difference in IQ evolved. 🙃
"Hanania has a habit of punctuating dense, judiciously footnoted paragraphs—which cite academic books, law reviews, and government documents—with racist or sexist claims that aren’t backed up with evidence. For example, a section on the paradoxes of “disparate impact” laws provides several pages of properly cited legal history before arriving at this claim: “An employer who wants to use intelligence tests to hire is potentially barred from doing so because whites could do too well.” This claim, that white candidates would be likely to outscore Black candidates on intelligence tests, is not footnoted or otherwise supported with evidence..."
"a few of Hanania's lines that assume that racial differences in average test scores exist."
I have nothing to go on but the section you quote, yet it seems even from that the reviewer was more concerned with Hanania's claim that employers might be barred from using intelligence tests because whites might do too well, not simply that racial differences exist.
Yeah, the lead poisoning explanation is a particularly clear example of environmentalists not quite realising the implications of what they're saying. Arguing that a significant portion of the black/white IQ gap in, say, the US is due to lead poisoning is to argue that black americans have brain damage (given that lead poisoning literally damages brain tissue.)
I mean... okay, if that was true, it would definitely warrant serious investigation and thorough efforts to repair water infrastructure and improve health and safety standards and maybe issue public apologies and compensation for the families affected, bu-uuuuut.... we don't give brain-damaged people special dispensation to get into Harvard or try to promote them as doctors or civil engineers or act mystified if they rarely become partners at law firms. These are not things one would expect from a brain-damaged population. It wouldn't be fair to them, let alone their patients and clients.
This is kinda the fundamental problem with all affirmative action programs. Even if you disregard the problem that you can't discriminate in favour of X without discriminating against all not-X, it's essentially a license to claim injury while insisting there is nothing wrong with you. That story doesn't add up.
It's worth noting that if the black/white IQ difference is due to some fixable environmental difference, it would be worth spending the whole military budget on fixing it. We're talking about millions of Americans being condemned to a worse life overall, plus vast sums of wealth being lost because less intelligent people are on average less productive.
Sure, but... what is the secret formula supposed to be, exactly? Do you think the US government hasn't already allocated many trillions of dollars to attempts at closing racial performance gaps?
Every human problem is theoretically fixable with enough genetic engineering, of course, but that would require acknowledging that the problem was genetic to begin with.
I think it’s very important in this conversation to examine what an IQ test is- what kind of intelligence it actually measures- it is specific and intelligence is a much broader phenomenon than something to be tested in a western model (literacy dependent?) exercise. The question ‘what is intelligence’ should be in the center.
> As well as preferring answers which show familiarity with our current scientific concepts, IQ tests also reward certain kinds of problem-solving abilities, what Flynn describes as solving "problems not solvable by mechanical application of a learned method" (p. 53; I don't think he really means to deny the possibility of AI). Prime examples, to his mind, are things like tests of similarities and analogies, and pattern-completion tests like Raven's Progressive Matrices. In the latter, each question consists of a series of line drawings, followed by a choice of several extra drawings from which the test-taker is supposed to pick the one that completes or finishes the sequence. (See here for an example.) Raven hoped that his test would be a fairly pure measurement of ability to "educe relations", i.e., to discover patterns, which he regarded as the essence of intelligence. Raven's test is often said to be subject to little or no cultural bias (a claim resting on basically no evidence whatsoever). Yet it is on tests of this type that the Flynn effect is strongest, 5 points per decade at the least. Below them come similarities and analogies tests of the rabbit/dog kind. Scores on vocabulary, arithmetic and general-information tests, on the other hand, show the lowest rates of improvement, and even some small declines.
> Flynn refers to these transformations in how we think as "liberation from the concrete" and "putting on scientific spectacles". His claims that the Flynn effect is a consequence of the changes in how people live and what skills they cultivate brought about by the industrial revolution. We now overwhelmingly keep dogs as pets, not to hunt, and we go to schools where we are not just taught to read but to think abstractly, and to use a common set of abstractions. Flynn refers here to the well-known work done by the great Soviet psychologist A. R. Luria in the 1930s, described in the latter's Cognitive Development: Its Social and Cultural Foundations (1974). Luria claimed to show, by means of fieldwork among peasants and nomads in Uzbekistan, that the kind of abstract reasoning skills Flynn points to developed in tandem with literacy, schooling, and participation in the modern economy. While Luria's work has flaws (an Uzbekistani peasant who had abstract reasoning skills, confronted in the 1930s by a Russian Communist official asking them strange and leading questions, had many excellent reasons to play dumb), his findings are broadly consonant with later work on cross-cultural psychology.
Right. But the implication of this is that IQ test designers in the 1905-1940 did a good job of anticipating in what direction daily life would evolve. The Ravens test, for example, looked super alien in the 1930s but by 50 years later, it seemed less bizarre, so the Flynn Effect on it was huge.
Similarly, on the Wechsler, the subtests with the smallest Flynn Effects tended to be in the most culturally loaded ones, such as vocabulary and general knowledge and were bigger on the weirder-looking more culturally-fair subtests. If the good friends Charles Dickens and Charles Babbage came back to life in 2000, Dickens would probably find that people with his literary interests didn't seem notably more clever than in 1850. But I suspect that Babbage would quickly find that a much larger fraction of the population could grasp what he was interested in than in 1850.
Exactly that. Some time ago I was looking through historical exams, it is very remarkable how the tests in language and general knowledge have gotten easier while mathematics have gotten harder and better at testing actual ability, instead of requiring memorisation of proofs, during the last 200 years.
I read it again, still reads to me like he is saying both are similarly intermixed, us ones a bit more. If I am saying House A is a little closer to the beach than House B, I am not saying House B is not at all close to any beach. I am implying House B is also close to the beach.
It's a rhetorical phrase. I don't know where you're from, but it's pretty common for Americans to say "X is a little bit more Y than Z is" when what they literally mean is that Z is not Y at all.
Indeed this. Or maybe he knew that non-African admixture in SSA is very low but did not bother to look if it 0% or 0.1%. Why care? ~20% in American Blacks is a significant thing.
Most Africans have some significant ancestry from ancient Arabian pastoralists, calling them White is a bit of a stretch but it is definitely West Eurasian.
My IQ is not high enough that I can easily read studies. I wanted to find some percentages and this older popsci article from 2015 gives figures up to 20% in Ethiopia:
"Quite remarkably, we see in Ethiopia about 20% - so a fifth - of the genome of people living there right now is actually of Eurasian origin, it actually comes from these farmers," explained Dr Manica.
"But it goes further than that, because if you go to the corners of Africa, all the way to West Africa or South Africa, even populations that we really thought were purely African have 5-6% of their genome that dates back to these western Eurasian farmers."
Prof David Reich, from Harvard Medical School in the US, added: "The claim that all sub-Saharan Africans today have a substantial amount of ancestry due to back-to-Africa migrations is quite interesting, and while I won't be 100% convinced until I look at the data myself, I think the analyses seem careful and thoughtful.
In Olympic distance running races, the Ethiopians tend to be brown and the Kenyans black. The Ethiopian national origin story is that they are descended from the son of the Queen of Sheba in Eurasia.
Nineteenth Century people like H. Rider Haggard, author of the adventure story "King Solomon's Mines" set in East Africa, liked the idea that East Africans have some Eurasian admixture.
Does it mean I can keep saying "IQ 83" whenever my Brazilian fellow citizens do something utterly stupid? Good. I thought this research was bs, and I used to say IQ 83 as tongue-in-cheek, but good to know it's good.
Yeah, I understand where Scott is coming from, but it seems unwise to leave an obvious vector of attack like that open when one writes a controversial post.
I was a bit shocked to learn recently that blood lead levels in the leaded gasoline era might’ve lowered IQ by something like 9 points.
It was also heartening to hear that some rapid progress has been made of late in certain jurisdictions against colour enhancement of turmeric using lead (with much more to be done on other sources).
I'd also heard that, but Cremieux (who I usually trust on things like this) thinks it's not true. I still haven't gone deep enough to have a strong opinion one way or the other.
I'm skeptical of any claim that the leaded gasoline era had minimal effects on IQ given that the average blood lead level was insanely high, like, an appreciable fraction of the level of acute lead poisoning.
[EDIT: Removed a study link because I've clearly read less about this than Cremieux but I remain skeptical given the above.]
If lead poisoning from living near freeways was so deleterious, then rural Southern blacks should have higher IQs than urban Northern blacks. That does not appear to be true.
Similarly, I went to school from 1964-1976 in Sherman Oaks, CA, home to the 101-405 freeway interchange, at that time the busiest in the world. I have looked for evidence that kids who grew up in Sherman Oaks during leaded gasoline are notably stupid, but so far have no findings to report.
I take it this is a reference to "Understanding How Low Levels of Early Lead Exposure Affect Children’s Life-Trajectories" which interestingly does still say that a decrease from 10ug/dL to 5ug/dL is associated with a significant difference in high school graduation rate and (mediated by that) a 4.4% difference in earning among males, which is still pretty substantial (the present value of lifetime earnings for a newborn in the US is something like $1.4m so that's about $60k for somebody in that group). Lead exposures in the US are mostly well below that but something like 1-in-300 kids still tests at or above 10ug/dL.
So it doesn't support IQ effects specifically but the overall impacts, apparently mediated by non-cognitive effects, still look high enough to justify expensive remediations for relatively-high-exposure cases. (And "relatively" is doing some work there - in the late 70s the MEDIAN level for kids was 14.9ug/dL.)
Did you mean to respond to me? What's that a quote from? I don't see it in the Cremieux article or the Cremieux Tweet that I quoted. Did you mean to respond to my comment about lead being unhealthy regardless of impact on IQ? I don't think Cremieux was referring to such claims, and suspect that he'd be suspicious that they'd be the results of the same sort of confounding that he discusses in his article, see e.g. endnote 2 in his article.
The tweet seems to be a reference to that study, is what I'm saying. I'm noting that the referenced study supports the notion that low-to-moderate lead exposure does indeed strongly hurt lifetime productivity.
This is usually what people actually care about re:IQ impact to justify why it's worth spending on exposure reduction, because cognitive reduction is associated with lower productivity.
I do think Cremieux's overall point seems plausible but I'm not sure my sense of the policy implications has really changed.
There was an older Mother Jones article (reprinted more recently in, I think, Forbes) about lead in gasoline. They tracked crime stats county-by-county as lead was phased out, and found an incredibly strong correlation (i.e. falling crime rates tracked lower levels of lead in the environment).
I don't think the effects of lead can be discounted (although I'm assuming high crime is a proxy for low IQ, which may not be valid).
We know the crime rates went down, we really don't know the cause. I've heard at least a half-dozen explanations for crime going down. They all are pretty good at correlation, and have at least a passingly plausible mechanism behind it. None of them come close to proving causation.
Lead gas is still used (legally in US) in certain types of aviation fuel for older piston-based planes, the most common type is 100LL (LL = low lead).
Apparently its hard to make a fuel that works for those engines due to specific octane requirements and older design that can get corroded by unleaded substitutes.
Now I sort of wonder if the IQ and other health damage from lead is worth keeping these old planes running, but as a lead-addled gen-X'er, thinking about that makes my head hurt too much so I stop.
Most of causality runs in another direction -- dumber children eat more lead paint and other things having lead, or their dumb parents let them. Effects found in later studies are very minor as these are much less lead in environment what even dumbest can access
The more amusing one is that lead dosage in kids used to correlate well with poor urban people. These days, it correlates well with rich suburbanites who raise their own chickens. The chickens love to peck at flaking old lead paint in search of bugs to eat.
A couple of generations ago, the Chicago Tribune editorialized in favor of building the Cabrini-Green public housing project on the grounds that it would stop poor kids from eating lead paint flakes.
It was built and quickly became notorious and now is demolishd.
Probably both, but it matters little in this context. Suppose you replaced all lead with expensive unobtanium which isn't harmful. Still dumb and poor would eat more paint and you will see unobtanium blood level vs IQ correlation. You can derive a proxy for IQ from gut bacteria based on what high IQ people and low IQ people eat.
People who drink expensive wine are smarter and richer that people who drink beer, but it doesn't mean that if you replace beer with wine for all population you will get same benefit.
Little kids put everything into their mouths. It's part of why sending your first child to daycare amounts to plugging your family into the global virus network for the next few years.
I found someone in HN claiming that while our current lead exposure decreases, the IQ gap stays constant, so the reported IQ decline/lead keeps getting bigger. I'm actually still trying to find the supposed study he's talking about but so far I think it's just an amusing possibility.
Hopefully SCOTUS and state legislatures will also realize that IQ under 75 doesn't necessarily mean intellectual disability but I'm not holding my breath.
Atkins v. Virginia (2002), is a case in which the SCOTUS ruled that executing people with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments, and the proof that Atkins had an intellectual disability was his low IQ of 59.
This decision led to lots of state statutes that qualified for the purpose of punishment an IQ under 70 as intellectual disability .
Hall v. Florida (2014) ruled that a bright line like an IQ of 70 is unconstitutional and practically qualified an IQ below 75 as intellectual disability.
That seems like the problem is the ruling itself, not the definition of disability. What could possibly be cruel and unusual about executing an intellectually disabled person who's too dangerous to be allowed to live? Isn't putting them down the ethical thing to do? We understand that it's the right thing to do for animals, why is it so different for humans?
I also find this confusing. I mean, if one wants to argue that someone who committed a felony was lacking mens rea because they literally did not have the intellectual capacity to recognize what they did was wrong, that is an argument I can follow. (I will however notice that young children and even dogs do have the ability to recognize that they did wrong and exhibit wrong, so good luck convincing me that your IQ 70 adult did not pass that threshold, unless the charge is that they misspelled their address on their tax form or something.)
But saying that it is ok to punish them by putting them in prison, but not ok to execute them feels incoherent.
I am generally anti-death penalty, but do not find executing very-low-IQ felons specifically offensive. If anything, it is the opposite: the IQ 80 criminal will understand a prison sentence of a definite length, but might live in anguish of their impeding execution. Someone who is severely mentally disabled will not understand being put into prison for a crime they might not even recall committing. But they will not lose any more sleep being on death row if they don't recognize that fact.
I wrote about the Supreme Court's decision in 2002:
"Several IQ researchers, accustomed to having their field of expertise ignored or denounced as racist and fraudulent, were bemused by Thursday's vote by six Supreme Court Justices to ban the execution of murderers, in effect, who score poorly on IQ tests.
"As staunch defenders of the much-maligned concept of the intelligence quotient, these scientists found vindication in the Supreme Court's embrace of intelligence testing, though they cautioned that the Justices' understanding of the complex subject was simplistic.
"The IQ experts were particularly amused that newspapers that routinely condemn IQ tests as biased and meaningless were quick to endorse intelligence exams in this case. The New York Times, for example, editorialized, "[I]nflicting the death penalty on individuals with I.Q. scores of less than 70 who have little understanding of their moral culpability violates civilized standards of justice.""
>"The New York Times, for example, editorialized, "[I]nflicting the death penalty on individuals with I.Q. scores of less than 70 who have little understanding of their moral culpability violates civilized standards of justice.""
Of course the NYT would take that position, it's in their (low-IQ) self interest! /s
Now can we have a conversation about the non-predetermined nature of the genetic component?
Of the three people talking about national IQ, the subset who are talking about the effect of sexual selection -- i.e. social values prioritising intelligence in mates -- rounds off to zero.
If nutrition can get you from 70 to 85, then a general decision at a population level to make babies only with the smartest partners can get you from 85 to 100.
And I suspect it doesn't have to take very long, either. Maybe 2-3 generations.
The 2-3 generations claim is definitely false, unless you're talking about some kind of extreme scheme like only letting the top 10% of people reproduce at all. Under any remotely plausible selection pressure, maybe 20-30, if you're lucky.
Why are you so sure? Sexual selection has essentially unlimited potential pressure. I'm not specifically excluding an "extreme" scheme imposed by force, but I don't think we need to go there to see change much more rapid than 20-30 generations.
Because there are populations where this has happened to some degree (eg high-performing test-takers getting elevated the nobility in China, rabbinical scholars being hot stuff on the marriage market in Eastern European Jewry). Both of those "experiments" continued for ~20 - 50 generations. If you got 15 points per two generations, Chinese and Jews should have IQs of 250+. But the actual advantage is 5 - 10 points, and the people I've read who look into it say that even this is on the high side of what you'd expect and probably included some contributions from founder effects, weird genetic diseases, etc.
I think embro screening is not an extreme intervention, and could work in as little as 2 generations. Essentially you remove the bottom half of the distribution. Do this 3x and you'll get something like a 1SD improvement. What's unclear is how far you can push this, but look at the chickens and how big they are now.
Embryo screening requires every baby to be born through IVF, and IVF is a very unpleasant procedure to go through especially when compared to the alternative process. I'd call it an extreme intervention.
Embryo screening seems worthwhile if you're doing IVF anyway. In which case we get the problem that in a few generations intelligence will be correlated with a genetic predisposition towards infertility.
I mean, my husband and I are doing elective embryo selection. (My insurance covered it.) I don't have any history of fertility issues. It's my assessment of this community that we're mostly affluent enough/have jobs with good enough benefits to do IVF electively. Health insurance in some states is also required to cover IVF. The clinics all know the magic shibboleths that need to get said in order for insurance to cover it, even if the couple doesn't *really* have infertility.
I just wanted the peace of mind that our future children are safe and sound in a cryo canister. We didn't shell out for the full polygenic scoring, but we did the basic check for aneuploidy. They're also from my Age 28 eggs, so they'll be healthier than if we got pregnant the old fashioned way with my Age 32/33/34 eggs.
>
Tell me about it! Getting a good result (i.e. making your ovaries produce a bunch of eggs) requires adhering to a strict drug dosing schedule. These drugs are all injectable, so "adhering to the schedule" involves stabbing yourself in the abdomen 2-3x, at the same time each evening, for 8-12 days in a row. Doing so requires a certain amount of executive function and conscientiousness. (Aella recently froze some eggs and had a ton of trouble with the "stabbing herself with a needle" part. She posted about it on Twitter.)
This is absolutely true. I am aware of this had to do itto avoid a genetic disease I was a carrier for. I think with recent advances this will get much easier. Still I think with enough of a payment, Make IVF free, give people a baby bonus if they do the screening and have a live birth, might be able to get over this hump. This will be worth it because a person with an IQ below 85 is very likely to be a net drain on tax revenues, so getting someone to 90 or 95 would really be worth it for society. Also IVF for people who don't need it for infertility will be easier and require many less cycles. Perhaps we can further innovate and make a non injectable versions of hormones. Current treatment regiemes are based on older woman who have trouble conceiving.
It's going to be highly non-linear though isn't it. There will be downward pressures that mean you don't just keep adding points indefinitely for each generation that prioritises high intelligence.
But at the low end, I would expect the gains to be large. For instance, I could imagine for a constant "maximal" amount of social/sexual pressure you might get from 70 to 85 in about 2 generations, from 85 to 100 in maybe 3-5 more (yes, I'm revising my earlier guess), but 100 to 110 might take 10 more and then hit a ceiling.
Anyway my question is more about why this isn't even really featuring in the conversation. I mean, once you've waded into national IQ, what's a bit of eugenics? But seriously, if it worked for those Chinese and those Jews, why should it not at least be raised as an option some Africans might avail themselves of? There's a good chance under certain conditions it's actually the most effective/cheapest intervention.
And if you're advocating for a "hopeful" angle on this topic then I don't see a whole lot better than pointing out there's a relatively simple personal decision that can improve matters.
A less hopeful corollary is that low national IQ has a choice component as well. The positive spin on that is that other priorities are higher, they'll get to it, but then the question is, when?
There's likely to be low-intelligence "social traps" that are stable and very difficult to change.
I think you should look up the Breeder's Equation some time, then plug in the numbers for heritability, plausible selection pressure, and the standard deviation for IQ. That should give you some idea of likely gains-per-generation.
Unless you achieve an utterly totalitarian level of social control which effectively sterilises ~90% of the breeding population, you're not getting anywhere fast.
(Not that I think eugenic selection pressures aren't worth achieving- the alternative being the eventual collapse of civilisation and all- but there isn't any instant-gratification solution here short of wholesale gene-editing or maybe multi-generational embryo selection using test tubes and stem cells. Personally I'd settle for a world where heroin addicts and violent offenders weren't having six kids.)
Well, obviously the effect is not linear; you *could*, hypothetically, have a gain of 15 points in two-three generations due to a well-focused eugenics program (something that the Chinese examination system, let alone a non-system in Ashkenazic populations, wasn't designed to be) and then basically flatline. The first gains in anything are often the largest and the easiest.
You're thinking about the difficulties of doing eugenics that's pushing at the top of the range. But what's going on in this case is simply shifting the average up to a region that's already inhabited by a good fraction of the population.
Suppose you have a population with IQ mean 100 and SD 15. If you allow only the top 50% of the population to reproduce, you'll get IQ mean ~= 110.5 in a *single* generation. 110 is +0.7 SD, which is roughly the midpoint of the top half of a normal distribution.
This holds under a simplifying assumption that a child will have IQ equal to the average of its parents +- some random noise, and that everyone in the top half of the curve has an equal number of children on average. Sounds like a rough but reasonable model to me.
Now, I haven't accounted for regression to the mean here. IANAGeneticist, but IIUC this isn't a big issue this close to the center of the bell curve. If you claim this will be anywhere near the same order of magnitude than the straightforward math that I did, then the burden of proof rests on you.
Very good answer. 0.8 might be a bit on the high side for estimates, but let's leave it with that for now. Even so, aren't we ignoring the fact that currently the people in the top 50% of IQ usually also grow up in the let's say top 60% of income / SES households, and that this has an effect in keeping them at the level of their parents? If we now forced only 50% of people to have children those children would grow up in better-than-average conditions but THEIR children might grow up in less intellectually stimulating conditions as their parents would have to take over the menial jobs currently performed by the people who will not get children? You can't expect the entire population to be doing office jobs.
Also, if you don't want to collapse your population totally, each woman would have to get twice as many kids which would mean less adult time per kid and poorer upbringings since the parents would have less time for working.
(And in the real world one would of course also have to include the great fall in living standards that would inevitably follow a totalitarian government with powers to sterilize 50% of a population coming into power.)
As far as I know, such effects from SES/income/... on intelligence are very small compared to genetic effects under normal (i.e. WEIRD) conditions.
While the entire population of any country will probably never be doing office jobs, I would expect the proportion of office jobs to increase with IQ. E.g. Malawi has a 39% employment rate with 77% of the labour force in agriculture and 19% in services, whereas Singapore has a 65% employment rate with 1% of the labour force in agriculture and 74% in services.
I think I partly agree, if I'm understanding you correctly. Women would generally be the ones doing the discriminating in intelligence-prioritising cultures, as elsewhere. But I also don't think this leaves no role for men.
Necessary conditions would be that a) women are actually empowered to discriminate effectively and b) that this is held to be a high-priority dimension on which to do so.
Men are involved in both aspects to the extent they refrain from violence a) towards women and b) towards each other, so that brute strength is not objectively the #1 virtue in a male.
But it's also not impossible for men to have a preference for intelligent women (!) and if we settle on monogamy (a prerequisite for intelligence-prioritising culture?) then men can at least contribute some selective pressure, and perhaps at the margin this is vital.
I think “anti-racists” will not start loving Lynn, because they rightfully believe that agressively upholding a taboo around race and IQ is their most effective rethorical strategy..
Not just a rhetorical strategy, we all know IQ is widely equated with “value as a human being” (once we’re talking about strangers). And because it’s a group table, it encourages human value linked to race, not to individuals.
Has anyone really seen this table meaningfully used for anything other than promoting a racist agenda? (Excepting that the authors will often point out they’re against low-IQ people, not color, so the racism is only coincidental.)
I get Scott’s defence of the table’s data, but the racism threat is how this data is used in policy/political discussions, and I’ve never seen it used in any direction but pro-racism.
Or to use an analogy, I could see people justifying research into how to design a disease to kill only white people. The science might be sound, but I’d still be very dubious about anyone displaying a lot of interest in it.
If we shout down everyone who tries to discuss it reasonably, the reasonable people will stop talking about it, and the only ones left will be the ones who don't care. It's no wonder only racists talk about it--anyone who talks about it gets branded as a racist.
Having a balanced discussion and working to remove the taboo opens the door for more respectable people to look into the topic.
Exactly right -- once you establish IQ measures standardized applications of mental acumen, nothing but itself in other words, you're left with little more than a political tool, which the left is right to oppose as such.
I agree with this entirely. While I am generally very wary of shutting down research avenues, the combination of potentially disastrously racist use with the already existing and already destructive if often insidious using IQ as a proxy for human value (especially in technocratic circles) seems potentially dangerous.
I *CAN* actually imagine it used beneficially, if it led to recognising the need for certain areas or groups requiring significantly more resources and support to thrive -- by analogy with special educational needs at school for example: those children get the level of support and one on one attention well above anyone considered normal. But for that we would need a world government and a universal extension of moral sphere to whole humanity which isn't coming anytime soon.
As an aside, I'm really curious what developing AGI will do to those currently dominant human value criteria. I'm not likely to live to see this change but I bet it will happen.
Does it take substantially more effort to convince people that IQ is not a proxy for human worth than it does to convince them that discussing race and IQ is morally wrong? The former has the advantages of being true and of actually combatting racism (and ableism as a bonus). The latter leaves people quite vulnerable to learning these statistics for the first time through the interpretation of racists who have been granted a strong argument in favor of 'don't trust the mainstream on this, they are lying to you' (speaking from experience here).
Very plausibly, the answer to my question is 'yes', but I would still prefer if we tried both.
I think Charles Murray has come out quite clearly against equation IQ and human worth. Probably many others are like him.
That said, it might be possible that humanity as such can never really come to a reasonable point on issues like this, and if we have to fail in one direction or the other I personally would much rather live in a overly woke world than in something like apartheid South Africa.
I think Charles Murray is clearly full of it. In the Bell Curve, in the last chapter, he says they are "present[ing] for your consideration another way of thinking about equality and inequality. It represents an older intellectual tradition than social democracy or even socialism. In our view, it is also a wiser tradition, more attuned to the way in which individuals go about living satisfying lives and to the ways in which societies thrive." And then goes on to describe things like Confucius, ancient Rome/Greece, and the caste system in India. And says the founders had some good ideas about "natural aristocracy" and all but that their ideas had the flaw of leading inevitably to modern ideas of equality.
Those "older intellectual traditions", as far as I can tell, don't make any pretense to any sort of equality of human worth, and certainly didn't produce societies that treated humans as equally worthy.
Actually in the same chapter and the one preceding it Murray and Herrnstein deals mainly with the issue of making society easier for a person wit low mental ability to live in. They then warn that the current system is heading towards a 'Custodial State' where large groups of people are incarcerated in order to make life safer for the smartest part of the population. This was written in 1994, just a few years before US incarceration rates skyrocketed.
It does seem that Murray was genuinely concerned with creating a society where people with low IQ could thrive, and just believed that in order to do that an open debate about IQ was necessary.
Also, recently on twitter Murray came out clean against Nathan Cofnas, when the latter claimed that IQ was an important part of human worth.
Of course in the end a writers intention does not matter as much as the subject of the book. Even the best intentions can lead to terrible outcomes, I just don't think there is any reason to assume bad faith in this instance.
Problem with their argument on crime, which I really think (like other things) is just standard conservative policy wrapped up in this "concern for low IQ people" frame, is that around 1994 crime suddenly started sharply declining, just as fast as it had been rising, with no change to what they said were the causes.
"It does seem that Murray was genuinely concerned with creating a society where people with low IQ could thrive"
Doesn't seem like that to me - seems like his whole thing is to propose rules making it worse for them and pretend it's for their own good.
"I just don't think there is any reason to assume bad faith in this instance."
IMO the quintessential Charles Murray story is that in high school he burned a cross on a hill, and claimed befuddlement that anyone would think there was a racial element.
Well, a basic tenet of DEI is that unequal outcomes are ipso facto proof of an unfair racist system, and we should put our hands on the scales until the outcomes are equal ("affirmative action", "positive discrimination").
As long as this attitude is widespread, rebutting it seems useful. "The fact that Jews have more than their population share of Nobels is not evidence that a secret cabal of Illuminati Jews controls the Nobel committee, the data just indicates that Ashkenazi Jews enjoy a significant genetic intelligence advantage over gentiles".
As Quiet_NaN has already alluded to, there is potential racism on both sides of the argument. In the current climate, vast numbers of people, including many in positions of power to do something about it, believe that racial disparities in socially relevant outcomes cannot stem from biology, or even cultural differences, but are entirely the fault of the more successful groups, whether due to present day discrimination, or the downstream consequences of past discrimination, and therefore the only fair and just way of ordering society is to actively disadvantage present-day members of more successful groups in order to allow social outcomes to equalize.
Needless to say, to the degree that those different outcomes are _not_ the result of things that are the fault of the more successful groups, any such policies based on the assumption that they are, are themselves every bit as racist as they would be if the groups were reversed ... and if the disparities do largely stem from hard-to-eradicate biological differences, then the people who seek equal outcomes at the group level will never stop agitating for ever more vindictive discrimination against the more successful groups until they have successfully hobbled them enough to make them as dysfunctional as the less-successful groups - and at that point, you may have Harrison Bergeronned yourself into a situation where there are not enough capable people in critical positions to be able to maintain anything like current levels of wealth and prosperity.
If the idea of researching this topic disturbs you, the only justifiable position is to say that we do not know anything about the causes of the disparities, that we do not ourselves want to know, that we will seek to prevent anyone else finding out, and, crucially, that we will sculpt our social policies such that they would be fair to individuals regardless of whether the racial hereditarians or the blank slatists are correct. That last part is what many blank slatists, I fear, would never be willing to agree to.
its a terrible strategy; if your willing to talk about iq being real instantly 1/5thish the people you talk to entertain holocaust denial, its such a shit test I willing fail and the left looks like idiots.
Nutrition, yes. Nutrition causes IQ, we know this on the basis of iodine, and it only needs one example.
Education? No. IQ causes education. If there were evidence that it were possible to teach someone stupid how to be smart, we would have that evidence, and we do not.
Regarding that particular study you reference, Cremieux notes issues with it here: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/adjust-your-expectations and notes that a reanalysis of the same data found a considerably smaller effect of education.
Further regarding environment and IQ, in that article, Cremieux notes the surprisingly small effect of minor traumatic brain injuries on IQ. In fact, in this thread: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1811565886148350304, Cremieux notes that the Dutch Famine, the Chinese Great Famine, and the Holocaust didn't affect IQ.
Of course education is only one part of the environment, and it is probably very hard to tease out how much of this effect is from schools getting worse and how much is from other effects, like media.
It *is* pretty easy to teach people how to perform better on IQ tests through training, and formal education seems to produce it as well (although far more slowly and as a side-effect).
Well, if this wasn't a red rag to a bull, no post of Scott's will ever be!
First, I think Lynn is politically motivated. Notice in the accompanying graphic how the Paddies in the Irish Free State/Éire/Those Ungrateful Rebels are *just* slightly stupider than our brethren in Norn Iron and (of course) The Mainland, Great Britain Itself, Ruling The Waves (and Waiving The Rules)? The slight difference in shades of green between The Republic and, miracle of miracles once you cross the border, the Six Counties and the Blessed Mainland Itself?
Mmm-hmmm. Cross from this side of the road (in the benighted priest-ridden peasant potato economy of the Republic of Ireland) to the other side of the road (staunch stalwart Loyalist Protestant Ship-building Still in the UK Northern Ireland) and get a 4-5 point jump in IQ. I believe it!
Second, I will have to grudgingly admit that the rigorous and oft-repeated (you are all noticing the crushingly heavy sarcasm here, I trust?) tests done to get those results seem to be adequate. I haven't been able to track down the actual content of the 2 or 3 tests done in the 70s, but okay. Maybe. Irish education was terrible up till about recently.
And having done an online Ravens' Matrices test myself (with all the rigour and scientific reproducibility that entails, which is "none, it's a free online test, what do you expect?"), yes I too came out as a 97 IQ moron (and proud of it!)
All that being said, I still find it very difficult to believe that we are that much stupider than our confrères Up North and our neighbours across the Irish Sea, and that the miraculous effect of crossing the Atlantic Ocean bumped up Irish-American IQs relative to those of us still hunkered down on the Ould Sod.
But what do I know, I'm just an ungrateful rebellious Papist peasant! 😁
EDIT: And because as far as I'm concerned, Lynn can blow it out his ear when it comes to Irish national IQ, that causes me to cast a *very* jaundiced eye over his assertions when it comes to non-white British people.
You probably know that Lynn himself was Northern Irish - if not, I hope you find that fact amusing.
But actually, Lynn's estimates were higher than other people's at the time! Hans Eysneck had somehow convinced everyone that Ireland had an IQ of 87, which was completely false, and Lynn upgraded it. I think Ireland c. 1980 or whenever was very poor and an IQ of 96 (which I think is what Lynn found then) isn't unreasonable. See https://russellwarne.com/2022/12/17/irish-iq-the-massive-rise-that-never-happened/ for more information.
Also have to consider brain drain in any discussion of Ireland. ~4-8 million came to the US in the 19th-ish century. Seems about a million moved to mainland Britain.
The mass migration post-Famine wasn't "the best and brightest", though, it was "the absolutely desperate". So if miraculously Irish genes burgeoned once on the hallowed soil of Columbia, maybe you guys *should* be importing all the immigrants of the world to turn them into smarter folks!
But it also wasn't random. You had to have enough brains to successfully leave rather than die. It could easily chop off the absolute bottom of the distribution.....
The Famine mass emigration is fascinating because of how it shaped the nation; it really does chop things up into "pre-Famine" and "post-Famine". E.g. the Scots-Irish, or as we'd say over here the Ulster Irish, who tended to be Protestant and descendants of Scottish settlers, were a large part of emigration in the 17th and 18th centuries pre-Famine. Mass emigration of the Catholic stock from the rest of the country is a 19th century thing. And emigration was a fact of life up until the 1980s, and - depending on how the economy is going at any particular time - even still.
It's not so much a case of "I want to go" but "You have to go". During the 80s when things were really bad here, a government minister even said in an interview "We can't all live on a small island" (the population of the Republic then was about 3 million, it's about 5 million now). So that was the attitude: "don't expect us to do anything about it, get the boat to England or the plane to the US/Canada/Australia".
So, back to the 19th century. A lot of emigration was paid for by family members who had emigrated earlier and sent tickets back for the rest to follow, or in some cases, similar to the Highland Clearances, landlords paid for their ex-tenants to emigrate. And many Irish went to Britain, as always.
"The Irish Emigrant Society of New York expanded its activities to found the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in 1850. This made it possible to more easily send remittances home to Ireland. Between 1845 and 1854 when the famine was at its worst, $19 million dollars was sent back to Ireland much of it in the form of prepaid tickets so that families could be reunited. This encouraged ‘chain emigration’.
Historian Arnold Schrier has calculated that the Irish in America sent over $260 million back to Ireland during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Dennis Clarke called this phenomenon “the greatest transatlantic philanthropy of the nineteenth century”. In 1864 one writer asserted that not more than five per cent of the emigrants from Mayo paid their own passage (Mayo Constitution, March 15th 1864)."
However, in many cases, boat passenger lists show that whole families left Ireland together. The poorest of these families often received assistance from landlords, local workhouses and the government.
The first state-supported assisted migration took place early in the 1800s – shortly after the Napoleonic Wars. But, after the famine, it became more prevalent.
At first, the British government was reluctant to sponsor assisted emigration because of the costs involved. But it did give tenants of estates owned by the British monarch tickets and financial support to leave for North America.
According to historian Hidetaka Hirota, after struggling tenants from two ‘Crown estates’ in Galway called for public work projects, they were instead provided with passage to Quebec.
...According to Hirota, emigrants from Kingwilliamstown came from a list made up of those who volunteered to leave. As well as those whose compulsory removal was necessary for the estate’s “improvement”.
Other landlords began to follow the process laid down by the Crown estates. While passage to North America wasn’t cheap, many decided it would cost less than maintaining tenants who couldnt pay their rent.
At the Strokestown Park estate in Roscommon, landlord Denis Mahon ran an assisted emigration scheme. In 1847 to clear some of the 12,000 tenants there.
As well as receiving passage to North America, participants had their arrears settled and were paid for the crops they left behind. However, one letter from the Strokestown Famine Archive highlights Mahon’s disappointment. That “many of those applying are of the better sort of tenant and if possible should be kept at home”.
...In 1838, the Irish Poor Law Act introduced local workhouses to help relieve poverty. The Board of Guardians, which was elected by taxpayers in each of Ireland’s 130 districts, funded these workhouses.
However, with the consent of local taxpayers, this act also allowed for the introduction of a levy to fund the emigration of those who’d been in a workhouse for three months or more. This helped officials reduce ongoing costs.
However, by 1847, the workhouses were full. So the act was extended to allow for the assisted emigration of those outside workhouses too. However, only the wealthiest areas could afford to do this. So, in 1849, another change was made to further facilitate emigration. The Board of Guardians for each workhouse could use loans to pay for passage.
This is when assisted migration took off.
...Between 1846 and 1855, landlords assisted the emigration of up to 100,000 people, while workhouses funded the passage of 20,000.
However, these numbers grew in the latter half of the century with workhouses helping another 25,000 leave. In the 1880s, the government also subsidised the transport of 54,000 and two philanthropists – Vere Foster and James Hack Tuke – funded around 30,000 departures.
While these assisted migration schemes account for a small proportion of the people who left Ireland, it facilitated more chain migration among families. It also impacted how North Americans viewed the incoming immigrants and led to calls for immigration restrictions."
As for those who went to Britain, after a while "compassion fatigue" set in as emigration continued over the decades (while technically of course we were British subjects just like the natives in Great Britain and so it wasn't so much 'foreign' immigration):
"A creature manifestly between the Gorilla and the Negro is to be met with in some of the lowest districts of London and Liverpool by adventurous explorers. It comes from Ireland, whence it has contrived to migrate; it belongs in fact to a tribe of Irish savages: the lowest species of Irish Yahoo. When conversing with its kind it talks a sort of gibberish. It is, moreover, a climbing animal, and may sometimes be seen ascending a ladder ladden with a hod of bricks.
Satire entitled "The Missing Link", from the British magazine Punch, 1862"
So Irish emigration wasn't really so much about "the best and brightest, the most capable who can get it together to get out", which is why the miracle of the genes where the Irish-Americans somehow became smarter and more successful once they set foot on American soil is so miraculous!
I feel like in that situation, you would want to leave even if you were well off. Imagine being the one person with plenty of food in a nation of starving people. ...It's not going to end well.
Sorry, Scott. He was *English", born in Hampstead, donchaknow! And if you wonder if that makes a difference, just ask the Duke of Wellington - born in Kerry, allegedly said when asked if that made him an Irishman "Being born in a stable doesn't make you a horse". He *taught* at the University of Ulster, among other places, so that's where the Northern Ireland connection comes in.
See how I love you, I went and searched online for the horrible old racist's attitudes towards we Paddies.
"HN: Let us begin with your roots. Where are they?
RL: They are all from the east of England. My father’s family are Viking stock from North Yorkshire and were small trade people until my father obtained a scholarship to King’s College, London. My mother’s family are from the southeast and are Saxon stock from the North plain of Germany."
So no dirty admixture of Celtic blood here to taint the pure Anglo-Saxon flood coursing through his veins!
"HN: This brings us to 1967, when you quit the University of Exeter and took up a position in Ireland.
RL: Yes, I was appointed research professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) in Dublin, where I worked until 1972. The brief was to carry out research on the economic and social problems of the country. So I settled down to investigate the economic and social problems of Ireland and think about what contribution I could make to finding public policies that would help solve them. The major problem was the economic backwardness, and when I researched the literature it was not long before I discovered that the Irish had a low average IQ. So I formulated the theory that the low IQ was likely a significant reason for the economic backwardness*. The solution for this problem was obvious. What was needed was a set of eugenic policies that would raise the Irish IQ.
(*Typical English, they never take a fucking iota of responsibility for the effects of at least three hundred years of trying to turn us into worm food. No, it's our dumb genes to blame for our economic backwardness, not their deliberate destruction of native industry and anybody smart enough to be bothersome.)
HN: This sounds a bit scary!
RL: Indeed. I reflected on the likely headlines I would get if I wrote one of the monographs that the ESRI produced analysing the problem and its solution. Headlines like Professor advocates sterilizing the mentally retarded and incentives for graduates to have more children. I didn’t see these going down well. Ireland is a deeply conservative and Catholic country and the Catholics had been the only group that opposed eugenic programs in the first half of the twentieth century, when everyone else thought these were sensible. Virtually no-one supported eugenic programs any more and anyone who proposed doing so would be accused of being a Nazi.
HN: And how did you deal with this problem?
RL: I chickened out! I did not think I could go public on this, so I sat on it for 35 years. It was not until 2002 when I published IQ and the Wealth of Nations with Tatu Vanhanen that I set out the theory. Nevertheless, I did write something on the issue in a circumspect way. In 1968 I published The Irish Brain Drain. It reported research showing that there was a high rate of emigration of graduates from Ireland, and warned that this would reduce the average IQ of the remaining population. I looked next at some of the demographic and epidemiological characteristics of Ireland to see if I could find any problems I could tackle. The first thing I noticed was that the Irish have an exceptionally high rate of psychosis. I knew that chronic hospitalised psychotics, consisting mainly of those with simple schizophrenia and retarded depression, have a low level of anxiety. I wondered whether a low level anxiety in the population might explain the high rate of psychosis and looked at other data that might corroborate the theory. I took the 18 economically developed nations for which there were reliable statistics and examined calorie consumption, coronary heart disease, caffeine and cigarette consumption as indices of low anxiety, and suicide rates, alcohol consumption, and road accident death rates as indices of high anxiety. I factor analysed the inter-correlations and found a general factor that accounting for about 50% of the variance and identified this as anxiety. The final step was to treat the nations as if they were individuals and use the data to score the nations on the anxiety factor. The result was that Ireland emerged as the nation with the lowest level of anxiety."
Ah, yes: we happy-go-lucky Paddies, too stupid to worry about anything because we have the child-like approach to life and are incapable of adult cognition about the responsibilities and worries of the world. The English have loved this take for a couple of centuries, now. Take it away, Dylan Moran:
…HN: We have come to the year 1972 and you were soon to leave Dublin.
RL: Yes, I had completed my work on national differences in anxiety and was keen to develop my ideas on national and racial differences in intelligence. But because I had discovered the low IQ in Ireland, I did not think it possible to do this while I was in Dublin. So I had to look for a new base. Then in the fall of 1971 the University of Ulster advertised for a professor to set up a psychology department. I thought this would suit me, so I sent in an application, was offered the job, and accepted. So in 1972 I moved to Ulster and began my work on national and racial differences in intelligence."
Oh, I'm damn sure certain parts of Northern Ireland suited him down to the ground. As far as I'm concerned, Lynn can [redacted due to the use of industrial language in the workplace].
'... alcohol consumption, and road accident death rates as indices of high anxiety.' That is certainly a special way to look for signs of high anxiety! And if those measures put Ireland as the least anxious among the developed countries, I certainly have to update my beliefs about Irish beer consumption.
Just drink 20 pints of Guinness each weekend and you too could live to be 100.
It's in the papers! (Granted, having excellent genes seems to be doing the heavy lifting here, but still - truth in advertising, 'Guinness is good for you')
"A Kerry man who enjoys 20 pints of Guinness every weekend has been declared as fit as a fiddle on a TV health show. Mick O'Brien, a retired ESB worker in his 70s, received a clean bill of health despite his hefty weekend drinking habit.
He shared his love for Guinness on The Clinic For Well People, which airs tomorrow on Virgin Media One. Tests revealed that Mick, who walks 25 miles a week to keep fit, had a metabolic age of 68, excellent blood pressure and a healthy heart, the Irish Mirror reports.
Dr Jean Kenny confirmed his thyroid was perfect and his liver was in good shape, adding: "If you mind yourself, you could live until you're 102."
However, she cautioned Mick that his alcohol consumption was more than double the recommended intake and suggested he reduce it to eight pints a week. A jovial Mick responded: "I'll have to consider whether I'll comply with what the medical people say."
The GP noted that Mick's weekly alcohol intake of 40 units - equivalent to 20 pints - was well above the recommended limit of 17 units, reports Dublin Live.
She warned him about the dangers of excessive drinking, saying: "Going down that slope can be bad," and "Alcohol is a grade 1 carcinogen. You have alcohol-free days which is good, but you need to address the drinking at the weekend."
Dr Jean praised Mick's "superb" genetics, noting that his father worked until he was 90 on the family farm, drove until he was 93, and passed away at 97 due to a stroke. His mother also lived into her 90s, and an aunt reached the age of 102."
Who's that poor fool of a billionaire who wants to reverse aging and live forever, so he takes so many supplements he rattles when he walks and he gets transfusions of his son's blood? Let him give all that up and take to the black stuff instead! 😁
Lynn, so far as I know, didn't do any tests himself and relied on tests carried out in the 70s on (so far as I remember) two tests on school children and one on adults. He kludged together the results of those to get his average for the Irish IQ.
Were we all poor and stupid in 1980? Well, that's the year I did my Leaving Certificate so, er, no comment 😁
Well hang on, obviously the framing in the map above is super lossy because a) not all countries are ethnostates and b) not all parts of the country are the same, so you get a map that has a 5 IQ gap between RoI and NI (which is on the face of it silly) because its the score for the UK as a whole. Now you might still think that the score difference between say English and Irish people is silly or racist (genetically v. similar) but as Scott points out the Flynn effect takes care of most of this.
FWIW if test scores were repeated today I'd expect Ireland to outscore or equal the UK scores, due to larger demographic changes in the UK and rapid catch up amongst the native Irish. Ireland outperforms the UK on PISA scores for example.
"you get a map that has a 5 IQ gap between RoI and NI"
No, no, see, that is totally right because of the perfidious Celts down south versus the pure Protestants up north 😁 If you read the conversation with Lynn*, he's very clear on the superiority of the Angelfolc blood** and second to that, if you are unfortunate enough not to be able to trace your Viking and Germanic ancestry in your parental lines, is to be a Protestant and not a Catholic.
EDIT: Damn it, I really must be as stupid as Lynn considers us to be, since I never back up things when I write them, but a few years back I was considerably exercised by yet another story in the media about "Irish IQ is low" based on Lynn, so I did some online digging around and found that he had graded IQ for the British Isles. It moved neatly from stupidest (us rebel Southerners) to the Northerners (slightly smarter) to the Welsh to the Scots (nearly as smart as the English) to, of course, the 100+ IQ titans in London.
Very revelatory of his mindset, I always thought. "In spite of all temptations to belong to other nations, he remains an Englishman!"
*"My father’s family are Viking stock from North Yorkshire and were small trade people until my father obtained a scholarship to King’s College, London. My mother’s family are from the southeast and are Saxon stock from the North plain of Germany."
**I've lifted this shamelessly from "Private Eye":
I'm terrible at maths and pattern-matching (did some arty-type courses and I was the one person in the class consistently not getting the "sort all these colours into families" type questions correct), and the one time I've tried the Raven's type test, I of course squelched like a deflated water balloon.
But I also think it's the type of test where coaching/training *could* make a difference - some of the questions, it's clear that there's One Weird Trick to work out the solution. The really smart will figure it out on their own, the stupid like me won't, but the moderately smart if they get taught "this is how you answer it" would certainly be able to improve scores on tests after that.
IIRC (it's been many years since I've taken it), some of the questions are highly correlated with mathematical stuff that could theoretically been reasoned out geometrically, but which has a shortcut if you recognize what it's doing. Like I recall there being a problem that ended up being a geometric version of a square root.
I recommend his regional breakdown of the British Isles for hilarity. The Nordies are just that teenier bit brighter than us Free Staters, but the cream of the crop is in London/South East.
"The Social Ecology of Intelligence in the British Isles"
Us: 96
Norn Iron: 96.7
The Mainland Proper (a selection):
Scotland (the stupidest): 97.3
Wales: 98.4
London up at the top with: 102.1
London is a chicken-and-egg case; is it rich because all the smartest people live there, or do all the smartest people live there because of the opportunities to become wealthy and famous?
So this whole thread started out because you were incredulous that Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland could really have different IQs. But when we drill down, it's only a 0.7 point difference, which is barely meaningful?
If I go by that map in Lynn's early book, yes. Which is why the map graphic is so poor - they're lumping in "Results for the UK" meaning "Northern Ireland is part of the UK, so make them a darker shade of green than the Republic".
But as you point out, if we believe early Lynn, there's only 0.7 point difference. So I imagine the rest of the map may have similar problems. It's a very crude measure.
Lynn, though, doesn't seem to have been working off pure IQ difference alone; he considered the Republic to be too backwards due to being conservative, Catholic, agriculturally based, etc. Why, they'd even disapprove of things like sterilising the unfit! But the North being part of the UK meant it was Protestant, industrial, and liberal (not so much on that last in reality) so they'd be fine with "we superior Anglo-Saxon stock must ensure the bad weeds don't breed".
As I said, I don't believe there was really that much of a 5 point difference between us here and those in Britain; if you're measuring London as highest in average IQ, you have to take into consideration that it's probably *much* more racially mixed than the rest of the country, so that also contradicts what he later chunters on about "skin reflectance". Or that London does not score so highly because "all the white British are there and they're the smartest", but "as the capital city and centre of pretty much everything, the smartest (including smartest brown, black and yellow people) end up there due to the range of opportunities to succeed and have a good life, the same way everyone gravitates to Silicon Valley even from overseas if they're looking for VC for a start-up".
Travellers are their own special case, and it's hard to have a discussion on that without running headlong into accusations of "racism!"
Travellers are not the same as Gypsies/Roma, but they have the same background of living apart from settled people, moving about in caravans (now motorised) and living by the side of the road, a separate culture, a lot of poverty, not much emphasis on education or opportunity for the same as kids are constantly being pulled out of school to move around, their own dialect or cant called Shelta, and a certain perception of criminality (and that's another hot button topic).
They have worse outcomes in pretty much everything than the settled Irish population, and their culture does emphasise early marriage, not staying in school, and not interacting much with the settled community. Modern times mean they get the worst of both worlds: the casual sexual affairs, breakdown of families, drugs of the settled community on top of 'no school, drinking, fighting, married at 16 and a heap of kids' traditional lifestyle.
"The health inequalities that lead to such poor health status are highlighted in the findings of the All Ireland Traveller Health Study (2010). These include:
- Traveller women live on average 11.5 years less than women in the general population;
- Traveller men live on average 15 years less; and
the number of deaths among Traveller infants is estimated at 14.1 for every 1,000 live births compared to 3.9 for every 1,000 live births among the general population;
- the study also showed that deaths from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases and suicides increased in Travellers compared to the general population."
The "indigenous minority" stuff is modern liberal/progressive notions slapped on top of the Irish context; they're Irish, not a genetically different sub-population. There *are* differences, but that's more to do with being a small group that intermarry and don't mix with the majority population:
"They found that Travellers are of Irish ancestral origin but have significant differences in their genetic make-up compared with the settled community.
These differences have arisen because of hundreds of years of isolation combined with a decreasing Traveller population, the researchers say.
The findings confirm that the Irish Traveller population has an Irish ancestry and this comes at a time where the ethnicity of Travellers is being considered by the Irish State.
The team estimates the group began to separate from the settled population at least 360 years ago.
Their findings dispute the theory that Travellers were displaced by the Great Famine, which struck Ireland in 1845."
So I'm not surprised at all they score badly on tests, but is that indicative of low IQ in the general Traveller population? Hard to know. The ones that settle/are willing to interact with settled population such as on that early school leaver programme I worked at, are on the low normal to normal side (so far as I can see). Not really that much different from the low normal to normal peers in the settled population. Some do want to live respectably and improve things for their kids and their community, some are perfectly happy to be criminal scumbags - just like the rest of the population.
>We know that in the US, where we do give people good IQ tests, whites average IQ 100 and blacks average IQ 85.
I think that in general, the people who consider Lynn's figures implausible, offensive and racist are generally highly suspicious of this as well. Many are simply not aware of the studies to begin with, but among those who are, before inferring that there is either a genetic *or* environmental gap in intelligence, they tend to infer that the tests are flawed in some way and do not accurately capture a real gap in intelligence. I agree that there's a case for optimism based on these sorts of figures, but I think the argument here is likely to miss the sort of people who register these complaints, because they get off the train before the point that its basic assumptions are grounded in.
I think this might be a case of not actually disagreeing much. The standard objection to the 85 average is that it's due to stuff that the test measures other than g, not an actual large difference in g between the populations, and that same objection is probably also the objection to Lynn.
The most common claims I've heard for what else is driving the difference is that IQ tests measure a combination of g and what might be termed "scholastic ability", with the latter encompassing test taking skills (both familiarity and comfort with standardize test formats and procedures and the skill of applying executive function to taking a standardized test), vocabulary, general literacy, familiarity with particular genres of puzzles, and motivation to perform well on the test. These correlate with g in first-world countries, especially among middle-class and above subpopulations because in those environments the main limiting factors for scholastic ability are g and executive function. But among people who grew up in poor or marginalized communities, and especially for third-world populations, cultural and institutional factors compete significantly with g as limiting factors and may increase the impact of executive function and the "lottery of fascinations" relative to g as well.
Scott is suggesting an additional hypothesis that to the extent that there may be a difference in g, it may be driven much more by environmental factors (early childhood nutrition, disease burden, etc) than by differences in genetic potential. This seems pretty similar to the standard objection in so far as it rejects hypotheses that involve innate genetic superiority, and that either hypothesis suggests that bringing third-world countries towards first-world standards and improving conditions for poor communities in first-world countries should be expected to close the gap, and is likely to have broader social benefits to the extent that scholastic ability is a useful proxy for practical skills or for a good foundation for acquiring such skills.
>Even if you’re generally skeptical of charity because all good things come from development, Lynn’s IQ estimates suggest there’s lots of room for charitable nutrition/health/education interventions to work.
I don't see how Lynn's work shifts the balance much on the respective roles of charity and development. It shows that environment affects outcomes. But that's not what the "charity vs. development" debate is about. That debate is about the extent to which charity is impactful vs. development in aggregate, the extent to which marginal dollars have impact in one vs. the other, etc.. Environment having an impact doesn't indicate anything about the respective roles of charity and development - they both impact environment.
Indeed, Africa is distinctive in being less developed - not in receiving less charity. If a lesson would be drawn from sub-Saharan Africans performing more poorly in the African environment than other environments, it's not obvious that the lesson would be "invest more in charity directly impacting the environment," rather than "invest in development."
I think it establishes a charity -> development pathway, because presumably charity includes things like health and education, health and education (according to this theory) improve IQ, and IQ increases development.
I'm not entirely sure we're connecting so let me know if I'm misunderstanding something you're saying.
I'll try again, but if we're miscommunicating or something, that's fine.
I may have misunderstood the position being referenced in the beginning of the quote "you’re generally skeptical of charity because all good things come from development."
If it meant that exogenous interventions like charity only improve the symptoms of the problem but not the cause, and that true improvement can only can from within, then I agree that Lynn implies that that isn't the case - the same people themselves - not just their material conditions - will probably improve (e.g. in IQ) depending on exogenous factors in their environments.
If, however, the position referenced in that line is less radical, denying not that exogenous factors can impact individuals and their outcomes, but rather asserting that the impact of general economic development dwarfs that of targeted environmental interventions, or that the marginal impact of the former is greater than the latter, then I don't think that Lynn sheds any light one way or the other.
Lynn doesn't shed light on which elements of the African environment lower IQ.
If someone believes that a particular intervention (e.g. education) raises IQ, then of course, that would imply that it would in turn foster development and all the benefits that that entails.
But if someone believes that, then the point from Lynn is superfluous, as it implies the conclusion of Lynn, but not vice versa. That is, Lynn shows that environment has an impact, but it doesn't show that any particular intervention is impactful. If someone already believes that a particular environmental intervention improves IQ, then Lynn (environment affects IQ) is superfluous.
Lynn doesn't even show us that any known intervention is effective at increasing IQ, even in the context of Africa - just that *something* about the environment of Africa suppresses IQ.
It certainly doesn't imply that investment in targeted interventions has greater marginal impact than investment in development.
Separately, I think that there's reason to be skeptical about the effectiveness of particular proposed interventions, and I may elaborate on that in a separate comment, but that's distinct from my point that knowing that environment affects IQ only shifts the needle from development towards charity inasmuch as one doubted that exogenous factors can impact a person's characteristics, at all, but that if one accepts that (which I think most "development" advocates do), then I don't see it moving the needle.
The interesting question from this, is what are the implications of this conclusion? It seems to me that a lot of unsavory people who have ends I would call very racist focus quite a bit on this information, so my assumption is the conclusion it leads to gives support to justifying racist beliefs.
“The “racist” position is that all IQ differences between groups are genetic. The “anti-racist” position is that they’re a product of environment - things like nutrition, health care, and education. “
At the very least, the conclusion that certain ethnic groups (let’s say Haitians) have an inherently lower mean IQ (and IQ highly correlates with many of the things in life we generally consider good, like not committing crimes, being a productive citizen, caring about long term consequences, etc.) then the extreme anti immigration stance seems reasonably justified, and maybe much more than that. Perhaps “they’re eating the dogs!” is overkill (since it’s probably not true) but statements like that can be taken as a more emotional and broadly appealing slogan that is bringing one to the same conclusion a levelheaded look at the genetic component of racial IQ differences would lead you to.
Shouldn’t the question here be “is this true,” not “what beliefs are more justified if this is true”? You seem to be implying—but I genuinely can’t tell, so please correct me if I’m wrong—that the fact that anti-immigration and/or racist sentiments might become more justified if national IQ data is accurate is itself a reason to reject national IQ data. That seems clearly wrong to me. Either the data accurately describes something out there in the world or it doesn’t. What conclusions people might draw from the data should be irrelevant.
Given that it is true, what are the implications?*
Debate as to the truth of this is being had by more well-researched people, over longer periods of time, then this post or the comments under it promise to reveal.
The heritability of most everything else that can’t be intentionally controlled (it’s very difficult to impossible to meaningful improve one’s IQ, as is the case with height) has been well established, so I personally would be surprised if it was revealed IQ is not heritable at all (especially with the significant evidence that it is). The “is this true” question seems to be well-answered, leaving only “how true is it?”, as in, what proportion of IQ is nurture vs. nature? Maybe 10%, maybe 90%, but I suspect the better and more consistent we get at the nurture part, the higher proportion nature is the reason for variation.
I think the repetitive conversations about “Is IQ heritable and different across genetically distinct groupings of people?” is more of a distraction when compared to “What are the implications of this is true?” which seems to be a conversation mostly racists and unsavory people are having. If the conversation about implications is only left to them, then if it ever becomes a generally accepted that certain racial groups have different inherent intelligence, then they will be in a much stronger position for advocating for policy.
The non destructively racist implication could be: these groups need MORE help and resources to flourish, just like we give to INDIVIDUALS with special educational needs at school. I'm not saying it's realistic, but it's a possible outcome.
There are real genetic differences in the 'mean' of every measurable characteristic between any pair of groups you can conceive of. Characteristics would includes IQ and height and darkness of skin. Groups could include blacks/whites, men/women and left-handed/right-handed. One is racist (or possibly just annoying) if one repeatedly picks out particular pairings and opportunities to harp on the difference (usually without understanding statistics, at all).
"US blacks are a little more intermixed with whites than African blacks"
A little? In some cases, it's a lot? I'm guessing the vast majority of black Africans are 100% black African, while most the average black American is about 25% European. And some black Americans are more than half European.
(Side note: I remember when I was a kid in the 1990s and "biracial" was a pretty commonly used term for someone with one white parent and one black parent. But Obama was the first "black" president, Patrick Mahomes is a black quarterback, Notre Dame's coach Marcus Freeman is a "black" coach (he's half Asian). Oh but, Miami Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel is biracial because he talks like a nerd, went to Yale, and looks really white.)
maybe 25% figure comes for 23andMe or the likes -- which would be biased upwards, as blacks with more white admiture more likely to be 23andMe customers
I just did some quick googling, and I wouldn't be surprised if 23andMe puts out a higher figure.
Nevertheless, the European admixture is significant enough that if there's a genetic difference in IQ based on race, you'd expect to see it reflected in the data. I don't know of much writing trying to tease out these differences, apart from some of the stuff Steve Sailer has written about data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study.
The ABCD finds an average of 16% white admixture for kids whose parents both self-identify as African-American and only African-American. But that leaves out people a bunch of people who might identify as only African-American but who might have, say, one parent who self-identifies as mixed.
Scientists have been talking about doing this kind of admixture and IQ study for a century. For example, anthropologist Margaret Mead published in 1926 a lucid critique of early admixture studies in which researchers guesstimated the degree of white admixture in blacks by looking at them. She said, no, that's not reliable enough, you need to get a good genealogy. She was otherwise open to the logic of the study, but suggested scientists search for ways to find ancestry more accurately.
Now we finally have reliable ways to estimate ancestry.
I think 23andMe let David Reich look at their data in 2014. I believe they came up with self-identified African-American clients being 27% white. But there's probably a selection bias. If you look like Steph Curry you are probably more interested in what a DNA ancestry scan could tell you about your racial background than if you look like LeBron James.
A more interesting finding was that self-identified whites tended to be really white, like 98%.
And there weren't many Americans at all in the 40% white to 90% white range. Outside of Louisiana, the One Drop Rule pushes people toward being quite black or very white.
I think you just stated they are not "normal"! Why do we have to be so squeamish about IQ? I've lived in small villages nearly all my life, where everyone has a valued place. The handyman might not be as smart as the doctor or the teacher, but he is appreciated no end when he comes to fix a burst pipe.
Chortle! Love the NYT gag. They'd probably be over-qualified writing for the UK's Mail Online, having to write articles like "You're Eating Bananas all Wrong"
And speaking of charity and IQ, the lowest of low hanging fruit is putting iodine in salt. You can donate to the Global Iodine Network like I do for the long term benefit of poorer countries without worrying you're just delaying Malthus's reemergence. Givewell calls Salt Iodization "slightly below the range of cost-effectiveness of the opportunities that we expect to direct marginal donations to" which in the grand scheme of things is quite good.
Iron fortification of flour is another thing that might help. Both iron and iodine supplementation were begun in the US between the Wars.
The US military first used IQ tests in World War One and many of the results were distressing to elites about the masses, especially in the hillbilly districts. So lots of steps were taken in the 1920s and 1930s to improve common people's lives.
My vague impression is that by WWII, American draftees were considerably more literate and healthier than in 1917.
> His opponents pointed out both his personal racist opinions/activities
That's the mildest possible way you could've put it. He wasn't someone who had "personal racist opinions" that he kept as "personal racist opinions". He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, a white supremacist journal that was founded by people like:
Henry Garrett an American psychologist who testified in favor of segregated schools during Brown versus Board of Education, Corrado Gini who was president of the Italian genetics and eugenics Society in fascist Italy, and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer who was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of anthropology human heredity and eugenics in Nazi Germany. He was a member of the Nazi Party and the mentor of Josef Mengele, the physician at the Auschwitz concentration camp infamous for performing human experimentation on the prisoners during World War 2. Mengele provided for Verschuer with human remains from Auschwitz to use in his research into eugenics.
It's funded by the pioneer fund, an organization he was a board member of and that has been classified as a white supremacist hate group, with one of its first projects being to fund the distribution in US churches and schools of "Erbkrank", a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics.
He's not just called racist, he *is* racist, he even describes *himself* as a racist.
The second half of that sentence is also, to put it extremely mildly, a bit of a downplay:
> and his somewhat opportunistic methodology
I don't know what he did for his Malawi estimates that you're referring to, but I know what he did for his South Africa estimates. He would use the IQ of 69 for South Africans, cited by Owen (1989), which is referred to by Richard Lynn as:
> “the single best study of Negroid intelligence.”
The study in question examines test and item bias in the Junior Aptitude Test (JAT), a standardized test originally designed for white pupils in South Africa. Owen’s study aimed to assess whether this test was suitable for students from different racial backgrounds—white, Indian, and black pupils.
The abstract of the study states:
> “This study was undertaken to shed light on problems concerning the construction and use of a common test battery for various South African population groups.”
Essentially, the study evaluated whether the JAT, developed for white students, was appropriate for non-white groups. It selected schools across South Africa but faced challenges, particularly with black schools. The study notes that the majority of the selected black schools could not participate “owing to the unrest situation.” As a result, the testing was limited to black schools in the KwaZulu region, one of the segregated areas designated for black residents under apartheid.
The study analyzed the performance of students on various JAT subtests. A significant issue identified was that the test was administered in English to black students in KwaZulu. Several JAT subtests heavily relied on language ability. Owen assumed that language would not significantly impact the results because the black students in KwaZulu had ostensibly been learning English in their schools. However, this assumption ignored or disregarded critical issues, such as the lack of teaching equipment, the low number of certified teachers, and pupil-teacher ratios that were more than double those of white schools. As the study itself states:
> “Language was not expected to play a significant role in test performance in this investigation.”
However, the results showed this assumption to be entirely incorrect. Language played a critical role, and the black students’ poor knowledge of English rendered certain sections of the JAT, such as the synonym test and the memory paragraph test, “virtually unusable.” Yes, that's an actual quote, the study explicitly states:
> “Certain tests proved to be virtually unusable.”
Owen further noted that language bias was not the only issue. In a section titled “Item Bias in the Tests of the JAT,” he identified other forms of cultural and economic bias. For example, several test items presupposed familiarity with objects like electrical appliances, microscopes, and Western-style ladies’ accessories. Owen writes:
> “In the case of both the Indian and black testees, it seems that the single largest cause of bias lay in the fact that the pupils were not familiar with the objects represented by the pictures. Cultural and socioeconomic status factors probably also played a role in this regard.”
Despite the study concluding that the JAT was biased and that some results were “virtually unusable,” Richard Lynn still considered this “the single best study of Negroid intelligence.” Lynn used this study, which, again, tested children in segregated schools using a non-native language, as a key foundation for his estimate of the average IQ of black Africans. In his own words:
> “The mean IQ of the sample in comparison with Caucasoid South African norms is 69. [...] It is proposed, therefore, to round this figure up to 70 and take this as the approximate mean for pure Negroids.”
Yeah, "give a test in English to a bunch of Zulu kids in the Bantustans in the middle of apartheid" isn't a great way to measure anything except how disinterested those kids are going to be in said test.
Incidentally, language seems to matter for non linguistic items too, I don't have research data but I've recently discovered that my short term memory for digits (forward and backwards) which is one of the Wechsler tasks differs by TWO between my native language and English. And I'm functionally bilingual, highly educated, reasonably intelligent adult who works as a translator/interpreter. And I still lose 2 raw score points on that task if it's given to me in English. Yes, anecdote/personal weirdness but possibly pointing to something real in situations when any cognitive task is administered in a non-native language to even HIGHLY FLUENT speakers, and compared with native speakers. That's not even starting on culture of course.
This all sounds pretty convincing. I totally buy that apartheid-era IQ measurements were hopelessly confounded and useless, which begs the question, why hasn’t anyone tried new tests to come up with a better number? Or maybe they have, but I never see them cited in these discussions.
I don't know. My guess is that if there was better data out there that shows high IQ, the racists would do everything in their power to make sure no-one sees it. But I think that probably there isn't better data out there because of the moral compass of psychologists. I mean, you only have a finite amount of attention/energy/time on this earth, and I guess they'd prefer not to spend it on research that helps racists make the lives of people worse, rather than the myriad of research that needs to be done on topics that will make the lives of people better (e.g. trauma, biases, bystander effect, stereotype threat, positive psychology...)
"The racists" don't have power to prevent others from seeing a study. If there is a study, I suppose the reason people aren't seeing it is that the topic itself is too politically incorrect for its results to be discussed.
I was never interested in delving into the topic myself as long as influential people in my social landscape had bizarre takes like "IQ is a fake, there's no IQ gap, and the gap is explained entirely by environmental factors, and look over there! That person believes the junk studies on IQ and should be canceled."
I mean, I care what's true, certainly, but I care about it from a policy perspective. In the case of "IQ is 100% environmental vs 50% genetic vs 25% genetic vs fake", all plausible conclusions lead me to the same policy: support better education in places with worse education. I always figured, too, that telling children that their race has lower IQ is potentially harmful to them, so why promote such information? The frustrating answer may be that if you don't, the "IQ is fake and also 100% environmental" people keep talking and thereby win the debate.
"Owen assumed that language would not significantly impact the results because the black students in KwaZulu had ostensibly been learning English in their schools."
Oh, boy. Even leaving out South Africa, imagine doing an IQ test in Spanish or French in an American or British/Irish high school on the assumption that the native English speaking kids had, after all, been doing years of study in that language. Imagine the results for intelligence you'd get out of that!
The fact that there are so many accusations like these floating around, each of them trying to take one test out of context and each of which can be described back and forth forever is part of why I didn't try to focus on the methodological issues.
I was quoting from his article "Race differences in intelligence" published in Mankind Quarterly (since I was talking about Mankind Quarterly), so you have the wrong article. You can check that by copying the quotes and doing Control+F (or Command+F if you use a Mac) to see if they appear in the article.
EDIT: Also I object to "each of them trying to take one test out of context", it wasn't just one random test he used, it was the test he himself described as “the single best study of Negroid intelligence”. That's a bit of a different story.
Bob has a point. If Lynn called one study "the single best study of Negroid intelligence", that seems like a pretty good reason to take a closer look at it. If its headline results are very flawed, it doesn't necessarily mean that all the other studies are worse―it could just mean Lynn is extremely biased as Bob suggests.
I'm puzzled about what you're trying to accomplish, both with this post and with this reply. If Lynn is a self-described racist allied with fascists, as is Bob's central point[1], then proposing that we "Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates" is a very insensitive take at best. And okay, Lynn has counterarguments, but why should I trust them?
Another example: a fellow named Scott Ritter, a convicted underage sex offender, is perhaps the most popular Russian propagandist from America. I don't argue that he's wrong *because* he's a convicted underage sex offender―that would be absurd. I certainly *have* the knowledge to properly argue Scott Ritter is wrong[2], but arguing against his supporters would be exhausting and take forever (and they wouldn't change their minds by a millimeter). So instead I point out that Russian State Media has to lean on "that guy" because they have so few American supporters. Doesn't that give us a prior about the position itself? So, going back to Lynn―isn't there *any* other source you could use? Can we not Learn To Love Professor Reasonable's results instead?
[2] Well, not quite properly. I simply followed the war very closely from the very beginning, learned about the history since ~2009 or so, and was epistemically careful―I did *not* build a database of sources I could use for debate purposes.
300k articles published based on the work of some fascist pseudo-scientist. Clearly the white supremacists have taken over academia. Someone better tell Trump before he razes the university system because wokism!
--
The Ashkenazi are basically the poster kids of the HBD hypothesis. This seems at least a 120 degree turn from good old racism. "Do you remember that 'parasite race' our founders in the Nazi party tried their best to exterminate, and which our white supremacist readers in the KKK hate with a passion? Turns out that they are not successful because they have a base instinct for exploiting their host population, but because they are actually, on average, really smart. Ooops."
--
Now, I would very much prefer if the Gini or Galton had been less racist, or if the co-discoverer of the Lynn-Flynn effect was a social democrat, alas, this is not the world we live in.
I would like nothing better than if I could trust respected academics to fairly investigate issues such as group differences in IQ, but I don't think I can, anyone who would argue that such group differences exist and are perhaps even genetic would clearly be cancelled. Thus, I must presume that any article they write starts with "In conclusion, Lynn is wrong (and also racist)." This makes whatever they write before a lot less relevant.
Of course, I would also take Lynn with a giant grain of salt given that it seems just as likely that his world view influenced his research results as vice versa. I will notice though that he published articles in Intelligence (which has then been criticized for platforming a racist pseudo-scientist, obviously). So even if Mankind Quarterly was in 2025 what der Stuermer was in 1937 (I do not read either, so I can't say), this would not disqualify his academic credentials per se.
Also, the academic left labeling anything that challenges blank-slatism 'racial pseudo-science' seems rich given that there seems some correlation between a field suffering from the replication crisis and how woke it is (possible confounder: softness of the field). This is not to say that there is nothing which is genuine racial pseudo-science out there. It is the problem of the boy who cried wolf.
Edit: fixed s/Flynn/Lynn/ -- stupid mistake on my part.
I don't know what you're quoting, but it's not my comment. Show me where I labeled Gini a pseudo-scientist, let alone advocated for blank-slatism.
> the Lynn-Flynn effect
It's not called the Lynn-Flynn effect. It's called the Flynn effect.
> anyone who would argue that such group differences exist and are perhaps even genetic would clearly be cancelled. Thus, I must presume that any article they write starts with "In conclusion, Flynn is wrong (and also racist)."
"Anyone"? Every single academic in every single university in every single country? Yeah, nah. But even if that was true would that mean that every single academic would care about cancelling to the point that they'd throw out academic rigor and start with the conclusion before the research? Doubtful. Also:
> Flynn is wrong (and also racist).
> Of course, I would also take Flynn with a giant grain of salt
My comment is about Lynn, not Flynn.
> correlation between a field suffering from the replication crisis and how woke it is
Do you have a source for that?
> The Ashkenazi are basically the poster kids of the HBD hypothesis. This seems at least a 120 degree turn from good old racism.
That's 11 million out of 8.2 billion people, or ~0.1%. So, not so much a 120 degree turn as a 0.36 degree turn. I don't think the half of the population that's brown are going to be reassured.
> Of course, I would also take Flynn [...] this would not disqualify his academic credentials per se.
I do not talk about Flynn's academic credentials. I don't even talk about Lynn's academic credentials. The comment you're responding to talks about whether Lynn (not Flynn) is racist.
> I don't know what you're quoting, but it's not my comment. Show me where I labeled Gini a pseudo-scientist
Well, you were arguing that Mankind Quarterly was white supremacist because it was founded by a bunch of fascists. I was pointing out, tongue-in-cheek, that at least one of the fascist founders was also a social scientist whose work remains relevant today, casting doubt on the idea that we can safely disregard anything based on the ideas of horrible people.
> It's not called the Lynn-Flynn effect. It's called the Flynn effect.
> In 1982, Richard Lynn published a paper about the generational increase in performance on IQ tests, now known as the Flynn effect slightly before James Flynn's publications documenting the same phenomenon.[40][41][42] A few researchers have called the phenomenon the "Lynn–Flynn effect" as a way of recognizing both their contributions.[40][41][43] In a 2013 paper, James Flynn offered his comments on this aspect of the effect's naming:
>>Calling massive IQ gains over time the "Flynn Effect" was an accident of history, a label Charles Murray coined in The Bell Curve in 1994. It is not a verdict a court would have been likely to hand down if it had an eye for the historical record. [...] Therefore, I give my thanks to Charles Murray and my apologies to Richard Lynn.[44]
> My comment is about Lynn, not Flynn.
Yeah, I got confused. Hopefully fixed now.
> "Anyone"? [...] But even if that was true would that mean that every single academic would care about cancelling to the point that they'd throw out academic rigor and start with the conclusion before the research?
No, I was being hyperbolic in this paragraph. Still, I think that there is a publication bias. If your findings fit the common academic narrative (which is woke), you will want to publish them in a high impact journal. If your findings clash with the common narrative, and furthermore rhyme with the claims of racists, at best you could publish in a lower tier journal. However, you have to balance the career risks of being called a proponent of racial pseudo-science against that, and will likely conclude that your time is better spent taking some less contentious data and polishing that to a publication.
The Jews might be a tiny minority, but they were disproportionally the victims of racism in European fascism. A significant departure of the attitude towards them between old Nazis and HBD proponents indicates that the ideological continuity between these movements is limited.
> casting doubt on the idea that we can safely disregard anything based on the ideas of horrible people.
Show me where I made that claim.
> wikipedia
Your source shows I'm right. It's called the Flynn effect, just because some people call it something else doesn't mean it's not called the Flynn effect. The fact that Lynn was before Flynn is also irrelevant since Runquist was before Lynn.
> woke
I repeat, do you have a source that wokeness leads to worse replication? Otherwise woke ideas are just straightforwardly supported by the evidence.
> continuity between these movements is limited
Given that after all this time they're publishing in the same journals that Nazis started, using the same Funds that were distributing Nazi propaganda, attacking 99% of the same people that they used to, with white supremacists sharing sharing forums, and conferences, and prominent speakers, and websites, and journals with HBD, I think the link is pretty crystal clear.
> A normal person with 60 IQ will seem . . . normal
People think having a low IQ is a terrible thing because the people in the First World who have low IQs are mostly people who got really unlucky in some other way.
I wonder if this applies to other conditions as well. For example, homelessness.
A homeless person in the Third World can be a mildly unlucky person who lost their job, or a family member died, or their house burnt down. They have low to no savings, take a long time to recover from random disasters, so they might stay homeless for a long time. If someone were to just give them a home, they probably won't become homeless again.
For someone in the First World to be homeless, and remain homeless for a long time, they have to be really unlucky. Most have some terrible chronic condition that makes their life difficult and, in addition, as a side effect, leaves them homeless. If someone were to give them a home, they might lose it again. The sort of homeless people who are easy to help already got help and don't remain homeless for long.
This would dramatically influence people's perceptions of the homeless in the First World, and even first-worlder's perception of the Third World. For example they might be more skeptical of a charity like Give Directly because all the poor people that they personally know are extremely unlucky people with some terrible chronic condition that makes their life difficult and would not leave poverty just with a cash transfer.
I would add that most homeless people sleep in their car or something, and nobody ever notices them. The homeless who drive debate are additionally selected for being visible and obviously homeless, which usually means a level of negative selection beyond just homelessness.
I don't think people with the IQ of 60 in the First World are otherwise terribly unlucky? Why would they be? Unless you mean "visible" or "noticeable" people with the IQ of 60, which is the point Scott already makes? It's quite possible that you encountered people with IQ below 70, even of 60, in normal life without noticing. There's a girl working in my local convenience store with perinatal brain damage and IQ assessed in childhood years as 57. Perhaps it was underestimated but she's certainly formally intellectually disabled. She's indistinguishable from many other people in the same role, including those who finished high school normally without formal diagnosis and extra support.
Yes, I was restating the point Scott made as a starting point to comment on how poor people are perceived in rich countries versus poor countries.
In rich countries the proportion of noticeable to unnoticeable homeless people, or intellectually disabled people, is higher than in poor countries. This affects the public perception of them, so that in the First World poor people are more likely to both be, and be seen as, responsible for their own plight, homeless people are more likely to be perceived as dangerous or violent, and so on.
Whenever one talks about people with low IQ, they imagine a person with visible traits of some kind of very obvious birth defect, rather than the actual typical case of the girl at your local shop.
"The sort of homeless people who are easy to help already got help and don't remain homeless for long." - what's this part based on? I'm not denying, just want to understand the detail
I'd say if anything, they are easier interventions, but by the nature of homelessness you describe, there's a group of homeless constantly generated like that? but I get this convo is about the other group, and the important point is that some folks think people move from this cycling group into the structural group, while you're saying they don't
It might help to think of the people who "already got help" not as actual homeless people who got help and are no longer homeless, but as potential homeless who avoided homelessness.
For example, maybe they lost their job but they were helped by unemployment insurance, or even by a strong economy that let them find a new job right away before they missed too many rent payments.
Maybe they left the stove on and their house burnt down. No matter, insurance covered it.
Maybe the bread winner died and their spouse was left with no means of supporting themselves. No matter, the bread winner had life insurance or their extended family had some savings and the spouse had an education so they managed to find a job before the money ran out.
I think people in the First World take that stuff for granted and don't see those situations as "I was nearly homeless but got lucky".
If this national IQ data is true (I’m not saying it necessarily is), would that make the people in nations with low IQs “subhuman”? If I introduced you to someone and told you they had an IQ of 60 would you think, “here’s a subhuman”? Even if you don’t believe in IQ as a metric at all—which seems possible given the tone of your comment—surely you think some people are smarter or stupider than other people; are the very stupidest people (who are still functional) “subhuman”?
...and yet most weeks there's a discussion in the open threads about the best way to encourage the outgroup not to breed. It's hard to claim this community doesn't look down on some groups.
Any guess as for the percentage of those "discussions in the open threads about the best way to encourage the outgroup not to breed" ? 5% of threads? 1%? Less than 0.5%? I guess it is the third option (I believe I can recall one, and I read all posts and many threads). Even if it were the first, it should "make it hard to claim this community does look down on some groups". - Or: You met one x-skinned person in your life. And saw him smoking. Now you see a bus of x-skined persons and assume they are all smokers. That makes you a .... .
It is a generally a pro-natalist blog, I admit. And it does discuss ways to improve the chances for healthy and smart kids. Eugenics, literally. It even may have expressed sadness about nerds and women with college degrees having even less kids on average.
Discussion how to make specific ethnic/IQ groups have LESS kids, let alone none - as in: eugenics in the Nazi-version: hardly ever - though there are some weirdos on this 95% free substack. See also Bryan Caplan`s position as in https://www.betonit.ai/p/a_eugenic_experhtml?utm_source=publication-search
...I mean, there's at least three separate conversations about this literally happening in this post's comments section now. Meanwhile, I've not encountered a single one in any other blog or forum I follow on the internet in over a decade.
This place allows people to speak freely so long as they maintain a minimum standard of civility towards their interlocutors (and only them); and as the man said in the past - if you declare a space safe from witch hunts, you end up with a space containing a couple of bemused normies and about ten thousand witches.
Given the demographic conditions, trying to improve Sub-Saharan African countries so as to make them into places that their citizens are less likely to be desperate to emigrate from, thus making an African demographic swamping of Europe less likely, is exactly the sort of thing you would expect the most ardent white ethnonarcissists to be willing to support. And in order to be able to know what actually would improve the economic prospects of those countries, we need to be willing to be open-minded about what the causes of their current low levels of development are.
It puts a limit on how much money you are going to shovel down a bottomless pit - if environmental interventions are only going to help you reach the genetic ceiling, then the more accurate an assessment you have of what that genetic ceiling is, the better you can estimate when you have maxed out the gains you can get from pouring resources into environmental interventions. If you then still want to continue throwing money at the situation, you can, .e.g. just give people a UBI, which may be far more efficient at improving their lives than maintaining an elaborate educational system that few are able to take advantage of. Or you can do something like this: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/the-best-foreign-aid-money-can-buy?utm_source=publication-search
I'm new to this blog and particularly its IQ discussions, but one of my early impressions is: if the general POV here is other people (read: me) have moved too far in saying IQ has zero value, then maybe, these have moved back into overconfidence in it, by way of translations to policy like this
like, don't you have to be a little more confident to say an upper bound of a 'slice' of IQ should set a limit for interventions, than to make some vague (and less useful, that's the point) claim about "the intelligence of a country" or even just "IQ of a country?"
some other things maybe I just haven't read into yet, or assumptions that seem lazy because the conversation has yet to get there: like the concept of a genetic ceiling that cannot be exceeded; certain solutions as only beneficial to IQ (education seems like obviously something where there's no cap on returns, even if they're diminishing); associating "elaborate educational systems" with precisely that gap in IQ between sub-saharan Africa and say, the US (unless you think a massive portion of education spend in this country is utterly wasted); or just looking much further into a way-too-handwaving statement like "few are able to take advantage of." then I think policy wise you'd want to avoid (have to, right?) the classic mistake of applying an average-based policy to an entire country and chopping off an entire top end of a distribution. but again, these might just be down the road
btw shotgun of issues above is mainly to make clear that I have many challenges to this whole idea, everywhere along the stream... but, I'm doing what I think we agree is good, engaging with all the thinking here too even though I viscerally hate most of it
I don't think anyone who takes these ideas seriously _is_ in favor of applying an average-based policy to an entire country and chopping off an entire top end of a distrubution - provided you are actually allowed to do the intelligence testing to identify the high-IQ kids from disadvantaged backgrounds who would actually stand to benefit from it. If anything, it is anti-hereditarian progressives who are most keen on shutting down programs and schools for gifted kids, or even academic streaming within schools for children not too far from the average, often precisely because the intake criteria for such programs and schools tend to result in severe under-representation of kids from the racial groups that progressives are keenest to uplift. There is, inevitably, something deeply inegalitarian about providing special accelerated schooling for a minority of kids who are already expected to do better than average in life, even if removing those opportunities results in a colossal waste of talent which could otherwise have gone on to create more inventive solutions to society's problems and make us all wealthier in the long run than we would have been.
That said, enough people around here are sufficiently Caplan-pilled to be entirely on board with the idea that a massive portion of education spend in most developed countries is indeed utterly wasted, and that instead of trying to funnel as many young adults as possible through a humanities degree on the basis that people with such degrees have historically done better in life than those with no degrees, one would be better to provide more vocational training for trades and let employers test for IQ directly without fear of disparate impact lawsuits.
But my comment was in response to to someone asking how knowing the genetic bound for IQ helps you. Of course knowing a country's _average_ genetic bound does not preclude you from providing more educational resources for children in that country whose genetic bound is above the average, I just mean that the genetic bound, if there is one and it can be accurately gauged, sets an upper limit on the phenotypic average IQ that country can expect to achieve, and the closer you are to that bound, the less likely it is that plowing more resources into environmental interventions is going to net you gains that justify the costs.
Notice, though, something curious: you comment "I'm doing what I think we agree is good, engaging with all the thinking here too even though I viscerally hate most of it". Does your own emotional reaction to what is, after all, a factual discussion, surprise you? From my own (admittedly sporadic) reading of the relevant parts of the blogosphere, pretty much no one on the hereditarian side will admit to a visceral hatred of the idea that at least some of the variance in intelligence, whether between individuals or between group averages, is environmentally caused. They mostly just think that the environmentalists are simply mistaken, and, sure, may express disdain for people pushing policies that, from a hereditarian perspective are likely to be counterproductive, but rarely express such an intense negative emotional reaction to the environmental hypothesis itself as an idea to discuss. Why do you think you have such a reaction to the hereditarian hypothesis?
I have a family member with something like a 60 IQ due to an event near birth I won't derail here, and you insinuating he's a subhuman is... Not the level of discourse I expect from this community. That's more bluesky or Twitter level.
surely the level you expect here is recognizing that he isn't claiming they're subhumans, but rather obviously, that he thinks the IQ-focused contingent feels that way? like... to me your comment looks from the same mold as the "actually, as someone with X, let me willfully misinterpret so that you're actually the offender" that is the hallmark of other sites and discussions (I don't know if it was ever a comment to come from the social justice-side, or if its genesis was opposing parody)
but still, like, that's just clearly not his argument dude
Seems like a deflection? If you disagree with what people have to say, explain your disagreement. Just expressing your general disdain makes you look like someone with nothing substantive to say.
> folks in the tech sector take on race science. Such clarity and equinamity.
Strong disagree, id argue autists are more likely to support genocide then the general public the germans love trains after all.
It would be quite the disaster if the numbers of some stupid model was widely believed and the "rationalist" "shut up and obey math" instincts landed on the side of mass murder.
Something rubs me the wrong way about this. The reason approximately no one supports phrenology any more, is that it had an opportunity to prove its validity, and it failed - it turned out that you _can't_ make detailed predictions about someone's personality traits from the pattern of unevenness on their skull. Whereas psychometrics _does_ have enough predictive validity to be useful. What you are doing here is kind of akin to dismissing some actually workable branch of chemistry as "astrology", as if the differences between them are unimportant.
He was a frustrating fellow because, at least in his old age, he was somewhat sloppy, but his mistakes tended to be random enough that his basic conclusions were highly accurate.
For example, when reviewing his 2011 book on the high achievements of Jews, "The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement," I discovered so many mistakes that I redid his entire analysis of Jewish Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry, and medicine-physiology. I discovered numerous mistakes, but also that his conclusion that Jews win an incredibly disproportionate share of hard science Nobels, was absolutely on the money.
Well, why is it so important? I would think it maybe affirms how Jewish populations historically value education and culture, by way of religion perhaps. Just thinking aloud.
Why when gaps between Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Mizrahim exist? Zionism is a powerful force to revive old liturgic language and destroy with numerically superior enemies, but cannot remove gaps from populations speaking same language and same religion?
Well on the genetics front, I would think these populations have been through different admixtures, while on the culture front they might have similar adherence to the continuity of the Torah, good schools etc. Again, just speculation.
My take is that it affirms eugenics, more than anything else.
If you wanted to improve the average IQ of a given population, it'd be nice if education and culture would do the trick. But no one can argue that removing the bottom half of the distribution would do wonders for the average IQ.
Low IQ Jews either died or assimilated. High IQ Jews either fled or were too valuable to forcibly convert. Over time, that adds up. It's still not an option most people would seek to emulate for their ethnic or religious group.
I never knew Richard Lynn when he wasn't in his old age, but I also found him frustrating. He gave the impression of being a rather smart guy who absolutely obsessed over one thing and had little awareness of the nuance and color of existence, which translated to the kinds of social simplemindedness people were calling "autistic" a decade or so ago.
Once upon a time - before I knew him - he'd been doing some very interesting work on national Extraversion and anxiety levels, relating them to objective sociological data like rates of liver cirrhosis, caffeine consumption, and suicide. This kind of interest in measuring culture was, to me, really impressive for its time, and suggests he was at least a little different when he was younger.
I'd never noticed any errors in his intelligence-related work like you did, but do you think he was so old by 2002 that his IQ and the Wealth of Nations was also full of errors? He was over 70 by the time it was published, and while he had Tatu Vanhanen working on it as well, I don't really know enough about Vanhanen to say what influence he had, if any.
I spent 18 months in a country where people are supposed to have an iq of about 70, according to the map. My neighbors and friends were mostly non-literate. They did not seem less intelligent than the people I know in my current (US) neighborhood or the people I grew up with (in the US). Most of them would not have performed well on IQ tests, though. They'd never attended school and had no familiarity with puzzle-solving. This was 35 years ago and most people had not seen movies or even photographs. I remember sitting with one older woman and helping her interpret a black-and-white photograph: this is the arm, here's where it connects to the body, etc. It's hard for people from literate societies with tons of exposure to text & graphical representations to see the extent of the gap.
I would think IQ is based on a familiarity with modernity, standardization, etc. School and literacy are supposed to get you there, but farmers were also wise in a way we're not, for thinking different than we do.
maybe, but I don't think smartphones imply engagement with second or third-order skills like puzzle-solving (if first-order is literacy)
this gets at another point I've wondered... to me, it seems impossible that there aren't significant portions of populations, like in the US, primed with puzzles specific to IQ tests. like, I took various smaller ones or saw mini-sets of problems when I was <10. and I can't imagine that can be stripped out of results by anything other than self-reporting, which, you know. if I have a chance to validate myself that strongly... it's hard to resist. but surely this has been covered in methodology, I'll take a glance, but curious for thoughts
Well, of course abject poverty and disease eat up IQ (on average), and I'd hope we agree that that's a tragedy, an outrage and a crime.
That said (and bearing in mind that the title makes it pretty clear that the author does not hold Lynn's estimate to be a wonderfully precise weapon of mass construction),
- Lynn's estimates *are* often amazingly shoddy, or based on very shoddy work,
- Aren't newer estimates on average IQ among African-Americans often closer to 90 than to 85? A new estimate linked to gives a figure of 85 point something, but (a) it seems people (including Sailer!) are having a very easy time poking holes in it, (b) that's suspiciously on the nose, a bit like the "1 in 4" figure (rape and dullness are not cosmological constants)
- I find the entire "people with a 60 IQ are smarter than you think" line thoroughly unconvincing - and spending some time in different supposedly-dumb countries does seem like a valid common-sense way to get some calibration.
- The Aporia article is pretty astonishingly cheap (drawing a level line to strawman your opponent? really?).
- Perhaps, if we genuinely want to be politically incorrect for the sake of truth, the test case should be to float hypothesis that make most people uncomfortable, or some people with mainstream platforms *really* uncomfortable: split the amorphous 'white' category (urban/rural, Catholic/Protestant, actual Anglo vs. Scots-Irish, etc.) or ask questions such as "Wasn't Spanish Catholicism particularly keen on eliminating local intellectual elites, in part because of their perceived role in sustaining paganism?" (and so forth).
"Wasn't Spanish Catholicism particularly keen on eliminating local intellectual elites, in part because of their perceived role in sustaining paganism?"
Consistently removing your most intellectually qualified into (at least supposed) celibacy can't be a *good* thing, at least.
Well, that too, but (a) most priests aren't that smart, (b) plenty of priests (including some of the smarter ones?) in the global periphery sired (and often supported, educated, etc.) large families with their housekeepers. Used to be pretty common in Europe in the Middle Ages (note: in France, well into the 18th century, to trust some anticlerical writers), and in parts of Latin America (away from large cities) well into the twentieth century.
... compared to some sort of idealized image of them as William of Baskerville or premodern academics? Historically, sure, priests had to be able to become literate (at times when the great majority wasn't, though not because of an innate disability), and no doubt some went into the priesthood because that a religious education was the only kind of education available. Still, it's not as if we were talking about an imperial examination. The most selective requirement in many societies was probably being born "legitimate".
I'm not sure they are _now_, but if we go back a few hundred years, it was definitely the case that a lot of smart kids from the lower and middle classes were sucked into the clergy.
That’s more of what I meant. And of course some of those smart kids *did* have children (“nephews”), and also supported their literal nephews - there was a guy like that in my family tree.
I don't think comparing whites is considered especially uncomfortable. People joke about dumb blondes/rednecks/polacks etc all the time, but nobody seems to pay much attention when their IQs are actually studied(yes, there is a "hair color and IQ" study). Perhaps because the differences are small. Nobody seems very upset that East Asians score higher than whites. Jewish IQs are a bit more controversial.
I was talking to a really bright guy from Mexico two years ago.
Mexico seems kind of weirdly lacking in extremely bright people, judging from comparing high end PISA scores in Mexico and Turkey. Overall PISA scores are pretty similar but Turkey has more top tier scorers. (Turkey has some exotic endogamous elites, such as the crypto-Jewish Donmeh, followers of the false messiah Shabbati Zevi.)
He figured it was because the Counter-Reformation kept puritans out of Mexico.
Malawians and US Blacks (which mostly orignate from West Africa) are genetically not very similar. It would be better to compare with the region US black people originate from.
>The “racist” position is that all IQ differences between groups are genetic. The “anti-racist” position is that they’re a product of environment - things like nutrition, health care, and education.
This is a weird lie to tell. It might make sense to lie to your opponents about what *your* position is, but what is the point of lying to them about what *their* position is? You've obviously read enough liberal media to know that the so-called "anti-racist position" is "there is no intelligence gap, any IQ differences can only be a result of flaws in the tests". Who exactly are you trying to fool by saying "actually, both sides have always agreed that black people are dumber than white people, the anti-racists just disagreed as to how black people *became* dumber"?
My biggest qualm with this type of study is that, generally, they insist that tests like "Raven's Progressive Matrices" are the most cross-cultural and resistant to education influences (because it doesn't involve languange). My view of Raven's is that it tests skills that are *relentlessly* trained in modern Western society, but are irrelevant to agricultural/pastoral society.
If you view IQ as "how well can you function in modern Western society", this isn't a problem. If you want to view the same number as also measuring genetic potential, it is a major problem.
As you and some other people have pointed out, the biggest problems with these cross-national comparisons come down to these cultures that are so different from the West that even something like Raven's isn't doing a good job of capturing the "genetic potential" of some illiterate farmer in an undeveloped African country. Unfortunately, I don't think there's really a way to create a test that could be administered in a scalable way. Presumably you could develop an oral interview to test IQ, but interviewing people one-by-one is a lot harder than sticking a whole bunch of people in a room to take a paper-and-pencil multiple-choice test.
But when you look at people with similar cultural upbringings and educational backgrounds (say, white and black Americans), and then you see that IQ tests are correlated with all sorts of positive outcomes, you can't just dismiss all IQ tests as biased and racist, as some of the left-wing types do.
I think that Raven is MORE broad-culture bound than for example (well translated and adapted) Wechsler for EXACTLY the reasons you mention and I've never understood why this doesn't seem absolutely obvious on the surface.
You don't need pastoral vs industrial/scholarly for this kind of phenomena really. I remember coming to the UK (well familiar with pictorial and numeric puzzles already) and encountering for the first time in my life ones using letters of the alphabet. I still can't do them at all, 25 years on.
The IQ advocates actually claim that appearance of agriculture (which is a major historical change) pushed IQs of agricultural groups compared to their hunter-gatherer neighbors.
Otoh, I do admit that other "non-language" tests Lynn counted in involved stuff like "drawing a person as detailed as you can" - and many adults could not do better than western 5 year olds (German kids do a lot of drawing in kindergarten, but then again: most suck at that age). Again: there were differences among individuals even among bushmen. And those who were said to be "smarter" tended to draw better, to.
I think Raven matrices are one of the easiest sorts of IQ test questions to study for. There's simply not that many variations on the theme. A kid who has regularly done IQ tests in the past will be familiar with most of the different question forms, whereas a kid sitting his first ever IQ test is going to waste time trying to figure out what is being asked.
>If IQ was 100% genetic, we should expect Africans to have an IQ of 85, since American and African blacks have similar genes. This isn’t exactly right - US blacks have some intermixing with whites, and only some of Africa’s staggering diversity reached the US - but it’s close enough.
No, it really, really isn't. Saying US blacks have "some" intermixing is a hell of an understatement when the *average* "African"-American is ~one-quarter white. This is like saying that there probably isn't a genetic reason why lions are smaller than tigers, because ligers raised in zoos grow bigger than tigers raised in the wild.
"But it does suggest that the genetic component is less than 100%. Practically nobody ever claimed it was 100% (Charles Murray estimates 50%), so this doesn’t refute anyone in particular."
Murray's estimate, from The Bell Curve, is about within group heritability, not the between group one. The Bell Curve declined to give an estimate of any between group heritabilities. They wrote:
"If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmen-
tal explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not
done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems
highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something
to do with racial differences. What might the mix be?We are resolutely
agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not
It would be interesting to see IQ scores grouped by actual genetic ancestry rather than by country, which is often a poor proxy for genetic ancestry, especially in Africa and the New World.
That would also allow you to more directly compare groups with similar genetic ancestry living in countries with different levels of nutrition, healthcare, education, etc.
With all due respect, I found this particular post disappointing because it seems out of touch with current data and thinking on the topic. The wiki for "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" contains some helpful citations. Sub-Saharan African test score means tell us almost nothing owing to bad test methodology plus reliance on tests developed in western societies to measure skills whose use we teach and incentivize, in some cases, to a greater extent than done in those societies. Most scholars agree at least that intelligent behavior is culturally-specific. Meanwhile, assigning IQ means to entire groups (e.g., American Blacks) without consideration of time, place, cohort, etc. is practically a non-starter owing to the complexities of defining groups as well as the granularity of the data.
I realize it's a lot more satisfying to sit back and say that such-and-such a group is (or isn't) a certain way, but data doesn't always translate well into sound bites.
If you don't like IQ tests, you can use PISA scores, which tell basically the same story. Same with inter-US results: you can look at the SAT, which is taken by a pretty wide group of students and includes a racial self-ID question.
National development tends to mean increasingly western economic systems and educational models, so you'd expect development level, IQ scores, and PISA scores to be related. Crudely, they're all indicators of how much a country is "like us". As for the SAT, I'm not biased against acknowledging racial differences in scores. I just struggle with big central tendency statements (e.g., differences in group means) given what the distributions look like and given the way the tests operationalize intelligence. I have no quarrels with your optimism in the original post if we define intelligence as the cognitive aspect of what's crucial to material success in a first-world country.
Great question. IQ tests are intended to tap into fairly culturally-independent abilities to learn, process information, etc. Cross-national comparisons in IQ could only be trusted under the assumption that the tests tap into those "pure" abilities and aren't culturally biased in some positive or negative way. There's good evidence that the tests are biased.
Since the individuals we interact with on a daily basis seem to differ in intelligence, it feels reasonable to average the IQ scores of everyone in a country and draw conclusions about national IQ. But the fact that it feels reasonable doesn't make it reasonable.
Scott mentioned the PISA tests in his original reply to me. Cross-national comparisons on those tests (especially science and math) do make sense, because they allow us to rank countries on how much their 15-year-olds know. You can't be sure how much each country's score is attributable to quality of education vs. differences in IQ, but you can at least equate higher scores with greater content-area knowledge. IQ is (mostly) not content-area knowledge.
Sorry, I meant to say this: Given the way IQ is measured, no evidence would convince me, because I would not consider any evidence to be valid.
I'm not opposed in principle to saying that one nation or large group is superior to another one, on average, in some respect. The fact that we can't speak of national superiority in IQ is a matter of statistics, not my particular views on nationality or race or anything else.
I know that I'm being a huge party pooper here, but from the mere fact that researchers quantify things, it doesn't follow that every quantification is valid or meaningful.
It feels courageous when people like Scott attempt to discuss the national IQ data impartially, at the risk of being accused of racism. It's courageous too, in a different kind of way, to admit that these data don't allow us to conclude anything.
They basically tell the same story because they correlate on the point of being standardized written tests.
It's circular logic to claim that they validate each other. They both, to a considerable degree, measure familiarity with and ability to exceed in standardized tests.
I have a decent amount of experience with the intellectually disabled, and saying "cognitive issues are only responsible for a small part of the [communication] deficit" is so wrong that it makes me question everything else in this essay. Trust me, even making allowances for poor hearing or difficulty forming words, the cognitive issues are responsible for 90% of the deficit. An IQ of 60 is really low and it's a significant handicap.
Hmm, I'm curious what you think of https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/ustat/ustat0301-01.htm . It describes the characteristics of people in the 50 - 70 range and they sound dumb but pretty communicative. For example, there are constant debates about whether to execute criminals in this range, and everyone involved has enough skills to live on their own, work a job, buy a gun, get in a fight with someone, murder them, and offer some kind of (verbal) defense of their actions.
Here's another description from that page:
>> "As one psychiatrist testified about a capital defendant with an I.Q. of between 35 to 45: "[People with mental retardation try] to go along with people that they suspect are in authority. For example, I asked [the defendant] where we were when I saw him, and he obviously didn't know, so I asked him if we were in Atlanta and he said `Yes, we are in Atlanta.' In fact, we were in Birmingham, Alabama. I could have said New York and he would have said `Sure, New York'..."
This person obviously isn't well, but even with IQ 35 - 45 they can still communicate and make themselves understood!
I thought the lesson of Williams syndrome (also, toddlers and ELIZA and LLM hallucinations) is that verbal fluency and IQ are just not by necessity all that tightly coupled.
Saying *meaningful* things with verbal fluency requires IQ, but just knowing words and stringing them into grammatical sentences does not.
A maddening part of raising a toddler is they're able to identify authority figures, parse their leading questions, and answer "yes" to them, like the retarded guy in your example. But, like the retarded guy who doesn't know he's in Birmingham, they don't actually understand any of the concepts. So you have to be really careful with a toddler to always ask open-ended questions, because otherwise you have no idea how to interpret the answer. And even with open-ended questions, they may have rote-memorized an answer ("how did you sleep?" "good!")
I appreciate you highlighting my comment. I know it's a cliche to say IQ is complex, but in my experience the minds of people with intellectual disabilities are just different from the minds of "normal" people, even unintelligent normal people, in a way that doesn't translate to IQ. For example, a close family member with a severe intellectual disability can do certain tasks very well, and care of himself reasonably well, but has zero curiosity, ability to logically deduce things, or adaptability. Whereas I've run into "normal" folks who seem to lack the ability to do even the simplest tasks and even have trouble caring for themselves (ie, they rarely bathe, their living space is alarmingly dirty, etc), but they usually have at least some degree of curiosity and ability to adapt (sometimes even surprisingly so). It's almost like the difference between someone with a degenerative bone disease and someone born without legs--both have similar mobility issues, but in completely different ways.
"The 'racist' position is that all IQ differences between groups are genetic. The 'anti-racist' position is that they’re a product of environment - things like nutrition, health care, and education."
This is such a remarkably facile framing, promoted so invariably by modern, genteel academic racists, that I'm frankly very surprised you use it. IQ is complex, the measurement of it is very complex, there are obviously both genetic and environmental factors at play in both its development and its measurement, and our understanding of it continues to evolve over time. The issue of whether "g" is a valid construct or a statistical artifact has never been settled, and the answer is very likely, a bit of both.
My strong objection to the notorious Saletan series was that the issues are sufficiently complex, and the social implications of the debate so fraught, that having this debate in the general public sphere is counterproductive.
Topics in my most personal conversations lately have centered around congruence, integrity and credibility, which are themselves deeply interrelated concepts. Integrity in my mind is the degree to which someone is able to maintain fidelity to core imperatives, and their relative weighting, simultaneously; a dynamic and never perfectly-achievable pursuit. I could argue "g" is a major factor in this, to the degree to which I'm able to activate relevant concepts and their associations, dampen irrelevant concepts and their associations, and process all those comparisons simultaneously (with or without metacognition strategies to improve efficiency) in working memory.
What impact does predilection for self-deception, or habitual employment of heuristic biases, impact all of that? How much of that is related to the social environment? The prefrontal capacities of my parents? The number of concussions I incurred playing football, soccer, or getting beat up?
How are all those factors going to vary from culture to culture? Within each culture? Am I controlling for nutrition? There relative advantages/disadvantages within that environment for exercising or displaying integrity?
If I'm a scientist studying the topic, is my application of scientific methods (formulation, consideration of plausible competing hypotheses, research methodology, analysis, generalization of results) congruent with my demonstration of the same in other areas of interest? My overall capacity should impact my credibility. How about my congruence?
If you're going to write about this, please don't adopt the simplistic framing of people promoting an obviously biased agenda. You demonstrate some notable capacity and sophistication in your application of your analysis of complex problem. This is a complex problem. The framing of IQ as exclusively environment or genetic is peurile, and inherently biased.
That intelligent people continue to do so is a demonstration of how integrity and congruity are to some degree independent of "g".
"A normal person with 60 IQ will seem . . . normal. If you try to engage in difficult conversation, they won’t be able to follow, but most of them can do simple low-IQ jobs like manual labor, basic retail, or writing for the New York Times."
There is hope for me yet, so! Even if Lynn is correct, I still may find a niche in the NYT! 😀
I am curious about a "normal" person with 60 IQ. I realize that I don't actually have an intuitive mental model for how this person would look and speak and behave; all the examples of low-IQ adults I've met were intellectually disabled. Does anyone have any example that makes it look normal? Some video of a 60-IQ person talking and doing tasks, or texts written by a 60-IQ person, or an example of a public figure who is such?
I had a psychotherapy patient whom I thought of as having average intelligence, and I was quite startled when I discovered he did not. He was a young guy who had a bad anxiety problem, and was kind of adrift in life. He good social skills, and was pleasant and entertaining to talk with. When he talked about his read of various people in his life, he seemed OK at recognizing when people were , for ex., saying something they would not really carry through on, or making unfair demands on a friend. He worked delivering for Uber Eats. He had figured out ways to make more per hour by mostly working at times & places where Uber was giving bonuses. Knew enough about tech to set up an account where he publicly commented online about live sports events. His commentary was in fact fairly entertaining (though not enough to get him followers). So all that seemed consistent with at least average intelligence.
So one day he decided to apply for a job as a clerk in a store. It was a well-known company with stores all over the country. Their application included a sort of mini IQ test, one where all the items were quite easy. It was stuff like, If you gas tank holds 10 gallons, and you get 30 mpg, how far can you get on half a tank of gas? Which of the following is the correct definition of "sarcasm"? Which of the following would be an example of indecision? And he could hardly answer *any* of them. I thought maybe he was anxious and having trouble focusing, so I tried just kind of talking him through some of them. It didn't help at all. He wasn't anxious or unfocused, he just did not know the answers to some of them, and could not warp his head around others. For instance, I am confident he knew what indecision is. But being asked to do a multiple choice item where he selected examples of things, and choosing the one that was a good example of indecision, somehow threw him.
I don't know what his IQ score would have been on a test, but def. quite a bit below 100.
We know from the recent Reich lab paper on long-run genetic selection that there was strong selection for IQ in the neolithic revolution, which implies agriculture strongly selects for IQ and ability to plan.
Malawians are 60-80% subsistence farmers.
Even a "normal" low-IQ person cannot do the implied math and long-term planning involved in this kind of farming. And in fact, economists routinely find that African small-plot subsistence agriculture is actually highly optimized; farmers make very precise choices about where to plant which seeds, which fertilizer to use, etc. Key point is basically: it really isn't true that an IQ 60 person can run a farm functionally.
Moreover, mean IQ of 60 implies large shares even lower, at ranges that are uniformly nonverbal even without specific disability. And this is why in the actual record-level NIQ database, they truncate estimates below 60, because even the database managers realize these estimates are crazy.
According to the Reich paper, pre-farming European genetic IQ was ~60 (I don't know how this correlates with Neolithic European IQ after you add in poverty/health/etc, but plausibly the latter was lower). But there are plenty of signs that pre-farming Europeans had an interesting culture, including the cave paintings, trade networks, early stone circles, and the fact that they eventually invented farming.
Likewise, modern hunter-gatherer peoples who haven't undergone that selection can do amazing things with hunting, tool-making, and complicated cultural systems; I don't know enough about Malawian farming to know if it's exactly as amazing, but probably pretty close.
So I think I stick to the claim in this post - that our estimates for what a very low IQ means are poorly-grounded, and that people with low IQs can do some pretty impressive things, especially if they're concrete and part of a cultural transmission package. Maybe this is the Joseph Henrich "Secret Of Our Success" thing. We know that Malawians get poor test scores in school, so it seems like there's some disconnect between do-well-on-tests intelligence and run-a-subsistence-farm intelligence, and the abstract/concrete and novel/cultural distinctions are the best explanation that I can think of.
You say that "the phenotype that arises from a given tested IQ in America is clearly vastly worse than the phenotype arising from the same tested IQ in Africa", which I basically agree with. I think part of it is the syndromes issue raised above, and part of it is that maybe Malawians have zero contact with the culture of abstraction that IQ tests come out of whereas even very uneducated Westerners have some contact with it, and maybe another part of it is that whatever health/nutrition issues the Malawians have preferentially harm faculties responsible for more abstract tasks rather than more concrete ones.
For an opposite data point, when I was in Haiti, my boss told me (secondhand, no personal experience) of extreme difficulties working with Haitians, like that they couldn't alphabetize files even when that was explained to them. Many Haitains are also successfuly subsistence farmers, so I think this also supports some kind of heavy abstract/concrete distinction.
I don't think we're really disagreeing, just agreeing on something like the correlations that make up IQ being less valid outside the normal range. Or if that's not what you mean, can you explain your position better?
Also, what is your source for people with IQ 50 usually being nonverbal?
Are you essentially suggesting that IQ (even measured by culturally appropriate tools) can be a poor measure of general intelligence, if we definite the latter as the ability to cognitively adapt, learn, react, and problem solve? So in "our" (abstraction heavy) culture it can be (when culturally/linguistically adapted) a very good proxy for "manifest intelligence" but might be much worse a proxy in different contexts?
Huh? No, pre-farming IQ was not 60. It was like... 90. They show I think like 2 SD deviation in PGS for IQ, and that predicts like 2-10 points difference in IQ.
Also keep in mind: if you believe that Malawian IQ is low due to genetics AND environment, you have to ask "What environment?" The answer is obviously pathogenic load, stunting, nutritional stress, maybe violence-- but this stuff doesn't create low familial IQ as Emil suggests! Cerebral malaria doesn't subtly drop your IQ; it leaves you functionally altered and disabled.
If you think low measured African IQ is ~50%-ish environment, then you're arguing Africans should have high rates of actual cognitive disability. Only a ~100% heredity argument yields a situation where African IQ is "low but not nonfunctional." If IQ is low due to widespread neurological damage from environment, then you're talking about widespread cognitive disability.
As a note: the most recent datapoint in the NIQ database for Haiti is an IQ measurement of 100!! I show that in the post! I'm not sure what to make of that either way.
My point, broadly, is derived from the argument over dysgenics. Emil thinks that high fertility in low IQ countries threatens to leave humanity less functionally able to operate as it currently does. I think this is wrong for many reasons, not least of which is Kenyans seem to have no particular trouble having shopping malls and cell phones and movie production studios, and changes in IQ have no correlation with changes in GDP, etc. The reality is that we know IQ isn't fully heritable, we know Africans are not experiencing the massive loads of functional disability they should be if widespread brain damage were causing those low IQs, and we know the national IQ data is weird samples with nonstandard measurements and tons of volatility. The simplest explanation is just that the national IQ data is super unreliable.
Shows that about 10,000 years ago Europeans had 2 SDs lower PGS for IQ, 1 SD lower for EA or income, and 1.5 lower SD for walking pace. These PGS scores are all mappable to genetically implied IQs from the underlying papers which first calculated them. They imply Europeans pre-Neolithic had "genetic hardware" about 2-10 IQ points lower than ours.
Negative environmental effects could certainly have pushed the value lower. But I'm skeptical that humans figured out farming at an IQ measuring at 60 when their genetic potential at that time was 90-100, since that would imply 30-40 IQ points lost due to environmental effects, especially childhood diseases doing brain damage. Hard to imagine figuring out the stuff they did at those IQ levels!
Doesn't basically every study show a 30 point pre to post industrialized flynn effect for IQ gains? Do you think there was a large post agricultural drop or that the flynn effect isn't real?
Thank you, I think I misunderstood the Reich paper as meaning 2-3 SD in IQ rather than 2-3 SD in PGS; that makes it much more comprehensible.
I'm not sure why you think that environmental effects on IQ need to involve dramatic disability. One of the most important environmental effects is education. Ritchie estimates something like +1 IQ point for each extra year of schooling; if the average Malawian has five to ten years less schooling than the average American, that explains 5-10 points of the gap right there. The health component I expect to look more like mild parasite stress than cerebral malaria.
Again, I agree with you that there's something weird going on with the data. It doesn't seem to be that the data is trivially flawed, because it seems to correlate with PISA scores etc in the expected way. I think it's a combination of:
1. We're not very well calibrated about what low IQ looks like.
2. The concept of IQ eventually breaks down at the tails into more of an "understand abstractions" component and a "have a normal daily life" component, IQ tests only measure the former, and populations with extremely low education do disproportionately better at the latter (you also need something like this to understand the Flynn Effect in the West, which implies that populations hundreds of years ago had IQs in the 70s).
In other words, insofar as you're forced to give a number, Lynn's is accurate, but the numbers no longer mean everything you expect.
I'll start by saying I think we are sort of agreeing but in a way that sounds like disagreement. You are saying "the number doesn't mean what we expect" and "something weird is going on." But you think this means we are poorly calibrated in understanding what a 60-70 IQ means. But I don't see a reason to trust stats that are obviously unreliable over all the contrary evidence. We seem to agree that IQ clearly isn't generating a stable and predictable phenotype-- you want to salvage international IQ comparison, but I think that's unwise. Correlating with PISA is a low bar-- every developmental indicator correlates with PISA scores. Rather, it should be really compelling to us that countries with 20 point IQ gains in Lynn's data, over time, have no meaningful gain in GDP per capita. If IQ is driving economic complexity, that shouldn't be the case! Likewise, many countries with rapid GDP per capita growth have stable or falling IQ measures! And since Lynn's data estimates many countries simply by taking the averages of spatial neighbors (since no data exists for many countries), the data literally has baked in autocorrelations. Spatial neighbors tend to have similar GDP, and Lynn assumes they will have similar IQ. I could go on, but the putative correlations are in many cases fabricated by imputation.
On schooling, this is complicated-- Ritchie actually estimates at least +1 IQ for each extra year; the actual range is 1-5 extra IQ points per year. Which is pretty crazy! The idea that going to school for one more year raises IQ by 1/3 of an SD is clearly nuts.
I think a better read of this is that Ritchie finds that increased schooling years has a large effect on test performance, which may not entirely be a change in cognitive ability outside the schooling context. The idea that a country can add to the actual cognitive ability of its people via having its own people, of the same cognitive abilities on average, set up schools, is a bit mind-bending. Cremieux has a nice piece pointing out reasons to be skeptical of Ritchie's findings about education causing higher IQ. https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/why-do-we-keep-getting-this-wrong
Plus, typical school quality in poor countries is quite low.
So I don't think it can seriously be argued that the most important environmental effect here is schooling. It's definitely going to be something biophysical. Brain size strongly correlates with IQ, stunting alters body size and brain size absolutely and relatively, maybe that's it. Maybe it's parasites, maybe it's childhood febrile episodes, who knows. But I think we should be skeptical of the idea it's just schooling. I mean, consider Nigeria. Lynn's database clocks in Nigeria at 79 in 1974, and 77 in 2012, a 2 point decline. But if you look at Nigerians who are around 18 in 2010 or so, they averaged 9-10 years of schooling, whereas Nigerians who were 18 or so in the early 1970s averaged 5-6. That's 3-5 more years of schooling and zero IQ gain. Nigeria is one of the only countries Lynn's dataset has multiple spaced years of data for, hence why I picked it.
At the meta level, my arguments on this are informed by working on a similar project related to fertility preferences. Even where I have literally 4x as many psychometric estimates around the world for a much, much simpler indicator and in much, much more representative samples and larger survey sizes, it's very very hard to squeeze this stuff all together. I mean to be honest, the NIQ database should really be using LCA, not averages; they should be assuming that all of these score estimates are noisy measures of an underlying trait, not components of a trait, but that would make the estimates less credible. I think that we should not regard the NIQ data as very credible. Changes in them don't predict changes in social phenotypes or predicted changes due to selection, the data is extremely noisy, the measures are scattershot across tons of different kinds of IQ proxies, and as this discussion reveals, "IQ of 68" is barely a semantically meaningful concept: it includes people who in daily life you'd barely notice are different, and also includes people who need to be institutionalized for cognitive disability! It's like saying Nigeria has a GPA of 2.8-- that's just a really weird way to talk about populations in general!
I don't understand why you don't think it's schooling. Yes, I agree that schooling gains are shallow and won't necessarily affect things too distant from test performance. But IQ is measured in test performance. So it seems pretty plausible to me that a big chunk of the Malawi/US IQ difference is that Americans have had enough schooling to get good test performance (including on IQ tests) and Malawians haven't. This would also explain your claim that Malawians are better at farming than their IQ would predict - it's because IQ is a measure of school quality and farming isn't.
(the reason I'm not just glossing this as "the tests are biased and don't really measure IQ" is that I think "test performance" is being a little too glib - I think this would apply to any sort of academic/intellectual pursuit similar to the ones taught at school, and that's kind of what IQ means. That's why I'm saying "abstract/intellectual/symbolic reasoning" instead of "test performance" exactly.)
In terms of your change-over-time numbers, I find them really interesting and will have to look at them more. My preliminary thought without having considered them that long is that IQ-when-you-first-start-measuring is linked to something real, and IQ-after-changes is closer to the test-taking/symbolic-reasoning axis which has a less profound effect on GDP (though I don't really understand why that would be - in order to start the next Microsoft, a country needs people with specifically academic skills; maybe all of these countries are too poor to be in that race, and their GDPs mostly differ on things like how good they are at subsistence farming?)
Re: Nigerian changes - good point. I think it's possible that Nigerian schools aren't good enough that 3-4 years of extra schooling has much effect. But I could also see "education" being less about the existence of schools per se, and more about a literate and technological culture where people are forced to engage with symbolic reasoning all the time. I realize this is getting kind of tenuous and god-of-the-gaps-y, but otherwise I don't have a good explanation of the Flynn Effect (and the Malawi effect, which seems related) that explains why it *feels* fake (in the sense that past people, and Malawians, both seem smarter than their extremely low IQs would suggest). Any IQ gains from having less cerebral malaria should be 100% real, whereas IQ gains from schooling could affect different skills differently.
I don't think it's that helpful to attack the Malawi numbers in particular without also attacking the Flynn Effect, because they seem like two different facets of the same problem. And since the Flynn Effect is on pretty strong ground, I think it makes more sense to face the problem head on than to try to come up with ways it might not exist.
I think we're sort of angling into a convergence here.
I'm comfortable agreeing that "doing better on a test" probably is not ONLY doing better on a test: probably those gains generalize to some other test-like circumstances. I bet the frequency of errors in any kind of paperwork declines when people have more experience completing tests! When I run surveys on survey platforms with compensated survey-takers, I never hear from anybody saying things like "I got stuck on question 5, it wouldn't advance" or "Question 23 just doesn't work." But when I run surveys of my religious denomination which has many old people, I'm inundated by that. I don't think the olds are dumb. I think most tasks improve with practice, and school practices you in a bunch of paperworky type tasks, and that's a real skill. But it's not g. And that's Cremieux's point in the article I link. Schooling seems to improve some of the less-g-loaded abilities.
On the Flynn effect, FWIW, when I specify a panel model with country fixed effects and decadal coefficients, the IQ coefficients are estimated as 0 in the 1960s, -1.5 points in the 1970s, -4 in the 1980s, 0.1 in the 1990s, 1.9 in the 2000s, and 4.4 in the 2010s. But standard errors are 3-5, so none of it is significant. IOW: the Lynn database does not evince a Flynn effect. To be honest, I've gotta say, the Lynn database is weirdly small. I assumed it had a ton of datapoints in it, but it really doesn't. I wish the post-Lynn hereditarian crowd would massively expand it with stuff interpolated from like PISA and things like that.
But I think this is another reason to be skeptical of the Lynn data! The Flynn effect is really strongly demonstrated in the most high quality sources, yet doesn't seem to have meaningful support in Lynn's data! That should be a ding against trusting this data!
Ultimately, I think we have a pretty long laundry list of reasons to think that the Lynn data is not revealing very many useful facts about societies. We should not be saying "Actually it's pretty good, it basically describes reality!" Instead we should be saying, "Okay, that was a good effort for a first try, but seriously guys, you can do better than this, this has huge flaws, please go back and try again and get way more and way better data."
At this point doesn't IQ just stop being a useful metric altogether? If 60 IQ can mean anything from "able to engage in multi year planning and risk analysis for survival" and "incapable of daily tasks".
I think you're assuming these decisions need to be decided individually, when they're often discussed with neighboring farmers. Often they take advice from smarter, wealthier and more successful farmers. You can be an unintelligent farmer who's successful by taking advice from smarter people.
Yields in Malawi are substantially lower than in more developed countries, so it might be possible that these decisions are not actually highly optimized and are worse decisions than those taken by farmers in other countries.
Speaking of the Flynn effect... You had a post about how the Flynn effect is receding in developed countries – independent of any dysgenics effects. Is there more information on what the mechanism behind Flynn is/was, besides sufficient calories which shouldn't be a problem in developed countries? Especially for new parents this seems like an interesting question.
Interestingly, there are studies showing that the IQ differences between groups of black and white students in the U.K. is smaller than the differences in the US, despite most black British and black Americans being of West African descent on average. This means it’s a more valid example of a similar genetic group being affected by environmental factors differently in different countries. That data has generally been interpreted as the U.K. education system being more similar from one school to the next, compared to bigger differences in schools in the US - I.e. inner city schools in deprived areas who primarily have black pupils attending them. Again, this shows a larger effect of environmental factors
This is possible, but I would also look into selection effects for immigrants to different countries. Blacks who immigrated to the US post-slavery tend to do better than those who were taken as slaves because immigration selects for high IQ both directly (lots of Nigerians come to America as doctors and nurses) and indirectly (easier to get through immigration process). If the UK blacks are more like recent US immigrant blacks then that might explain the difference.
U.K. black people are mostly of Afro-Caribbean origin and mostly from Jamaica, so mostly West African genetically and the same history of slavery that US black peoples ancestors suffered. I’m not aware of comparisons between more recent black immigrants to the U.K. and people who are second or third generation Jamaican-British black people living here. Lots of people immigrated to the U.K. from Jamaica in the 1950s to fill a post war labour shortage.
This recent paper still shows the discrepancy in the U.K. but the effect size is much smaller (Black ~96-97 vs White 100). It’s not clear how much this could be a Flynn effect disproportionately benefitting younger black British children who started from a lower baseline. Their parents are also less poor than their grandparents or great grandparents who were mostly Jamaican immigrants in the 1950s. We do have more recent Somali and Nigerian people immigrating recently though
In the U.K. the worst performers at school are white working class males who get a food allowance (very rare these days). Black females are way ahead in testing.
"You do realise that person's skin/hair/eye color does not allow for any inferences about person's psychology, physiology or social behavior? "
This is so obviously false that I have a hard time believing that you believe this. You think someone with white skin is just as likely to speak an Asian language as someone with white skin ("social behavior")? That black people are just as likely to get sunburnt as white people ("physiology")?
Cringe...did you even read what I wrote? If you did, you clearly did not understand a thing about what I wrote, which btw speaks volumes about your own IQ.
Now ask yourself: a) how can skin color (physiology) be differentiated in an objective and statistically meaningful way? b) How can social construct like language be correlated with physiological traits (like skin color) in an objective and statistically meaningful way? c) How do you differentiate people with "Asian" skin color from people with "white" skin color in an objective and statistically meaningful way? d) How do you differentiate "white" or "black" people from one another in an objective and statistically meaningful way?
Take all the time you need, I'll wait...
Ok I'll just save you from further embarrassment and give you a hint: YOU CAN'T. While certain aspects of skin pigmentation can be measured, using these measurements to categorize people into racial groups or correlate them with cultural traits is neither scientifically valid nor ethically sound.
Your argument proves too much lol. How can colors themselves be differentiated in an objective and statistically meaningful way? They fall along a continuous variable. So I guess there's no such thing as red or blue or green!
Now apply this to every scientific concept and you'll see quickly that nothing exists at all except various quantum field interactions, which according to you cannot be differentiated in an objective and statistically meaningful way.
We can work out ancestry well enough I suppose, ie from Europe, Africa or Asia.
That said info find the American use of racial characteristics in census forms to be suspect, and indeed all the DEI stuff, based as it is on dubious categories. Unfortunately that stuff is being exported across the world. France is resisting. We should all be like France.
"I believe we can all, at least those of us who are serious data scientists, agree that self-reported identification is not objective data and thus statistically meaningless."
This is not even remotely true. Self-identity and cultural background are critical elements of an individual's personality. Speaking as a psychologist, self-report data is both reliable and valid for a wide variety of applications, from mental health diagnosis to sensory perception to voting and purchasing behavior. The vast majority of professional social scientists accept this--it isn't considered controversial in any way.
I say all this as someone who understands and accepts that race has no inherent biological meaning. Its an arbitrary social and cultural category, but one of the more powerful ones at that.
2. You did notice that - in the US, at least -results for many social outcomes (school, prison, income, ... oh and IQ results) do indeed differ significantly between those persons that put their "x" on "black/Afro-American" and those persons that put their "x" on "white/Caucasian" (also x on "Latino" vs. x on "East-Asian")? Do you expect the result between group "persons taking an IQ test and an observer marks them as white/black/Asian/hispanic/dunno by just looking" and group "persons taking an IQ test and marking those respective boxes on their own" would also differ that much?
3. You are aware that the word "black" is used nowadays less for "being of extremely dark complexion"? Kamal H. - or even Obama?
Like every nature/nurture debate, it’s obvious that the answer is both have a clear impact. To dispel this data is not pointing at a politically fraught conclusion is naive, to say it’s actually a case for the safer political opinion is fanciful. Normalizing across health and income still results in racial deltas in IQ (like height), the real debate should be around whether we should place the primary value of person as much in their IQ as we collectively do.
Intriguing that Botswana's IQ is higher than other parts of Sub Saharan Africa.
The people in Botswana have substantial Hottentot admixture which means that their genetic potential for IQ is probably one of the lowest on Earth. That means that their higher IQ relative to surrounding countries is a product of a good environment.
You’re totally wrong. Botswana is a fake democracy, and that’s part of the secret of their success.
The first president of Botswana was their hereditary king. He appointed a successor, who appointed another successor, who appointed another successor, etc.
So far, not a single president has taken power in an election. As an opponent of democracy, I think it’s a great system.
But I do believe all those elections were relatively fair?
Bernards Shaw actually wrote a short play about this problem, where the king of Britain threatens to abdicate and run for office. All his ministers immediately understands that he would probably win a fair election. The same would is probably trye for many constitutional democracies.
The royal house of Botswana just had to actually do this, due to some political game I never quite understood.
Also, I understand, Botswana is actually the only real nation-state in Sub Saharan Africa, with 95 percent Tswanas. Interesting if this could be the reason for their better system
Another explanation is of course money from diamonds. But we are about to see which it was soon, when lab grown diamonds will drive the prices down.
I think Thomas Sowell should comment on the efficacy of pouring more money into "charitable" work in Africa. How much of it gets to the people who need it?
Moderation warning for irrelevant politically-charged comment. Not everything has to be turned into being about transgender, aren't national IQ differences edgy enough for you?
These debates invariably focus on Africans and American blacks. I'm curious about the broad swath of supposedly ~85 IQ people stretching from the Middle East to South Asia.
Let's do some math, assuming Gaussians with s.d.=15 for everyone. The total number of people with the equivalent of 145 IQ (+3 sigma) under white norms would be ~50k in India (mean 85) and ~5 million in China (mean 105), despite both having 1.4 billion people. So 145 IQ Chinese outnumber 145 IQ Indians by a factor of 100 (!).
IQ 145 corresponds to a pretty good researcher in a mathematical field. Looking at the demographics of faculty/PhD students at top universities/research labs, it doesn't seem like the Chinese/Indian ratio is 100:1. I'm not sure if it's even 2:1. I don't think even the Middle Easterners are that rare relative to Chinese.
Sure, there could be differences in propensity to immigrate, preferences in field of study, etc. etc., but we still don't see anything approaching the wild ratios suggested by national IQ differences. This makes me suspicious of the estimates in general.
Faculty quality at universities varies a tremendous amount. Likewise, the amount of PhD graduate student positions and faculty positions varies as well. Further the desire of different people and groups to hold certain jobs varies. We therefor shouldn’t expect the representation of an ethnic or racial group in faculty positions to match their rates of IQ, outside perhaps certain threshold effects.
My choice of technical faculty/researchers was just an illustrative example. Sub in any category of high-performers in high-complexity fields.
The point is that the implied distributions have a right tail too and we should be seeing consequences. But even if you allow an absurdly generous 10x multiple for random confounders favoring the 85 IQ groups’ overrepresentation, you still have another 10x disparity to explain.
These are crazy numbers that can’t be handwaved away. And if additive genetic models and their Gaussians don’t work for these subpopulations, why should anyone believe the rest of Lynn’s data and methodology?
Your error still stands. Let me approach this from a different angle. Imagine the world of 1700. How many high performers in high complexity fields were there? Probably fewer per capita for the entire world than there is in the USA alone today. Why? Because there were not a lot of high complexity field positions to be in, at least by our standards. How many Chinese universities and research labels are there per capita? Why so few? China is still a very poor country per capita by US standards. They have fewer high complexity field positions per capita than we have, no matter the field. Who knows how many high IQ Chinese are running factories or programming or some government job?
Are you only talking about people in the west? I've heard that the smartest Indians like to go west, while in China top students prefer their own top schools. Chinese institutions dominate the Nature Index for example.
As for international comparisons ones I thought to compare:
I actually counted 10 ethnic Chinese versus 5 ethnic Indians for (non-fake) Nobels, but otherwise this is solid data. These indices started taking off in China in the last 15 years, so they could just as well be an argument for capitalism as latent +20 IQ. Since 15 years is the approximate time lag of Indian free market reforms, we’d expect Indian indices to go up substantially in the next two decades unless the country has an IQ problem.
This will be a pretty good test of the Lynn hypothesis, which basically posits IQ->GDP instead of the reverse.
We do not see many Middle Easterners at the Nobel Prices, do we? - Or at chess-championships. - That said, Chinese numbers may be inflated by most tests done in the big cities, no among rural population. Also, extra-smart Chinese in Communist China might be kinda held back by the system, when it comes to extraordinary achievements. Or by "confucian culture". Taiwan is where they build the very best computer chips. Not India. Not Iran. Not Communist China. - See also: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/
India is very weird IQ-wise because of extreme diversity, extreme inequality, and inbreeding from the caste system. Since we're looking at the tails, variance matters more than average, and since India has many different populations, that pushes variance up. If we replace it with Iraq or Thailand or something, I think we would get more of the expected results.
I also think IQ 145 is high for a good math researcher. Average professor is 120, Feynman was supposedly 126, average Nobelist is somewhere between 145 - 150.
Physicist Steve Hsu on Feynman's alleged 125 IQ score:
"Feynman was universally regarded as one of the fastest thinking and most creative theorists in his generation. Yet it has been reported-including by Feynman himself-that he only obtained a score of 125 on a school IQ test. I suspect that this test emphasized verbal, as opposed to mathematical, ability. Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test. He also reportedly had the highest scores on record on the math/physics graduate admission exams at Princeton. It seems quite possible to me that Feynman's cognitive abilities might have been a bit lopsided-his vocabulary and verbal ability were well above average, but perhaps not as great as his mathematical abilities. I recall looking at excerpts from a notebook Feynman kept while an undergraduate. While the notes covered very advanced topics for an undergraduate-including general relativity and the Dirac equation-it also contained a number of misspellings and grammatical errors. I doubt Feynman cared very much about such things."
One of my friends married into a family like this. The person who came up with the phrase "there are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make" had obviously never met Nigerians.
This kinda reminds me of Polgár sisters, three female chess grandmasters in one family. Their parents weren't chess grandmasters though.
I wonder what is the contribution of genetics and upbringing, and how difficult it is for genius parents to spend enough time making their children geniuses. I mean, it is easier to give enough time and attention to your children if the mother stays at home -- but then you don't have a family where *every* member is a recognized genius.
"I trust that readers of this excellent Substack understand IQ measures as the average of a distribution, not an absolute measure for an entire group. Unfortunately, many with limited statistical knowledge misinterpret these figures, assuming they apply universally. While the average IQ of Black individuals is lower than that of White individuals, there are countless Black individuals with IQs above the average for Whites. This underscores an essential point: when meeting someone, you cannot infer their intelligence without knowing their position on the distribution. This clarification is vital when discussing group IQ differences to a broad audience"
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
And by their SAT when it comes to college admission.
Didn't Lynn once use a school for the handicapped to estimate Equatorial Guinea's IQ?
> Lynn and Vanhanen (2002) cite a study by Fernandez-Ballesteros, de Juan-Espinosa, Colom and Calerò (1997) as demonstrating that the 'national IQ' of Equatorial Guinea is 59. Lynn and Vanhanen write (p. 203): 'Around 1984, data for 48 10-to 14-year-olds were collected on the WISC-R... Their IQ was 63. Because of the 12-year interval between the two data collections, this needs to be reduced to 59.'...
> In fact, Fernandez-Ballesteros et al. (1997), attempting to see whether a cognitive training programme could increase SPM scores (it did), described two experiments. IQs in each were assessed by the WISC. They describe (p. 253) a 'second experiment with forty-eight subjects, 10- to 14-year olds, attending a school for handicapped children (63.025 IQ Mean)'. Half of the 48 subjects had been clinically diagnosed as 'organically impaired'; the other half were described as 'culturally deprived'. Lynn and Vanhanen took the mean IQ at a school for the handicapped and brain damaged as a measure of an African country's national IQ!
Yes, his data is mind-blowingly flawed. If a black person tried to publish data on white people based on developmentally-disabled people, people would mock him incessantly, yet this guy gets published and quoted for decades.
Even the variables of whether you’ve recently eaten or you’re thirsty affect cognitive performance on written tests. No doubt the fact that your dad just reamed you for not taking out the trash, or you were up late working, or your parents were fighting, or there’s a bully waiting for you at lunch, or there’s a pretty girl sitting near you, or a war raging nearby will impact your score.
It seems fairly intuitive that there are many other factors to consider besides genetics when explaining discrepancies in all academic test scores, including IQ.
Can someone briefly lay out a non racist reason why anyone should be especially interested in this?
When I see these kinds of posts, and look at the comments where I find esoteric discussions about genetic admixtures, migration patterns of historical populations, and intelligence testing methodologies, I know I’m missing some implicit consensus about why this is considered a valid area of study, as opposed to a hobby horse of people looking for the holy grail of rationalizing racial prejudice.
Are all your intellectual interests instrumental, then? I agree that fueling racism might make the area of study not worth pursuing, but I will admit that I am personally curious.
One possible instrumental defense is that to the extent that IQ is a good measure of something worth pursuing, and is partially or wholly determined by environmental factors, then the first step towards eliminating inequalities is to describe them.
Scientific reason: learning more about the world and about humanity is Good.
Practical reason: sectioning off some relatively small portion of knowledge as HERE BE DRAGONS, DO NOT LOOK BEHIND THIS DOOR is just *begging* for someone- probably the worst person you can imagine- to throw the door open. It should be approached sensitively and cautiously. Denial is not stable, healthy, or liberal.
Somewhat cynical addendum to the practical reason: other social dynamics, like one population group being the only one not allowed to have affinity groups, increase the bitterness and vehemence with which they will approach the dragon door. Having sane, healthy people approach the problem cautiously helps defang the edgelord temptation and the backlash.
Is this Lynn guy one of the “sane healthy” people approaching it cautiously?
One would think the best way to destigmatize something is to dissociate it with the things/people it’s association with created the stigma in the first place.
Ergo, a good faith researcher of group intelligence should want to stay as far away from racists as possible, and repudiate them at every turn.
A good faith researcher may find similar results. Is she in your book then a racist, too? The Aporia article puts it this way: "The latest example is Sarah Gust and colleagues’ measure of “student achievement”, introduced at the end of 2022. These economists combined data from various student assessment studies (such as PISA and TIMSS) to calculate average test scores for 159 countries. The figure for Sub-Saharan Africa was 303. The figure for the UK, which is often used as a benchmark, was 503. Since the standard deviation is 100, this means that Sub-Saharan Africa scored two standard deviations below the UK. Two standard deviations is 30 IQ points. So if the UK’s average IQ is 100, Sub-Saharan Africa’s is 70.
Incidentally, the UK was by no means the highest-scoring country. That accolade goes to Singapore, which achieved an average of 560. At the other end of the scoreboard, we have Niger with an average of just 207. That’s three and a half standard deviations (or 53 IQ points) lower. Clearly, very large differences in test scores between countries are possible even when none of the data come from Richard Lynn. So far as I’m aware, no one has accused Sarah Gust and her colleagues of having a racist agenda." -end of quote
Now, Aporia may be a "racist" publication. But "are they lying"?
If we stipulate that there's some generic Truth value to studying this topic (no more or less valid than the sex lives of salamanders), then what remains are the reasons and motives for why we might want to study it and the implications of what we find—the political stuff.
My comments on identifying good-faith truth-seeking vs. Trojan horse racism concern the second part. A good-faith actor would take great pains to ensure that their work was not tainted by association with known racists and would do their best to destigmatize the research itself, a social endeavor that requires explicit dissociation and repudiation of racist ideology!
The generic Truth value to studying IQ (and spreading the truth about heritable differences) is to avoid misleading the naive and optimistic while the intelligent and opportunistic select for the very traits they are saying don't matter.
For example, it is technically unacceptable to use IQ tests in hiring, if its not relevant to the work. Yet most tech companies will include in their interviews complex problems, puzzles, or situations relating to the job that basically function as an IQ test, essentially having the same result as an actual IQ test, with similarly resulting disparate impacts. There are also "cognitive" tests that supposedly test for your ability to do work, but for all purposes, are an IQ test.
Likewise, wealthy or intelligent people are currently able to perform embryo selection for healthy and intelligent babies (+6 IQ and no birth defects!), even while publicly saying that IQ doesn't matter and everyone is equal. It took thousands of years of selection pressure to raise the Chinese average national IQ to 105, but the selection pressure our elites are about to perform on themselves will be many times stronger, and improving as the technology progresses.
Ultimately there is truth to the nature of human intelligence and competence, and it can't be ignored. I haven't mentioned race until now but if it needs to be spelled out: censoring or avoiding IQ research out of worry that it will increase racism against black folks, is pulling the wool over the eyes of the very same black folks who need this information the most.
The best way for EVERYONE to have a shot at the genetic lottery, is for everyone to be aware that IQ heritability is real. And that if you want your descendants to succeed, you will need to join the race.
Lynn was a racist - clearly observable via his work, his history, and his own admission. Equally important - his work is simply invalid because his data was effectively made up to support an ideological conclusion. If valid research comes to the same conclusion then present that research on its own. If you use that research to defend Lynn its hard to argue a motive beyond your own racism. No amount of further observation can make fabricated data correct.
The post is not about denying Lynn or anybody was a racist. Neither is my comment. Might have been. Now, he is dead. - The post and my comment care about whether the numbers are mostly in the right ballpark - and if so: how come and maybe what to do. See also the new follow-up post: "Highlights about the comments."
Not to defend Lynn, but the data: He took results of cognitive tests done by other scientists. No making up. He re-calculated the numbers to translate them into IQ numbers. The formulas are in his works. No one here claimed yet to have found a miscalculation. Lynn did not regard all studies to be representative and discarded some. He gives reason in his work. Some he considered too low to be believable, some too high (usu. those done in kinda elite-schools). Problematic: sure. Not sure, who is "making stuff up" here? Again: Newer and better studies come to results very similar to Lynn. So who is in denial?
You asked for a non-racist explanation; I gave some. I didn't say that was the case with Lynn. I know little about Lynn or who he associates with.
>Ergo, a good faith researcher of group intelligence should want to stay as far away from racists as possible, and repudiate them at every turn.
I think that as a researcher, it is quite difficult to control what other people do with your work. The level of throat-clearing necessary for this would be extreme, though perhaps necessary.
If only all researchers repudiated racist idiots using their work! Alas, such demands tend to be isolated, just like questions of who is or isn't acting in good faith.
Nope. Good faith researchers of group intelligence should want to get their research and data right. They should absolutely not repudiate work of others if it happened to get the data right. They should correct mistakes and deficits in the research work of others. (And they will, one of the best ways to make a career in science!) - If they are truly heroic, they might call out when the public is uninformed about significant facts or dished out half-truths. Good faith biographers of dead people should be open if they find out important facts. If Lynn was a racist, say so - considering the topic of his work, that is surely interesting! Relevant it would be, if it had changed the results. I am not really much interested in most dead people's hobbies nor their opinions about "race".
Why should anyone be interested? It’s important for society and policy. For example, if different groups have different mean innate IQs, then you would not expect the number of group members admitted to medical school or elite universities to match their fraction of the population. If society cares about that sort of discrepancy (and it does seem to) then it becomes important to understand the different possible explanations.
So in response to concerns that inequality is the result of bigotry and discrimination, the rejoinder is no, it’s because those groups are inferior at some objective measure of competence, and therefore the resulting social order is not something that can or should be fixed.
Seems pretty convenient the same exact groups are disadvantaged under regimes of social oppression or a neutral meritocracy. What a coincidence!!
It’s not a coincidence. Just suppose two groups differed in mean intrinsic capability; which group would be more capable of oppressing the other (and hence more likely to have been the historical oppressor)?
I appreciate the logical consistency. Obviously, there are examples of groups that were actively oppressed at one time and began to thrive and prosper once the oppression was lifted, even compared to their former oppressors. So, we know that an identity-neutral meritocracy can reveal latent potential that was being artificially suppressed.
But a lack of overt oppression is only one factor among many necessary for communal improvement. Oppression is not binary; it can exist in gradations. Even aftereffects of oppression no longer being actively enforced, if not compensated for, can still impact people in ways that make them less competitive at the margins, failing to meet arbitrary standards set by groups that aren't similarly encumbered.
It's very plausible that historical oppression can create collective path dependences that require extraordinary direct intervention to disrupt and reverse. That's the whole premise of Social Justice.
I don't know what it would take to prove that intrinsic capabilities explain most or all current disparities when so many other plausible mechanisms exist. You'd need to be very ideologically motivated to believe IQ survey data could resolve the question conclusively.
Absolutely nobody is suggesting that IQ is the sole factor that explains everything. The suggestion is that it is one factor that could be important in the mix. If it is, then wouldn’t you agree that it would be good to know that?
First, because this determines a lot about what we should try in development economics and charity. If IQ is artificially depressed by health/nutrition/education, that's a very different picture in the consequences of providing health/nutrition/education than if IQ is immutable (and also, it matters a lot which of health/nutrition/education it is, and the exact pattern of skill change).
(and even if IQ is completely genetic, that just opens up even more avenues for improving it - eg embro selection - and the exact pattern and way that it's genetic makes a big difference)
Second, because the pattern of human IQ distribution is one of the few things we can use to think about AI. I think I was able to accept the scaling hypothesis a lot faster than most people because we know that humans evolved from much dumber hominids within a few tens of thousands of years, and there's no way evolution can do much in that time except scale. But statements like that require a lot of knowledge of exactly how the evolution of intelligence works. Another thing in this category is Garrett Jones' thesis (reviewed at https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/08/book-review-hive-mind/) that more intelligent people are naturally more cooperative - big implications for superintelligence if true!
Third, because something like a third of the world's population is stuck in miserable poverty, a lot of the explanations have something to do with cognitive skills, and if you ban anyone from thinking about this in order to make yourself feel better, you've made it much harder to understand them and help them.
Fourth, some people study the mating habits of snails. Are we to say that any research that can't immediately justify itself to you must be sinister and shut down? Could the early people researching electricity, nuclear physics, or computers have survived that challenge? How do we know that all biologists aren't only doing biology in order to devalue the sacredness of the human spirit? How do we know that all economists aren't just doing economics because they're neoliberal shills trying to justify their own privilege? Once you start thinking in these terms, you become paranoid and anti-intellectual and start hating curiosity for its own sake. I think "I find myself curious about this" should be an ironclad defense about any field of study (except maybe viral gain-of-function - and even then you should at least be able to *think* about it).
Fifth, because a lot of people have loudly been saying that Lynn can't possibly be right, and if it's worth their time to spread a bad and wrong opinion, it's worth my time to correct them.
Pretty interesting that you think it's "bad and wrong" to claim that Lynn's incredibly flawed data (in which he used disabled people to represent the average of a country and then estimated surrounding countries based on it) can't possibly be right. I think it's a lazy interpretation of a complex, subjective issue.
I suppose you're well past the point where you feel the need for obligatory throat-clearing before wading into this discourse, which is fair enough.
The essence of my question pertains to your fourth point. You seem conflicted between your genuine affection and respect for the romantic pursuit of curiosity at all costs and your acknowledgment of the necessity of Kolmogorov's pragmatism and compromise.
I say this as a tremendous fan of your work and a grateful beneficiary of the community you helped cultivate.
It's unfortunate how little social distance there often is between those curiosity-driven and truth-seeking souls you righty champion and people with specific agendas who are incidentally and selectively attracted to certain truths insofar as it helps their odious ideological projects.
Maybe I'm wrong to have this impulse, but it angers and scares me when I see friendly banter where there ought to be repulsion and exclusion. Not in defense of some sclerotic orthodoxy but as a sign that there is also a moral sense accompanying the curiosity drive - that it's not entirely single-minded and oblivious to the larger context it operates within.
Given the implications and moral principles at stake surrounding race and IQ, I expect a good-faith Truth Seeker would want to avoid having their work tainted by association with known bastards. It's a matter of simple hygiene: If you want to destigmatize something from its connection with something terrible, it helps to explicitly repudiate the terrible thing while providing an alternative framing, as you've done here.
I'm not indicting any particular person; rather a style of high-decoupling that, in its total dismissal of social approval as a guidepost, allows itself to become a carrier of cynical and harmful parasites.
You once wrote about how creating a place without witch burnings would result in a few libertarians and a million witches. Not great!
I hope enough people engaged in shaping this and other public discussions about genes and intelligence—for all the urgent reasons you outlined—also want to prevent it from becoming Witch Island.
>in its total dismissal of social approval as a guidepost, allows itself to become a carrier of cynical and harmful parasites.
Adherence to social approval is no great defense of cynical and harmful parasites. If anything, social approval for a cause makes it much, much easier for parasites to glom onto a cause and leech away the benefits, at quite great cost to society.
I might similarly ask you: why it is that anti-racists find this topic such an important one to obfuscate, censor, and attempt to refute? Is it a hobby horse of people looking to rationalize anti-racism?
Why should we expect health care, education, etc, to have a linear relationship with intelligence? Isn't it possible that the difference between middle and lower class US is important, but the difference between lower class US and Malawi not so much?
Also, aren't there other negative factors which might plausibly affect the average African American more strongly than a Malawian? Institutional distrust, teachers making them feel stupid, family instability?
Possibly, not plausibly. Been to Malawi? (I always wanted to, but ... well, I taught in East-Europe and in Arab countries. The TIMMS results fit my observations.)
a) Trump ancestors are mostly from Germany. Not that I am proud of it.
b) Even non-western human cultures have concepts of smart and slow. And, surprise, those considered "smarties" do better on "western" cognitive test than the "slowies". Oh, most human cultures seem to value the smarties slightly more. Outside the US, at least.
b2) Many of those cognitive tests given to people who never went to any school are very, very basic. Think kindergarten. Still, results vary.
c) IQ 90 to 110 are most people in East Asia and Europe. Not that smart - "only humans" - and a considerable number of those normies is relatively easily fooled into silly fake "IQ tests" on their phones. Also candy crush or farming. Some of the smarter guys, too. But they don't matter for the business model.
> I think the strongest emotions here come from two deeper worries people have about the data:
> First, isn’t it horribly racist to say that people in sub-Saharan African countries have IQs that would qualify as an intellectual disability anywhere else?
> Second, isn’t it preposterous and against common sense to compare sub-Saharan Africans to the intellectually disabled?
Having talked about IQ with plenty of graduate-educated American liberal/progressives or read their takes online, I think this is just a wrong analysis of where the 'strong emotions' people have about this data come from.
They usually focus on one of a few topics: a) eugenics happened and IQ discourse leads to eugenics b) IQ tests are culturally biased, c) there are multiple types of intelligence, or d) IQ tests don't correlate with anything meaningful, like income. Only the last point is easy to convincingly refute with 10 seconds on Google, and I won't comment on the other points here.
But the deeper issue is that to them, IQ research and discourse appears to be poisoned with illiberalism, racism and edgelords who enjoy the toxicity without really caring about the racism per se. Given that, how could you hope to recover accurate information from the cesspool?
Best to ignore it if it's not decision-relevant. And fortunately, it's not! Liberals and progressives generally are strong supporters of foreign aid and development (modulo environmentalism). There are plenty of other reasons to think "charitable nutrition/health/education interventions" work without national IQ data.
Given the assumption the conversation's poisoned and irrelevant, then bringing it up must be for other reasons, most likely that the one bringing it up is a racist and/or an edgelord. Which is reason for strong emotion, because it's very annoying and anxiety-inducing to talk to or be around such people, especially about their racist beliefs or toxic proclivities, especially when they're actively working to persuade other people to share and spread their views!
Not in so many words, but I think that this isn't just my idiosyncratic view of why liberals and progressives tend to reject IQ discourse -- it's the standard account. Your alternative account ("isn't it racist to say X/niche point about diagnosed ID vs. national IQ") isn't anything I've ever heard a liberal or progressive say as their argument against IQ.
If you want to respectability-wash this topic, which it seems to me is your primary agenda (since I'm almost certain you could have made the preceding argument yourself, but chose not to), then I think you need to take a different tack. First, show that you really understand the other side's point of view -- pass the intellectual Turing test.
Then, either convincingly explain why national IQ research is genuinely decision-relevant to a respectable topic, or give a convincing personal account of why you happen for non-racist reasons to find the topic intrinsically interesting.
I count this article as a failed attempt at respectability-washing (at least for me), and failed attempts do harm to the author's reputation, the same way successful attempts do good.
I think you state the objection correctly, and I am personally sensitive to it. One defense of IQ research as decision relevant is that it’s possible that cases such as most Bangladeshi kids being lead poisoned by tumeric would have been discovered sooner if population level IQ monitoring was in place. (I don’t know much about this case, I am just baffled that it took as long as it did to discover). More generally, if a group has lower IQ than another, that might warrant a closer look to see if there are environmental factors in play which can be eliminated to that group’s benefit.
Not impossible, but realistically, is lack of 'population level IQ monitoring' a key causal determinant of the lack of lead monitoring, or any other specific global health issue?
I don't think so. National IQ metrics correlate with numerous other global health statistics that also raise concern about harmful environmental factors. Factors that likely harm IQ metrics, ranging from lead to intestinal parasites to famine, also have strong negative impacts on more conventional global health metrics.
For lead specifically, everyone knows* it's intensely harmful and, if present in food, water, air, or soil, helps explain a variety of poor outcomes and should be cleaned up and future inputs minimized. We know lead exposures happen, we know we need to test for it, and we know that doesn't always happen due to competing priorities and lack of resources, as well as corruption and government inefficiency. How would national IQ monitoring help increase resources or reduce corruption? I don't think it would, therefore I don't think it would help avoid lead exposure.
A case for the utility of national IQ monitoring would depend on identifying at least one specific harmful environmental factor where national IQ statistics make a uniquely big difference in helping to identify it relative to more conventional global health statistics. I very much doubt any such factor exists, but am open to being proven wrong.
I mostly agree, but I don't think it's right to say IQ measurements are completely irrelevant for real world decisions. They are part of the picture like many other things and may or may not help to illuminate inequalities and population health issues.
Maybe lead's effect on IQ was influential on the Bangladeshi government, but ctrl+F doesn't find "IQ" anywhere in the article except in the middle of the word ubiquitous. It leads with "premature deaths" as a motivating health consequence for taking lead seriously.
So again, decision-relevance isn't about showing that X (i.e. lead) impacts IQ. It's about showing that impact on IQ has unique advantages in terms of being diagnostic for X. I don't see that here.
I would be persuaded on the decision-relevance of national IQ monitoring if the case for its unique advantage as a diagnostic can be made for even one environmental factor impacting a conventional global health metric of concern.
Here is an example of an argument forms I'd find persuasive:
Harm H can be caused by an enormous number possible environmental factors, and for most of them there's no good test to rule them in or out. One exception is factor X, which is uncommon and very expensive to fix. But when it's the cause, fixing it helps a lot with H. As it turns out, national IQ monitoring is the only good way to detect X, and it's remarkably cost-effective relative to other global health priorities.
Here is an example I do not find persuasive:
Harm H can be caused by numerous environmental factors, and there are many convenient tests to zero on which ones are operating in a specific situation. Some of these factors also impact IQ, which probably mediates some but not all of their impacts on H. So one option that might inconclusively suggest a subset of these factors is particularly important in driving H in some context is to test for IQ. However, there are also other much more conclusive and inexpensive ways to test for these factors.
I think your lead example is an example of the lattern form.
I think you’re oversimplifying. Diagnoses are rarely based on a single factor even in individuals, let alone populations. It’s fine to say you don’t think it’s worth it to research group level IQ differences, but to deny entirely that the information is useful when looking for environmental causes of inequality seems unreasonable.
Plus I’d say that cognitive function itself is an important (if maybe not conventional) health metric of concern, and it seems like IQ is a decent proxy for this.
That being said I don’t actually know that the Bangladesh story is an example where more comparative IQ research would actually have been useful, just one that got me thinking.
> Diagnoses are rarely based on a single factor even in individuals, let alone populations... Plus I’d say that cognitive function itself is an important (if maybe not conventional) health metric of concern, and it seems like IQ is a decent proxy for this.
This is a reasonable hypothesis, but I have to continue emphasizing that it's not enough to justify IQ monitoring on the basis of "it's diagnostic of a harmful effect". In my opinion, it needs to be uniquely diagnostic of a specific upstream *cause* of that effect.
For example, let's say a population has low cognitive function because of a famine. We could test them for IQ to discover that their cognitive function was low. But that would be completely unnecessary, because we'd see on inspection that they're starving, the famine causes numerous other health impacts, the impairment to cognitive function will be about as apparent as the loss of weight, and the famine can be solved by feeding them or figuring out what's causing food to be absent and solving that. Fix the famine, and you also fix its impacts on cognitive function. No need to test for IQ.
It's really hard for me to imagine a real global health issue in which including national IQ as a factor in analysis makes a substantial difference in our ability to hone in on a fixable upstream cause of the issue at hand. It's just too correlated with other much more obvious, urgent and important health and economic metrics to contribute much.
>But the deeper issue is that to them, IQ research and discourse appears to be poisoned with illiberalism, racism
More specifically, they care about *anti-black* racism and illiberalism derived from that. Other forms of racism are much less "poisonous," sometimes wildly popular, and illiberalism that's not anti-black gets encouragement instead.
Edit: Otherwise, yes, I agree this is not a good, well-thought post.
This seems like a good analysis on how to cost-effectively improve education in low and middle-income countries. It finds providing information on the benefits, costs, and quality of education, supporting teachers with structured pedagogy, and targeting teaching instruction by learning level, not grade are great buys. Other ideas include reducing travel times to school with free bicycles, merit based scholarships to disadvantaged children, and mass deworming.
You use the American Black vs. sub-Saharan African discrepancy to argue that IQ can't be 100% genetic. Fine. But doesn't the United States / China discrepancy point in the opposite direction? China is still much poorer per capita, with worse living conditions and health care, and yet the average IQ is higher. You can't just sweep that under the rug, there's something else going on...
Just because something isn't 100% genetic doesn't mean it can't be genetic at all. Maybe the China/US discrepancy is genetic. China spent a long time giving out important positions through standardized tests, I can imagine that making a difference over the course of millennia. But also, China is widely suspected of gaming its international education test results.
>A normal person with 60 IQ will seem . . . normal. If you try to engage in difficult conversation, they won’t be able to follow, but most of them can do simple low-IQ jobs like manual labor, basic retail, or writing for the New York Times. A country centered around people at this level may not win any space races, but it can certainly continue to exist.
Surely there’s a problem with defining ”normal” here tautologically? In the DSM someone with an IQ bellow 70 is diagnosed with intellectual disability iff they have ”deficits in adaptive functioning”. If they don’t there’s no reason to diagnose them.
In other words we end up with saying something like: ”the people with IQ below 70 that are able to function normally are actually able to function normally!”
I think this framing risks underestimating the actual impact of low cognitive ability by controlling for it.
But even so, in my experience there’s a subset of patients that don’t quite fulfill criteria for ID (deficits in adaptive functioning usually have pretty severe cut-offs), patients with no other developmental disorders, it’s also pretty clear that their low cognitive ability makes life very challenging for them. At face value it seems extremely unlikely that somewhere like Ghana would have this as the Average level.
I think there are two kinds of variation. One is the bell curve, made up of a thousand tiny genes of small effect each. The other is really big things, like an extra chromosome (Down's) or traumatic brain injury.
I'm trying to argue that a "normal" low-IQ person (one who is simply at the low end of the normal bell curve) has fewer deficits than a person with a specific medical problem like Down's.
I think the two kinds of variation idea makes sense. No issue there. But I don’t share the impression that what people find highly implausible about a functioning nation state with an average IQ below 70 comes from them basing their idea of ID on exemplars like Down’s syndrome, adding associated medical issues to the mix. Some people are maybe imagining someone non-verbal, but I think most people would picture some kid in the special ed class in middle school.
Are you trolling us with that headline, Scott? The trouble with Lynn's National IQ *estimates* is they're bad science. Worse yet, they're bad science in aid of Lynn's bizarre racial agenda (scroll down to see some Lynn quotes below the bad science examples).
Bad science examples first...
Sear, et al looked at the original Lynn and Vanhanen World IQ data sets and found lots of problems. A lot of the data is pretty sketchy. Quoting Sears: "The primary data are grossly inadequate...the sampling is sketchy at best and ludicrously insufficient at worst.” For instance: "The figure for Ethiopia is derived from a sample of 250, 15-year-old immigrants to Israel. The figure for Nigeria is from a sample of 86 adult men & one of 375, 6–13-year olds. The figure for Sierra Leone from a sample of 22, 23-year-old skilled workers and one of 60 adults." Lynn and Becker updated the datasets a few years ago, but the old sketchy data is still there, plus new sketchy data!
From the Sear paper (link below)...
"...37% of all samples are under 1000 individuals, which are very small samples for calculating averages for national population, which may have many millions of citizens. Some samples are exceedingly small: a closer inspection of the dataset reveals that six countries have IQs estimated from <100 individuals (Angola’s IQ is estimated from 19
individuals; Dominican Republic from 34; Greenland 40, Uzbekistan 51, Republic of Congo 88, “Netherlands Antilles” 96, and a further 14 with samples of <200 (Namibia, Barbados, Sierra Leone, Ecuador, Ukraine, Botswana, Laos, Latvia, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Malta, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Haiti and Eritrea). A significant proportion of countries – 30% – also have IQs estimated from a single sample, which is particularly problematic when so many samples are small and unrepresentative, including only children."
> In 1995, Lynn was quoted by the media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) saying: "What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the population of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of the 'phasing out' of such peoples ... Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality."
> In a 2011 interview with then far-right artist Alex Kurtagić, Lynn stated: "I am deeply pessimistic about the future of the European peoples because mass immigration of third world peoples will lead to these becoming majorities in the United States and westernmost Europe during the present century. I think this will mean the destruction of European civilization in these countries."
Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved 7 February 2016 quotes Lynn's interview in a British political magazine Right NOW!...
> I think the only solution lies in the breakup of the United States. Blacks and Hispanics are concentrated in the Southwest, the Southeast and the East, but the Northwest and the far Northeast, Maine, Vermont and upstate New York have a large predominance of whites. I believe these predominantly white states should declare independence and secede from the Union. They would then enforce strict border controls and provide minimum welfare, which would be limited to citizens. If this were done, white civilisation would survive within this handful of states.
This is why I conclude Lynn was a crackpot who promoted crackpot pseudoscience.
Look, just because they're a neo-Nazi doesn't mean they can't do science. Everyone else has their own biases as well, and yet we take their work seriously for the most part. Why should it be any different for white supremacists?
If they're a neo-Nazi they need to be held to a higher standard. Sloppy work, bad thinking, and crappy data just undermine their philosophy even further.
I consider the standards of serious scientific work to be high and to apply to everyone. How can one be held to "higher standards" than other scientists? - Could even end up with the "racists" or "parapsychos" be considered even better science when they somehow pass those "higher standards". Remember Scott "The control group is out of control". https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/
Results of some ethnic groups in cognitive test do differ from results of other ethnic groups in such extreme ways, those differences are highly unlikely to disappear under much "higher" test-standards. See Japanese. See Igbo. See Aboriginal Australians. See Ashkenazi. And if it really is just "black culture" holding so many Afro-Americans back in school and IQ-testing - just more reason to work on it. MLK cherished a different culture.
I am certainly willing to accept he was a crackpot. The larger question though is why nobody else has done the proper studies which settle the question. The failure of this dog to bark pretty much speaks for itself.
Have you bothered to look? Another criticism by Sear showed that there were more recent IQ studies that were done with more rigor that Lynn and Becker ignored. Sasha Gusev pointed out that these sketchy studies are promoted by individuals with dubious academic credentials with axes to grind.
> Two other recent papers [Panofsky et al. (2024) and Bird & Carlson (2024)] have gone further to tackle the question of how the field should actually deal with genomic racism. Both papers demonstrate that the underlying research itself is largely conducted by coordinated groups of hobbyists, with no credible academic affiliations, typically publishing in journals that they themselves have founded and review. The underlying studies, to the extent they are conducted, are low quality and highly repetitive because the primary goal is to generate memes for political blogs and forums.
It's as if Gresham's Law applies to scientific knowledge as well as money — where bad science drives out good. Worse yet, otherwise rational people who should know better get taken in by this sort of bullshit.
>”It’s as if Gresham's Law applies to scientific knowledge as well as money — where bad science drives out good.”
Would the same law apply anywhere else in science? Because this seems like a total cop-out for why nobody has done the basic scientific work that would literally disprove racism. It is absurd to me that after years, if not decades, of social science organizations being dedicated to the elimination of racism or whatever, that no one has proposed, “Hey, you know all those flawed and wrong intelligence studies that racists always cite? Why don’t we use actual science instead of pseudoscience to get the *real* numbers. Then their arguments will be proven to be wrong.”
> Because this seems like a total cop-out for why nobody has done the basic scientific work that would literally disprove racism.
There's a huge amount of scientific data and studies data out there that disprove that the "scientific" underpinnings of racism aren't valid. You probably just weren't interested in considering any data that contradicted your worldview.
1. Start with the genetic differences between individuals of the same "race" can be greater than differences between individuals of different "races." Most genetic variation, around 85-90% depending on the population, exists within so-called "racial" groups, not between them. (Subsaharan African populations are the most genetically diverse.)
> Lewontin, R. C. (1972). The apportionment of human diversity. Evolutionary Biology, 6, 381–398.
> Yudell, et al., Taking race out of human genetics: Engaging a century-long debate about the role of race in science
2. Genetic studies find no evidence linking race to differences in intelligence.
> Richardson & Norgate (2015). The equal environments assumption of the classical twin method: A critical analysis. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 322.
> Fraser, S. (Ed.). (1995). The bell curve wars: Race, intelligence, and the future of America. Basic Books.
3. The Flynn effect contradicts the idea that genetics determines IQ. For instance, IQ tests have been given to Americans for the past ~105 years. The median IQ of Americans has increased by 3 points per decade. The Median IQ of Americans in 1920 was what Lynn claims the median IQ of Nigeria is today (on scanty data). I find it hard to believe that back in 1920 when the median IQ of Americans was around 70, half of the American population would have been considered developmentally disabled and unable to do things like simple counting and unable to tie their shoes. The Flynn Effect has been observed in all societies across all continents (presumably as education, health, and diet have improved). Also, Flynn found the highest gains in the culturally reduced tests. The lowest gains were in verbal tests. Intermediate gains were seen in mixed tests such as the Wechsler and Binet, and in these tests, the performance side had the higher gains.
> Flynn, J. R. (1987). Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: What IQ tests really measure. Psychological Bulletin, 101(2), 171–191.
> Trahan, et al. The Flynn Effect: A Meta-analysis
4. Several open threads back, we discussed whether there were any studies on the relationship between IQ and Nobel laureates. The IQ Comparison site has a link to a study that indicated there's a nonsignificant correlation between IQ rank and Nobel Prizes per capita rank: Spearman rank correlation of 0.259 with a p of 0.245 with a 95% CI.
The way actually IQ test work does not allow to be done between different linguistic groups. Even Colombia and Mexico have different versions of the WAIS IV.
Richard Lynn's critics produced quite a bit of empirical work of their own. For instance, see http://iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/wicherts2010b.pdf which finds an average African IQ significantly higher than Lynn, if still below Western norms. If you check the abstract of that link you'll see them arguing for environmental causes, though they're not really producing a map that looks qualitatively different from Lynn.
But honestly the real thing I want to tell you is "Don't be so hard on them." I'm on the left, at least from an American perspective, and even being neutral on this issue gives me so much flak I've learned not to talk about it (and the same goes for the Israel-Palestine debate). The need to affirm one's political allegience has been encouraging petty sniping since our ancestors first learned to talk. It's disappointing, but it's also very human.
Indeed, the Aporia piece that Scott references begins with a discussion of Wicherts, and it's discussed by Cremieux, as well in his response article: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/national-iqs-are-valid.
If Lynn haters spent a fraction of time they spent complaining about Lynn dataset making their own dataset, they might have done this dozen times, but they did not.
Right. If you embrace bad and manufactured data and erroneous conclusions, you might also be interested in defending Creation Science, Terrain Theory, detox diets, and homeopathy (among others). ;-)
Lynn science is a poor quality science. Which nobody cares fixing about, because result would be similar.
IQ denialism is pseudo-science like the ones you listed. It focuses not about getting proper knowledge about world but about telling people how to behave.
If you're a Less-Wrong rationalist, you should be all about discarding faulty priors. But instead of engaging in the science, you accuse me of being a meanie because I called into question your favorite priors. And, of course, it follows that I'm being self-righteous for trying to identify bad data and/or pseudoscience.
"What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the population of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of the 'phasing out' of such peoples ... Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality."
Yeah. This isn’t racist. It’s just good sense.
It’s weird how we all recognize that brutal selection is what vaulted humankind to the top and that, looking back, we’d never wanted anything else to happen, but now we have to pretend selection from here on out is just terrible. Ultimate status quo bias.
Hmmm. How do you know you're qualified to reproduce? If I were on the eugenics board, I'd be selecting against individuals who display the phenotypes for credulity towards pseudoscience.
He's not talking about eugenics, he's talking about phasing out entire populations. Societies are basically superorganisms, and these inferior societies will die out on their own if we simply stop giving them aid. All he's suggesting is that we stop interfering with the process.
Nazis and fascists, in general, suffered a major selective sweep called WWII which proved them to be genetically unfit. Hitler, with his moronic fixation on racial purity, caused some of his smartest and ablest scientists to flee his regime — giving the US the atomic bomb and some other key technologies. Hitler even admitted that Germans had proved themselves racially inferior to the Slavs, Anglo-Saxons, and mongrel Americans in a conversation with his followers in his final days in the bunker (witnessed by Traudl Junge).
Also, Republican-run red states had higher mortality rates due to COVID-19 than blue states. Suggesting that their ignoramus health beliefs interfered with effecting sound policies to combat the pandemic. Natural selection working the way it should.
Yes, and? You're falsely assuming I have any attachments to any of these ideologies. The only thing that matters is who comes out on top.
So I'm sure that if and when liberal democracy hits its expiration date, you'll gracefully accept nature taking its due. You won't, of course, because you're obviously just being facetious. Ultimately, all of those utopian ideals aren't worth a damn without the strength and resolve to protect them. The left has only itself to blame for its failure.
Did I accuse you of having an attachment to these ideologies? I was giving examples that agreed with your point that natural selection is naturally selecting against stupid people.
Lynn and Vanhanen's book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" came out 23 years ago. Since then, a number of other people have taken a crack at this question, both from IQ tests and from school achievement tests (e.g., the World Bank's Harmonized Learning Outcome database). Mostly Lynn has held up in the big picture.
However, regarding Africa, one team of researchers came up with average scores much closer to 80 than to 70 (while others have vindicated Lynn's finding). I have not delved into the issue enough to have an opinion on who is right.
I would prefer the 70 figure to be true for humanitarian reasons: raising sub-Saharan IQ from 70 to 80 sounds a lot easier than raising it from 80 to 90. South Koreans, for example, are now taller than Japanese on average, but it seems unlikely they'll eventually catch up with the people of the Dinaric Alps and become multiple NBA superstars (leaving aside genetic engineering for now).
>We know that in the US, where we do give people good IQ tests, whites average IQ 100 and blacks average IQ 85.
> The “racist” position is that all IQ differences between groups are genetic. The “anti-racist” position is that they’re a product of environment - things like nutrition, health care, and education.
No, I'm pretty sure that the actual anti-racist position (at least among people who aren't of the LessWrong variety) is that any differences between whites and blacks arise as a result of IQ tests being less accurate than fortune cookies.
I do think IQ tests are a lot more accurate than fortune cookies; my point is that what you present as "the anti-racist position" is most likely held by a small number of academics and LWers. If you share this post on Twitter, I'm willing to bet that the majority of responses will tell you that any differences in IQ aren't real (or that IQ itself isn't real), *NOT* that the differences are real but don't depend on genetics.
“So under the environmental hypothesis of IQ, we should expect Malawians to be more than 15 IQ points behind black Americans.”
This is one of the reasons why we should doubt Lynn’s estimates for Sub-Saharan Africa. The 1944-45 famine in the Netherlands had no measurable prenatal effect on the IQ of young adults 19 years later. https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.178.4062.708
The other reason is the poor quality of the African IQ data. This is the opinion of Heiner Rindermann, who nonetheless believes that cognitive ability varies among human populations:
“Given the quality of the data, it is not possible to come to a really precise result. … There are further arguments indicating overestimation (student assessment studies not corrected for older age) or underestimation (less test-wiseness). The usual phrase ‘‘further research is needed’’ is very appropriate here: We need representative samples of the ages 10–70; samples representative of the full range of school education, including the share without or with only little education; the use of fluid (school-distant) and crystallized (school-near) cognitive ability tests; and up-to-date norms from Great Britain. Furthermore, as African samples have less cognitive task experience, the estimates could be increased by a short test training or a more general cognitive training.”
1. If you have an IQ below 70 in the US, you get social security for your disability. No further deficits required. So apparently the people who spend a lot of time and tax money on this question have concluded that an IQ at that level makes you pretty non-functional even without specific other syndromes such as Downs.
2.Normal distribution is a bitch. Even if a 60 IQ person is functional, that mean implies 16% of your population has an IQ below 45. At some point, you have a large fraction of the population that can't wipe their own ass.
It is because in developed countries there is a strong correlation between having a low IQ and all the other effects of mental disability. Actually it is the latter that is the largest problem, but you can scan for this with an IQ test, since there will be relatively few people having only a low IQ and no other symptoms.
In a different group this will not hold.
Think of dwarfism. Dwarfism is correlated with a lot of adverse physical effects, therefore it makes sense to give anyone below a certain height disability benefits. This would not work if you just went to a country with a lower median height. Pygmy people does not have nearly as many back and neck problems as you would expect from their height.
This is untrue. An IQ of less than 70 still requires evidence of extreme or marked deficits in areas of life functioning. Trust me, as a disability lawyer, I wish I could just get my client approved after an IQ test.
Source: practice this a lot, based on listing 12.05 of SSA’s standards of disability in case you want to double check me.
Some other ways to further validate/invalidate the environmental theory:
Does the environmental<>IQ relationship continue up the ladder to the countries listed as higher IQ on Lynn's list? E.g. Does Singapore have a somewhat higher level of education/nutrition/health? It does seem to be true for GDP per capita - 84k there vs 81k in the US.
Do countries with similar IQ levels on Lynn's list, but with pretty different genetic backgrounds, have similar environmental factors? Looks like Kazakhstan and Venezuela and Papa New Guinea seems to be similarly colored in the map above. 13.1k vs. 8.4k vs. 3k... seems like counter-evidence? Note that there may be a causation/correlation wrinkle here.
Do countries that have seen improvements in education/nutrition/health over time also see improvements in country-level IQ over time? Singapore was around 50% of US GDP in 1990, and is now that slight bit higher (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=SG-US). Did their IQ also improve? Not sure if we have reliable historic data on IQ.
Perhaps someone with more time & research skills than me can do a better job here, including doing better than GDP as a proxy for all the actual environmental effects...
Lynn wrote a paper on South Korea reporting huge increases in both height and raw IQ test scores since 1960. (If only these taller, smarter South Koreans would have some children ...)
Something similar was seen in Japan a generation earlier.
In forming his national IQ estimates, Richard Lynn deliberately selected results for Africa that showed low IQ and ignored results that showed higher IQs. Does Scott Alexander see fit to mention this, and the many other problems with Lynn's methodology, in his article? Of course not!
'Wicherts and colleagues found that the only consistent feature in Lynn’s decision-making process in whether to include a study in his African national IQ dataset was the average IQ reported by the study itself. The lower the IQ score, the more likely it was that Lynn chose to include it. In fact, Lynn did not use a single one of the many studies available that reported an average IQ above 85 in an African sample. The Wicherts study concluded “it is hard to avoid the impression that [Lynn’s] assessment of representativeness [of African IQ] was a function of the average IQ in the sample.”'
I've checked out a reasonable sampling of the papers that Lynn et al included in the NIQ dataset, and a suprising number come from African researchers who don't seem to come up with dramatically better numbers.
The best his critics have been able to argue is that if you cherry-pick results in the other direction then SSA's IQ could be as high as 80 instead of 70... ...which as Scott has pointed out, would actually be stronger evidence for the hereditarian position, not weaker.
...You're personally asking me if I broke down all of the NIQ dataset's sources by surname, did a statistical analysis for racial bias in estimates, and then published this in Nature, or something, before you'll even look at the source/s?
I take it as a yes. The country-by-country part in this (the last comprehensive publication before Lynn died) is a fairly easy read (skip the math part). I checked some Asian countries, in Nepal the raw numbers indicated an IQ of 60 or even 40 (few studies, mostly villagers). Lynn doubted this and suggested to assume an IQ similar to neighboring India (ie IQ 80). While in Africa, he eg. doubted data from expensive private schools (therefore highly exclusive) to be representative for the given country. Sounds reasonable. But sure, better data would be better! For some countries in those regions there is better data, from PISA, TIMMS et al.. Does not change the picture, sadly. - Citizens, journalists and scientists claiming all this to be "unfairly biased" are welcome to demand funds for IQ tests with representative samples of the population. To surely debunk evil Lynn once and for all! (lol)
Peer reviewed scholarly journals have published all this data. What the clique of Science Denialists within Wikipedia are doing is declaring that "Intelligence," the leading journal in Intelligence research for decades, is not reliable because it publishes studies showing racial gaps. But there are virtually no papers published in peer reviewed science journals showing no racial gaps.
I think you missed Scott’s point, which I took to be that even if you take Lynn‘s results as accurate, you can’t use them to support the heredity hypothesis.
See https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289609001275 . But also, I don't think this old debate is that interesting - lots of World Bank stuff and standardized testing numbers have come out which correlate with IQ and seem to confirm something like Lynn's view. I'll stick some of them on a Highlights From The Comments post.
Feels like one of those blog posts that's not about what it's about.
The real story here is Scott Alexander declaring "iq differs by race" is now within the Overton window, at least within his social club. Sure, you could talk about racial differences at SSC meetups before, and Scott would occasionally hint at racial IQ being real in a "there's this well researched forum called Human Varieties" kind of way. And yeah, we're still not at the point where Scott can say "IQ differences between race are less than 100% environmental". But a large, non-anonymous blogger can now say that IQ differences, regardless of what causes them, are real. And that's huge.
It's so interesting to see how everyone seems to unconsciously understand that the world is changing. Just look at how fast big tech kneeled before the new administration, even the ones that resisted last time!
I've been writing posts approximately this IQ-pilled regularly for the past ten years. This one isn't even spicy, it doesn't even argue anything is genetic.
a) Yes, happened on SSC (and well appreciated), much less on ACX (wisely). Mentioning at times Emil Kirkegaard was enough, and enough to make me worried.
b) Yes, this one is very much watered down. Hardly "argues anything is genetic". But that is ... not exactly honest, is it? As ACX readers are expected to be aware that intelligence IS genetic to a large extent. If not for my genes, I might be a tree, a cat or Jeremy Siskind! And a difference of 15 IQ point inside the US is hardly just "nurture". So why pretend?! - I would love to see HBD written about by EK/Aporia/RKhan/GregC. And see Scott writing about all the other surprising and true insights of this universe. As in: Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning
Your 'sociological' take about this being some sort of Overton window flex is wrong. There are posts from years ago closer to endorsing less than 0 heritability of the group gap than 'actually, if you trust these numbers, the anti-hereditarian case is stronger'
Every country that has industrialized has gained 30+ IQ points via the Flynn effect. Each year of education adds 2-3 IQ points. Within group differences in IQ are genetic, but like height, obesity, and criminality large differences between groups are 85%+ environmental. (US blacks today have higher IQ's than US jews in 1900, US Hispanics have lower crime rates than 1800's Japanese).
Definitely not correct, though claims like these are often made. There are plenty of critiques out there to read, but as a sniff test, I’ll point out that if pre-industrial societies had an actual 30 point IQ gap, it would be virtually impossible for people like Gauss, Euler, or Newton to have existed. These; and many others like them, would inarguably score at the very upper end of IQ tests today. If they were two more standard deviations above the mean for their time, that would imply a population in the trillions.
This. We know the Flynn Effect can't be entirely an artifact of testing, or by implication things like polio and vitamin deficiency would have no effect on brain development, but it also can't be entirely real, or we'd all be solving math problems like Von Neumann.
I can't recall the source offhand, but I remember reading that most Flynn Effect gains were concentrated in the bottom half of the IQ distribution, which is what you'd expect given pre-industrial class differences in nutrition and educational access and so on.
If so, Flynn didn't say this in his original paper. But Ravens tests showed the highest gain, and verbal IQ tests showed the lowest gain.
I like his summary, though...
> The current generation has made massive gains on all kinds of IQ tests. These gains persist to maturity and, therefore, cross-sectional data are suspect as a measure of the effects of aging on IQ. These gains suggest that IQ tests do not measure intelligence but rather a correlate with a weak causal link to intelligence.Therefore, between-groups IQ differences cannot, at present, be equated with intelligence differences. Environmental factors with a large impact on IQ have not been identified. The hypothesis that Wechsler-Binet IQ gains may not represent intelligence gains shows how they can be reconciled with the SAT score decline.
Yes, Flynn Effect gains vary enormously depending on the type of test you look at, and for some measures (such as reaction time and vocabulary) we've actually seen declines since the mid-19th century. FE gains are inversely correlated with the g-loading and heritability of the test, which is what you'd expect if they were primarily a function of environmental factors.
One thing Scott's discussion highlights is just how much of the reaction to Lynn is driven by the sentiment "You're not allow to talk about that, and you're certainly not allow to express that conclusion." There is little desire to reason about reality or make specific counter-claims, just "You're wrong and shut up."
No one seems to be silencing Lynn. And that is the real problem here. Google Scholar reports more than 230K citations for Lynn's work, with 17.5K of them coming after 2021. Lynn's papers are being posthumously published in fringe journals like Mankind Quarterly. And despite decades of criticism about the poor quality and practices of his work, only a few journals have taken any action to retract his papers or even acknowledge the criticism. Worse yet, many researchers innocently cite the National IQ dataset as being an accurate resource, assuming Lynn’s interpretations are uncontroversial. Unintentionally or deliberately his white supremacist ideology is being laundered behind the facade of legitimate scientific inquiry.
We may be approaching a point where genetic interventions could potentially be cost-competitive with environmental interventions, especially in countries where the latter have hit diminishing returns.
Admittedly, the biotech sector hasn't precisely covered itself in glory post-COVID and other scandals related to depression and alzheimer's research, so... who knows if people will trust it.
I don't see anything in that linked post that indicates culture is *hard* to change. It just presents a list of cases where culture was successfully changed and yet nothing improved, which might be evidence that changing culture is *pointless* (at least for the particular problems discussed), but is not evidence that it's hard.
Warning for a long URL, but this is Ciarán Benson's critique of Lynn's work on Irish IQ, and I would like to refer you all to the beeyootiful illustrative figures, such as Lynn's breakdown of regional IQ within Great Britain (see pages 5 and 6 here for geographical diagram and table of results):
Stunningly, the smartest people are in the North-East/East/South-East. Hmm, by pure coincidence, what was it that Lynn said again about his family heritage?
"HN: Let us begin with your roots. Where are they?
RL: They are all from the east of England. My father’s family are Viking stock from North Yorkshire and were small trade people until my father obtained a scholarship to King’s College, London. My mother’s family are from the southeast and are Saxon stock from the North plain of Germany."
Lynn scored the Republic of Ireland national IQ at 96 (the lowest in the regions) and London/South-East at 102 (the highest).
Benson gives this slap at his methodology:
"Lynn derives the Republic of Ireland’s mean IQ from data provided by Gill and Byrt (1973). In their standardisation of Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices on Irish children, they reported an overall mean difference of 3 points between the performance of Irish children and that of the British standardization samples. On that basis, and noting that the Irish children were approximately two months older than the British children, Lynn arrived at 96 as his ‘working estimate of mean IQ in the Republic of Ireland’ (Lynn, 1979, p.5).
In effect, Lynn compared a ‘corrected’ mean score on a test of one type of non-verbal ability given to a sample of 6- to 13-year old Irish children in 1972 with a wrongly calculated index score derived from unrepresentative samples of young men during the Second World War whose scores on a variety of different types of tests were aggregated with those of boys and girls who took two unspecified tests in the 1950s and 1960s. On such a foundation rests Lynn’s finding of a difference of 6 IQ points between the Republic of Ireland and London and South Eastern England which Eysenck claims to be ‘highly significant from a practical as well as statistical point of view’ (Eysenck, 1981, p.78).
Such being the ‘facts’ on which the low Irish IQ myth is based, there is really no need to pursue this critique any further."
I'm not claiming we're a nation of unrecognised geniuses, but I am claiming Lynn was sloppy and motivated by a certain amount of bias and wishful thinking (e.g. the superior genes of the pure Angelfolc blood as shewn by the high IQ).
Yeah, I'd guess that Lynn's Protestant prejudice against Irish Catholics played a role.
In general, Lynn's mistakes tended to be random and thus his overall findings have held up well. But his aversion toward Irish Catholics probably played a role in this case.
Russell Warne looked into old data and concluded that Ireland was always pretty close to England in IQ.
But, I dunno ... I could also imagine that the agriculture-oriented culture promoted by the Irish Free State tended to hold down IQ scores a little in the 20th Century.
Perhaps it's kind of like how Israel doesn't have quite the test scores you'd expect. But that's partly by design. The Zionist founders wanted to socially construct a more "normal" culture for Jews where they would be farmers and soldiers rather than urban financiers and intellectuals. My impression is that they pretty much got what they wanted, which could be why Israeli Ashkenazis seem less intellectually-inclined than American Ashkenazis.
But wait! Richard hasn't just solved national divergences in IQ, he has also solved the problem of "who smarter, hims or hers?"
Sorry ladies, we have to accept that Harry Enfield was right, and that our small (literally, Lynn says men have bigger brains and bigger of course means more smarter) brains get filled up and confused at a low level of education compared to men:
"HN: You have also worked on sex differences in intelligence. How did this come about?
RL: In all fields of scholarship we have to take a lot on trust. If all previous scholars are agreed on something, we take it for granted that they must be right. All the experts from at least World War 1 had stated that there is no sex difference in intelligence. In the following years numerous scholars whom I respected repeated this assertion. For instance, Herrnstein and Murray wrote in The Bell Curve that ‘‘The consistent story has been that men and women have nearly identical IQs’’.
I had no reason to doubt this consensus, but in 1992 I was shaken when Dave Ankney and Phil Rushton independently published papers showing that men have larger brains than women, even when these are controlled for body size and weight. It was evident that these results presented a problem. It is well established that brain size is positively related to intelligence at a correlation of about 0.4. As men have larger brains than women, men should have a higher average IQ than women. Yet all the experts were agreed that males and females have the same intelligence.
I grappled with this problem for about six months. I went through dozens of studies and the experts seemed to be right that males and females have the same intelligence. Then at last I found the solution. When I looked at the studies in relation to the age of the samples being tested, I found that males and females do have the same intelligence up to the age of 15 years, as everyone had said. But I found that from the age of 16 years onwards, males begin to show higher IQs than females and that by adulthood, the male advantage reaches about 5 IQ points, entirely consistent with their larger average brain size. I published this solution to what I called the Ankney-Rushton anomaly in 1994."
I trust Scott will have no problem informing his missus that naturally, as the (big) head of the house, he is considerably smarter than she is by a whole 5 points of IQ? 😁
Even if that were the case, that still means that in practice, once the lowrolls are dealt with, the remaining men are still more intelligent than women on average.
You don't need to kill them. You just need to keep throwing them in prison, or let them rot in ghettos and encampments. Either way, they're mostly separated from the rest of the rest of the population. Though, admittedly, it would be more effective and cheaper to just kill them... And if we had a higher birth rate, we could afford to be a lot more picky about our population.
Deeply unhappy about this text. Context: I read the mentioned Aporia-article before - (got it in my email on 01.01.). And used it to defend Lynn in a quora-answer. 1. I am unhappy when I see Scott venturing out to publish posts that are ... risky ... . IQ of sub-saharan Africans (aka "Blacks"), is a topic one mentions to get stigmatized on wikipedia. Aporia does it, Emil Kirkegaard does it, Greg Cochran did it (he seems very unwell), Razib Khan lost his NYT contract because he might consider mentioning it (more below) ... Better not touch this topic unless ready to openly embrace HBD aka as having the NYT shout: "See! A racist! We told you he is wacky and dangerous!". I am aware, Scott is a truth-seeker, but what he wrote about his "naive friends" in excellent https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/ applies to him, this time around; short quote: "Every couple of weeks, I have friends ask me “Hey, do you know if I could get in trouble for saying [THING THAT THEY WILL DEFINITELY GET IN TROUBLE FOR SAYING]?” When I stare at them open-mouthed, they follow with “Well, what if I start by specifying that I’m not a bad person and I just honestly think it might be true?” I am half-tempted to hire babysitters for these people to make sure they’re not sending disapproving letters to Stalin in their spare time." end-of-quote
2. Even worse: I believe Scott gets central parts of the data *wrong*. IF West-Africans with lousy educational background etc. indicate an IQ of 80, while in the USofA those Afro-Americans whose ancestors came from there - still do not manage better than IQ 85 ... that indicates that genes may count a lot more than generally assumed, and living in the US vs. living in a "shithole-country" may matter much, much less (IQ-wise) than generally assumed! As the Aporia article put it: "We already have abundant evidence that black Americans score about 85 on IQ tests, as compared to 100 for whites. If the average IQ in Sub-Saharan Africa is 80, this would mean the massive difference in environment between Sub-Saharan Africa and the US reduces IQ by only 5 points, yet the comparatively small difference in environment between black and white Americans somehow reduces it by 15 points. The point has been made a number of times, including by Lynn himself, but environmentalists still don’t seem to get it."
3. Just to add about Razib Khan: Checked his wikipedia (for his formal degree), found a link to the letter that made the NYT drop him: "New Times Op-Ed Writer Has a Colorful Past With Racist Publications". Guilt by association! . There were links to those"racist" texts. Great stuff! My favorite (not by Khan): “I’m Not a Racist, Sexist, or a Homophobe, You Nigger Slut Faggot” https://www.takimag.com/article/im_not_a_racist_sexist_or_a_homophobe_you_nigger_slut_faggot/
I just skimmed the top level comments of the 368 comments, and not one of them asks the question that is at the crux of the matter, how is Lynn's IQ map actually useful? Is there any decision you can make off this map that there isn't a better indicator elsewhere?
You can absolutely accept refugees for pratical reasons. For example, I'm sure the people that fled Russia and Ukraine to avoid the war are decently valuable as far as immigrants go. But you don't need to mindlessly welcome in every group of refugees that wants to live in your country. And, according to that graph, well... we should probably have a policy of preventing climate refugees from entering the country at any cost.
According to Lynn's map Ukraine has an IQ around 95. Syria is around 85. Afghanistan is around 80... but never mind that. And nevermind that if you're accepting refugee's in for other reasons, it doesn't matter that they were refugees anyway. The point you seem to be making is that you can take a population level study and use it to judge individual cases as if they are the same, which you cannot. All of those places had doctors and the like after all. A simple test, especially a job specific test would tell you more about someone's usefulness than Lynn's map, even if it wasn't biased.
Edit: forgot to add, refugee's are accepted based on the fact that they are being persecuted. Natural disasters such as ones caused by climate change would not make them elegable under the current system.
That's why I said refugees, not immigrants. You can't pick and choose from a single group of refugees, that would piss off even the people that did get selected.
I'm sure there'll be a bunch of people that argue we should accept climate refugees because their homeland is becoming literally uninhabitable and that they'll die if we don't give them shelter. And this research shows us that we should ignore those people.
Ok, I can see why you picked refugees now, but that's still quite a take.
So would this be an accurate summary of your position? You believe we shouldn't be humanitarian to some countries because they might have low IQ. What the sin of being low IQ is is unclear though, but especially given your other comment where you try to make yourself out as an edgelord l I'm willing to bet it's go something to do with impurity of the bloodlines or something.
I'll be honest with you, when I asked the question about the benefit of this map, my implication was that there there was no benefit unless you're looking for an excuse to be racist, and this study is not nearly high enough quality to justify that. Thank you for making my point for me.
For example, which giant country has more long term economic potential: China or India? If you look just at Indian-Americans and Chinese-Americans, they both seem like pretty sharp cookies on average, so both countries would seem likely to have similar potentials. But if you look test score data, India looks like it has bigger problems.
I think the idea is that if a country has high IQ and low development, that means there's an opportunity to make a lot of money by investing in their development. China is an obvious example, but unfortunately it seems all of these opportunities are already taken by now.
I'm pretty sure that the causation flows the other way, investment in skilled jobs leads to higher IQ scores in the country, which leads to more investment. Although that's rather simplistic, as for example in China it was also the combination of sufficient political stability and low wages compared to the other options.
Bear in mind that if you're going to go off such little information as an IQ map, you mustn't be doing very significant investment otherwise you'd be doing much more research anyway.
Vietnam took the PISA test for the first time recently and got a quite good score, but there were complaints that only 56% of the designated students took the test.
Argentina does really bad, but they argue that at least they round up 80% of their 15 year olds, unlike higher-scoring Mexico.
The last I checked, the honest Dutch had 101% of their designated number of students take the PISA. Finland was around 96% and the US around 91%.
I haven't read every single one or anything, but the comments in this thread are remarkably rational and reasonable. Kudos, ACT commentariat. Given the inflammatory subject, things could have easily gone otherwise.
I guess any further analysis on my part have to wait for better data, preferably more detailed and is at least on province/state level (and genetic ethnicity level). But this article is good enough to prove that even if it's true, it's not an excuse to be racist.
'I never said *all* Jews kill babies to drink their blood, so I don't know why you're trying to stop me from condemning the ones who do'.
Listen, the Supreme Court just killed Affirmative Action, and half the country is saying that DEI is why LA is on fire.
You can point out as much as you want that discrepancies in tested ability seem to align with deprivation and therefore we should proudly embrace those discrepancies as evidence of problems to be fixed.
But the entire right and half of the left, including many of the people you cite in this post, have drunk the Meritocracy Kool-Aid. They assume in their rhetoric that test discrepancies reflect innate abilities and that we should stop trying to help populations that test poorly because it's destroying the country.
This is just one of these cases where people are using the same term to mean different things, and talking past each other thereby.
When you say IQ, you mean 'a strictly delineated, tested metric which is the result of complex interactions between innate and environmental factors'.
But when people say IQ in the sphere of politics or race relations, they mean 'a broad measure of innate and immutable ability to function in and contribute to society'
So when you look at people talking about IQ in the context of politics and race relations, and notice that the things they say are all nonsense based on your definition of the term... you're not correcting their misconceptions, you're misunderstanding what they are trying to say.
And when you try to come into those realms and tell them the 'truth' about IQ, using your own definition, they will hear you to be saying something very different than what you mean to say, because they will be hearing their own definition.
Which is not to say that there's no point in the conversation - obviously people in those realms are not using the science properly and it would be great to correct them. But when you just look at them talking in ways that don't make sense under your own definition of IQ and assume they must be confused and can be easily corrected, you're just going to end up wrong about what they are saying and wrong about how to correct them and wrong about why everyone suddenly seems so mad at you.
No one is mad at you for saying the thing that you understand yourself to be saying inside your own head. They are mad at what *they* understand you to be saying, based on their own internal definitions of the words you're using and their personal knowledge of the shape of the debate.
Ultimately it's on the speaker to be understood, even when that's incredibly frustrating.
Wait, why do you think Scott isn't using the second definition? He wouldn't be constantly talking about IQ if he thought it wasn't a useful heuristic. I think you're the one that's misunderstanding him.
IQ is a useful metric whether or not it varies solely due to nature, solely due to nurture, or (most likely) both.
The US military, for example, gives a cognitive test to all applicants to enlist. It's banned by law from enlisting the bottom 10% and it usually tries not to take the bottom 30%. (During the Great Recession, you'd have to score in the top 50% to enlist in the Air Force or Navy.)
Hmm, Barbados was part of the British empire, and Haiti of the French, with a period of US control as well, then various dictators and coups. I'm wondering how one would one divide through for all those cultural and historical factors?
That's the whole point: there are somewhat similar genetics on the islands but a whole host of other different factors. This tests whether genetics are a major factor, it doesn't necessarily tell you what exactly mostly drives IQ if it isn't genetics though.
It would seem to me a better idea than comparing African Americans and Africans.
"The large difference between sub-Saharan Africans in developed countries (eg the US) and in sub-Saharan Africa demonstrates that the latter aren’t performing at their genetic peak, and that developmental interventions - again, nutrition, health care, and education - are likely to work."
Where "work" is defined as raising Sub-Saharan Africans to the level of Black Americans. That's not nothing, but it's not the defense liberals would generally want.
1. This entire article fails to acknowledge the absurd, and apparently intentional methodological shortcomings in Lynn's work that amount to academic fraud. What the work implies or don't imply (the entire point of your article) is irrelevant.
2. What is the scientific basis for your belief that IQ is a linear combination of racial admixtures? This requires rather a lot of assumptions and leaps of logic.
1st and second generation African immigrants in the United States and elsewhere have better educational attainment (a proxy for IQ) than black Americans, so perhaps we should assume the African component of their IQ is higher when raised in a similar environment and the white admixture drags it down?
>A normal person with 60 IQ ... can do simple low-IQ jobs like manual labor, basic retail
I don't think that's true. The example here is McNamara's Morons, otherwise known as Project 100,000, which was the Army's attempt to draft people with sub-83 IQ's during Vietnam. It failed miserably. If you consider the military to require the same range of skills that civilian life does then you'd have to conclude that a 60 IQ person would not be able to work in simple low-IQ jobs.
There's an interview on YouTube somewhere where Jordan Peterson talks about working clinically with an 80 IQ person. He said it was basically impossible to find a job that he could do.
Being a combat infantryman is not a simple job, it’s complex and done under difficult circumstances. Maybe it was simpler in the days of close order drill and volley fire, but I’m not so sure about that. In my military experience the dumb guys tended to get themselves in trouble unless they had a functional unit and a sergeant to keep them on the right path.
As I'm sure you know, most jobs in the military are non-combat. There are cooks, drivers, laundry workers, police, etc. Project 100,000 found that low-IQ people couldn't even do those. They even gave them extra, specialized training under the theory that modern education methods can overcome low IQ. Turns out they can't.
Scott Alexander isn't stupid, and he's a pretty upstanding guy overall. He may be wrong, but calling people's intelligence into question because they disagree with you is weak.
"If IQ was 100% genetic, we should expect blacks everywhere to have an IQ of 85, since they all have the same genes. "
Okay, mandatory disclaimer here: "Blackness" is, in many ways, a social construct and not a scientific term, though it maps loosely to some notions of heredity and genetics. We could compare American blacks to their mostly sub-Saharan Nigerian forebears (with a fair bit of genetic mixing.) But "blackness" on a global scale doesn't map well to being Nigerian. Ghanaians and Australian Aborigines would be considered 'Black' by American cultural standards, but would be very different from sub-Saharan Nigerians.
But to bolster the environmental and cultural argument using better data: Nigerian immigrants in the UK seem to academically outperform the average person in the UK.
I haven't carefully gone through how this data was calculated (no time right now) and I assume it's selective in some ways, either in terms of which immigrants can reach the UK from Nigeria or in terms of which immigrants are being tested. So I'd welcome methodological criticism. But at least this seems much more encouraging for the environmental and cultural hypothesis than 'people slowly working their way back to average and not quite getting there.'
The stark difference between Nigerians and Somalis in the UK is intriguing, but I don't have time to dive into the reason for the difference. If anything, though, it underscores the importance of not lumping all people with dark skin and African origin into the monolithic category of 'Black.'
I hate to break it to you but Cremieux is a racist with an agenda. I have countless evidence that I'm happy to share, but you also have to ask yourself why his posts always end up with the conclusion that "blacks bad"
For the specific example, look at native UK blacks performance in GCSE vs native white Brit's/irish.
Native blacks beat Irish whites and trend very closely to white Brits.
Yeah, we get it. Anything that produces evidence that favors black people is "biased." Anything that produces evidence that disfavors black people is "fair and balanced" including the Lynn estimates which uses the IQs of a group of developmentally disabled kids to represent one of the African countries in his dataset. Transparent and laughable.
The first Cremieux article cuts off when he starts discussing Nigerians in Brittain, which is what I was trying to address (since race seems like less of an issue in the UK.) He does have data from Canada with Nigerians and Somalis both under-performing, which may serve a similar purpose if Canada is presumed to be less racist than the US.
The second article seems to argue that academic achievement as measured by the GCSEs is a bad predictor and weakly correlated with general intelligence.
"Similarly, when GCSE results are included alongside IQ tests, the result is evidence of bias in favor of girls relative to boys and Black Africans relative to White Britons. We know there’s bias when these variables are used to indicate intelligence, but we don’t have explicit knowledge of why. All we know is that there’s bias, and in both of these cases, it results in certain groups scoring better than they should for their smarts."
After this, it cuts out to a paywall effectively saying "if you want to know the support for my assertions give me money." So his argument is not made. Publicly, anyways. Why the GCSE's are less predictive of performance than IQ he does not say. He just asserts. He argues we have to control for conscientiousness. But IQ is already a mix of different mental abilities. If conscientiousness improves performance then perhaps a metric which factors it in rather than controlling for it would be superior as a predictor.
He does seem to make the argument that IQs for Nigerians aren't significantly better in the UK than in the US. Which is interesting. Though they are significantly better than for native Nigerians.
The reason for the difference is simple: the Nigerians are primarily economic migrants, i.e. middle class aspirants that came to find jobs and education. The Somalis are more disproportionately refugees, i.e. the most vulnerable ppl fleeing war and hardship. The people that came to pursue jobs and education succeed in school and employment more than the people that were dragged over by a random and traumatizing calamity of fate.
The fact that you don't even question Lynn's hilariously-flawed data is pretty embarrassing.
It doesn't make it any better that your excuse is basically "well I'm not racist because I don't think black people are stupider than us due to genetic inferiority, it's simply because they're poor!"
This is the neoliberal argument. It's reductive and doesn't address the unique issues that might be behind underdevelopment of the respective nations.
It also does everyone a disservice because when charity is pumped and nothing happens, the next conclusion would be "I guess they're just genetically inferior then."
Unfortunately a lazy take based on an extremely flawed premise.
You should read about how many of Lynn's African data points were basically made up and wildly extrapolated.
"The authors report IQ numbers for 185 countries but 104 of those numbers (more than half) are based on zero data collected from people from that country. They are guesstimates based on their numbers for surrounding countries."
"The IQ estimate for Equatorial Guinea was based on kids in a home for developmentally disabled kids living in Spain. Not even their own home country. Spain."
"The estimate for Somalia was based on a single sample of refugees living in refugee camp in Kenya."
"The estimate for Botswana is based on 104 kids living in South Africa who were tested in English even though English wasn't their native language"
"The Haitian estimate is mostly based on 133 rural 6 year olds."
"The estimate for St. Vincent and the Grenadines was based on a single sample of 174 rural children."
Lynn was a white nationalist who wanted predominantly white states to secede from the Union.
These studies obviously also fail to capture the varying relationships that different cultures have with standardized test taking and how that would likely skew the distribution over large numbers.
An Asian kid, for example, is likely to be highly exposed to and experienced with standardized test taking at a young age, and likely would take it more seriously than another kid from Africa with the same intellectual capacity.
Is that enough for you, or do you need more? Because I've got more.
The fact that these "intellectual" racists are trying to push us back to a world of race science and IQ averages and Scott is happy to validate them is embarrassing.
They continually discount data based on economic migrants and call that data skewed, but they are happy to use data based on averages from developmentally disabled kids. It's almost as if there is an agenda there.
It's embarrassing to watch Scott build a false premise off of this and try to legitimize it.
For African-Americans you also have the complication that, while the majority are descended from slaves (mostly from the USA, Haiti or the Anglophone Caribbean) with all the generational disadvantage that entails, the post-decolonization immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa to the USA and their descendants have disproportionately wealthier/more educated backgrounds (wealthy relative to their countries of origin; more educated even compared to the average American). So with e.g. Nigerian-Americans you have a population who are on average highly educated (29% have a postgraduate degree!), with predominately middle-class upbringing, but liable be treated by the American majority (everyone from anti-Black bigots to aficionados of critical race theory) as if they come from a very deprived/out-group background. I wonder how this plays out in practice?
I'd have thought that the IQs of North Koreans and South Koreans would be similar (and relatively high), allowing for impacts of food shortage and general hardship on the former, but the difference in GDP seems out of all proportion (attached is a 2023 summary, showing SK's nominal GDP being 60 times that of NK). Can GDP really be considered as a proxy marker for IQ, when GDP is likely to have been effectively depressed in dysfunctional states? Not being very smart, I have probably got something wrong here, but I've wondered about this for a while.
“If there were some group that got even worse nutrition, health care, and education than US blacks, we should expect them (under the environmentalist hypothesis) to have an IQ even lower than 85”
There is a small flaw in the argument here because the poor choices made by some group in terms of education/nutrition also have a major genetic origin. It is hard to separate “pure” environmental causes from genetic causes as there is a confounding effect.
Side issue - the current time is irrelevant to the discussion, and I should have said “not *that* smart”. My point was : many, many factors went into who joined the priesthood - and it is my intuition that the dysgenic effect there could be easily exaggerated. That is a better statement.
The main effect was probably, in the main, to reduce the number of grandchildren of people who had a certain social status (particularly in the Americas, where, in many countries, mestizo common folk rarely bothered to formally marry) and had an inheritance to leave. It was a profession for third-born sons, to avoid splitting the inheritance. Of course there was some room for vocation (and hence selection) in that there was also the option of joining an army, say.
Source: hearsay and random reading, so you are very welcome to tear this apart with sources.
It was particular orders (e.g. Jesuits, late entrants to the game) that had a reputation for intellectuality. Don’t get me wrong - in the Middle Ages, priests were a large percentage of those literate - but it’s not as if the illiterate majority had not had the innate capability to learn to read or even learn some Latin.
It's not like priests and religious were only children, either. As you point out, for rich/nobe families, the clergy was a career option for younger sons. If you were poor and smart, joining the clergy was a way to social mobility and career success (see Cardinal Wolsey for one example). But it's not necessarily that the *smartest* of your twelve kids became a celibate religious, it could be the most religious/devout one - see St. Catherine of Siena, the twenty-fourth child of twenty-five.
Or, if we go by 19th century norms, for middle-class and upper families, a way of steering that third son into something respectable so he can make a living, but doesn't mean that he's particularly smart *or* devout, like the figure from Trollope's "Barchester Towers" of Dr. Stanhope and his family:
"The Bishop, or rather Mr Slope under the direction of Mrs Proudie, also orders the return of the prebendary Dr Vesey Stanhope from Italy. Stanhope has been in Italy recovering from a sore throat for 12 years and has spent his time catching butterflies. With him to the Cathedral Close come his wife and their three adult children. The younger of Dr Stanhope's two daughters causes consternation in the Palace and threatens the plans of Mr Slope. Signora Madeline Vesey Neroni is a disabled flirt with a young daughter and a mysterious Italian husband, whom she has left. Mrs Proudie is appalled and considers her an unsafe influence on her daughters, servants and Mr Slope. Mr Slope is drawn like a moth to a flame, and cannot keep away from the Signora. Dr Stanhope's artistic son Bertie is skilled at spending money, but not at making it; his sisters think marriage to rich Eleanor Bold will help."
I am not able to understand the figures here, someone please explain to me the effects of skin reflectance on IQ/educational attainment (does this mean it's good or it's bad?)
file:///C:/Users/rmdal/Downloads/Lynnetal.JBS.pdf
"Among the variables other than IQ and school achievement, gross domestic product (GDP, average 1975–2005) was obtained from the World Development Indicators of the World Bank. … Data on the combined school enrolment ratio for primary, secondary and tertiary schools (proportion of children of eligible age enrolled in school), youth literacy, public expenditure for education (as % of GDP), life expectancy and the Gini index of income inequality were from the Human Development Report of the United Nations. … Scores for political freedom on a 0-to-6 scale (1988–2005 average, reversed score) were averaged from data about political rights and civil liberties published by Freedom House … Corruption scores on a 0-to-9 scale (1999–2005 average, reversed score) were from Transparency International … Skin reflectance data were from Jablonski & Chaplin (2000), with missing data points extrapolated from neighbouring countries. Scores for religiosity and subjective well-being were formed from the results of the 2000 wave of the World Values Survey."
I do like in the tables presented, his original guesstimate for Irish IQ back in the 70s or 80s was 92, but by 2003 the PISA scoring equivalent rose to 98.6. A whole 6.6 points of more IQ! Where did the infusion of superior genes come from, given that Lynn very damn strongly believes it's all about the genes? EDIT: I must correct that, he doesn't believe it's *all* about the genes, he does think environment (including social attitudes to things like learning science/maths, is being happy more important than success in life, etc.) is also important. But the genes really do matter a lot. If you have the genes for light skin, you're going to be smarter, because light skin correlates with high IQ - see below for "skin reflectance".
Also, Lynn norms everything so that Britain is 100. That makes it easy to 'prove' the Brits are the new normal, yes? What would happen to British scores if, say, the USA or Spain or Japan were normed as 100?
"However, to study the causes of discrepancies between school achievement and IQ, the trend-adjusted, averaged school achievement scores were converted directly from a mean of 500 and a standard deviation of 100 to a mean score of 100 for Britain and a standard deviation of 15. The latter method was required to investigate the reasons for systematic differences between the standard deviations of IQ and school achievement."
And if you're using "skin reflectance" as one of your criteria, then you damn well will look like an old-fashioned racist, not a new scientific racist. That's saying the quiet part out loud, Richard!
"Table 3 shows that correlations with IQ and school achievement are indeed similar for most criterion variables. Life expectancy is about equally related to IQ/school achievement and logGDP. Some others (school enrolment ratio, political freedom, corruption, subjective well-being, public expenditure for education) are related more closely to logGDP, and others again (skin reflectance, youth literacy, Gini index, religiosity) are more closely related to IQ and school achievement.
… For example, Templer & Arikawa (2006) reported a correlation of 0·92 between IQ and skin colour, and Meisenberg (2004) reported a correlation of 0·89. The reason for the lower correlation of 0·69 in Table 3 is that the TIMSS and PISA assessments are heavily biased toward economically advanced countries with high school achievement, high IQ, high GDP and light skin colour."
Though I have to admit, at least he finally admitted some of his early data (which is *still* being quoted all over the place) might have been crap:
"The school assessments have greater reliability than the IQ tests, presumably because they were performed within a narrow time range (1995–2003), and the samples were selected to be representative of the whole school-age population in the country. The IQs, by contrast, were collected over more than half a century, in different age groups and with different tests, and in some cases with samples whose representativeness is open to doubt."
Mirabile dictu, there may be some genuinely useful information here! Yes, schooling *does* make a difference:
"If school achievement were determined only by the children’s IQ, we would expect that between-country differences in school achievement, relative to within-country differences, would be as great as those for IQ. Actually, however, between-country differences in school achievement scores are greater than between-country differences in IQ. When the school achievement scores are converted into the IQ metric directly rather than by linear regression, the between-country standard deviation is 0·53 within-country standard deviations for IQ, and 0·70 within-country standard deviations for school achievement, counting only those 57 countries for which both measured IQ and a school achievement score are available.
Therefore school achievement is not simply an expression of the children’s intelligence, but children in high-IQ countries tend to over-perform in school relative to their IQ, whereas children in low-IQ countries tend to under-perform. This result is expected if school systems are more efficient in high-IQ countries than in low-IQ countries.
To identify the country-level factors that are responsible for over- or underachievement in mathematics and science, the difference score was formed between school achievement scores (directly converted into the IQ metric) and IQ. Then each variable in Table 3 was used in turn to identify those that predict over- or underachievement in the school assessments relative to IQ."
"American and African blacks have similar genes. This isn’t exactly right - US blacks have some intermixing with whites, and only some of Africa’s staggering diversity reached the US - but it’s close enough."
No, it's NOT "close enough."
You can't just wave your hands and make a magic incantation and think that it is so.
The average African DNA of the American "black" population is likely less than 25%. That's much more intermixing than "some."
Increasing white DNA in "blacks" changes their characteristics, including intelligence, greatly. This was recognized previously, in American locales like New Orleans, by finely gradated scales of racial categories: mulatto, quadroon, octaroon, etc. These gradations of portion of white blood were recognized because the results were much more than skin deep.
American "black" culture has always recognized these gradations also. They have various terms for varying shades of skin color: from "High Yalla" on down to pure black. And these gradations are recognized as significant, because they are.
So, back to your "close enough" in comparing American blacks with actual Africans: You need to adjust the estimate of non-African DNA much higher. Which would result in the measured increase from 60 IQ for pure African DNA to 85 for the High Yalla DNA in the USA.
If you read the comments on this very thread you will see the best estimate for admixture in the USA is around 18% white. (Higher for self-selected sub-populations like 23andme users). You will also see that skin colour and IQ are not highly correlated so in admixed people their pigmentation is not very strongly linked with their IQ and all the things that IQ predicts (educational attainment, criminality, health, family status, longevity, income). You will also see that genomic studies now clearly show that the higher the amount of caucasian DNA (not pigment), the higher the IQ and educational attainment. This information is freely available on the internet. The "high yella" is a very crude approximation and not very helpful. Pure African DNA is probably around 80 IQ. Admixtures will increase or decrease IQ depending on the admixed race. These are probability distributions and not deterministic predictions.
Except for: "skin colour and IQ are not highly correlated", but then you also say, "genomic studies now clearly show that the higher the amount of caucasian DNA (not pigment), the higher the IQ and educational attainment."
Those two claims seem to be directly contradictory.
So, higher white DNA means higher IQ. Ok, that's pretty much what I said above.
Higher white DNA MUST also lead to more white pigment. Maybe not on a one-to-one ratio, but in general.
Thus, it seems logical that less black color is associated with higher IQ.
Evidence of this abounds. Search for images of "black scientists." 9 out of 10 of these would have "passed" for white in days past.
Yes, on average Africans with more Caucasian admixture will be lighter skinned. But the SNPs for skin pigment and IQ do not appear to be linked. So if a white person had kids with a black person, the kids would vary in intelligence and also in skin colour. But there would be no or little correlation between lighter skin and higher intelligence. The brightest kid could have the darkest skin or vice versa. Skin colour is a noisy proxy for the amount of Caucasian DNA and we have better measures. DNA tests clearly show greater Caucasian admixture leads to higher IQ.
Great case study in the news the last couple weeks.
"Black" mayor of LA worshipping at the African altar in Ghana. She ignored her city burning so she could commune with her "brethren."
See this picture of the "black" American next to an actual black African. This is why Africans laugh at "black" Americans for their claims to Africanness.
She is a typical American High Yalla--with virtually no black pigment. And while she ain't exactly the sharpest knife in the rack, it's quite likely that her IQ is closer to 100 than it is to 60. More white DNA = higher IQ = whiter skin.
I’m not sure this research is good enough quality to justify all the discussion around it. The methodology seems terribly flawed and I couldn’t find any replications— why is it even worth talking about?
If this were a study I’d say stereotype threat or priming effects Scott would rightly be mocking it as a waste of grant money, but here he’s treating it as the data. Maybe there should be a higher bar for such a contentious issue?
Are there regions that don't seem to have changed a lot genetically but sometimes show improvements in intelligence/IQ which can't be explained environmentally?
Could the same thing that explains the Lynn effect also explain the Flynn effect? As nutrition and education and living standards in the US / Western world get better on average, IQ increases?
That's been discussed for a long time, and the short answer is "yes," given the correlation between IQ and living standards. Whether the Flynn effect *is* the cause hasn't been proven, but it's regularly pointed out. (I don't know how interested you are in raw studies, but search out a comment I made earlier on this thread and you'll find an article I linked that says essentially that.)
If we shouldn't worry because, for anyone really intelligent, it doesn't matter if it's 85 or 100—they're both stupid. What's sad is intelligent people have to live in this intellectual desert.
However, studies don't show unambiguously that there's any point at which more IQ translates into less subjective well-being. This is something I still think about a lot, but for the past year or so I've been coming to suspect that the real problem is being very smart, and *also* having a strongly intellectual bent. Being very high in both intelligence and also intellect/openness to ideas means you really want to play with abstruse concepts, and you're really good at it, and and it's your favorite thing to do, but then whenever other people try to play, they keep goofing up or cheating without meaning to.
Like imagine being incredibly talented at basketball, and absolutely loving basketball, only most people can't grasp what you're even doing, and when the more talented among them try to play with you, they keep running out of bounds and scoring points in the wrong hoop. Meanwhile, someone who is extremely talented in basketball but *doesn't* absolutely love it will just... go around being athletic and do OK.
the key is the rough correspondence of IQs of many races across different developmental scenarios (at least the rank order). i don't pay much attn to these 3rd world numbers because of all the reasons given. the question is what happens in first world countries.
second, the issue of DS vs. just low IQ is pathogenic/mendelian/etc. trait vs. IQ in the "normal range." the tails of the distribution exist, but that's just the product of the law of large numbers. then there is the totally different class that is due to a big mutation (or chromosomal anueploidy like with DS). the exact same applies to height or many quantitative traits (there may be something similar happening with autism, a very heritable trait where some ppl have huge effect mutations and other people do not).
third, the net-nazis laughing "hahaha ppl in malawi are retarded" are not doing anyone a favor if you want to have an open mind to both env&genetic factors. they are, in fact, showing that they are retarded.
Oh Jesus Christ I wish the net-nazis would just go away. I think the actual prevalence of racially motivated individuals in this day and age is much lower than most people on the left insist, and definitely accounts for much less of the opposition to the egalitarian thesis than they think. But the fact that the right tail of ethnocentrism is so visible makes it impossible to actually convince them that there are people like, say, Scott Alexander who take Lynn seriously without being secretly racist. They don't even care about the existence of people like you; you're probably duped or something!
To the extent that it's even possible to talk about this seriously, I'm not sure "the rough correspondence of IQs of many races across different developmental scenarios (at least the rank order)" is the key. It's a good argument for your position, because yes, controlling for culture & wealth is a good idea, so in principle it does help to just consider, for example, the US, and see what the gaps look like there. The problem is that looking only within countries doesn't fully control for culture & wealth, because there are obvious differences in culture and wealth within any given country; moreover, when we partially control for culture and wealth like this, the IQ differences are also partially attenuated - that's exactly what happens in the US. This may not be what's going on, but there is at least an intellectually honest case to be made based on that problem.
1. The idea that the 25 points from 60 IQ to 85 IQ is “more” or even reasonably comparable than the 15 points from 85 IQ to 100 IQ is fundamentally flawed. IQ is based on percentiles of human performance, not actual raw ability. The difference between a lifter at the bottom 5% and bottom 20% in pull-ups is 4 pull-ups, the difference between top 20% and top 5% is 12 pull-ups despite both being a 15% difference. These types of percentile scores are not homogeneously spaced and so cannot be compared in this way.
2. Emil is doing a bit of a Motte and Bailey here because while he defends the point his HBD theories from criticism about IQs of mentally ill with 60 IQ seeming far less capable than people from poor countries with 60 I, he makes no such distinction when correlating IQ stats and crime. He wants to both defend his position from the obvious counter argument while also getting to tar the impulse control and violent outburst tendencies of not mentally ill people who test having lower IQs
IQ tests are also Western European constructs. Some of the questions are culturally biased. Why is there no questioning here of the instruments used to test IQ?
There was a *lot* of interest in cultural bias for a while. I'm assuming most of the posters around here know enough about this by now because it was pretty well researched about thirty years ago, but that can obviously be frustrating to someone like you who asks the obvious question and gets no answer!
The fairest response I can give probably comes from the APA task force report from 1996; this is a great document to read up on if you're interested in the political minefield that is IQ:
"It has been suggested that various aspects of the way tests are formulated and administered may put African Americans at a disadvantage. The language of testing is a standard form of English with which some Blacks may not be familiar; specific vocabulary items are often unfamiliar to Black children; the tests are often given by White examiners rather than by more familiar Black teachers; African Americans may not be motivated to work hard on tests that so clearly reflect White values; the time demands of some tests may be alien to Black culture. (Similar suggestions have been made in connection with the test performance of Hispanic Americans, e.g., Rodriguez, 1992.) Many of these suggestions are plausible, and such mechanisms may play a role in particular cases. Controlled studies have shown, however, that none of them contributes substantially to the Black/White differential under discussion here (Jensen, 1980; Reynolds & Brown, 1984; for a different view see Helms, 1992). Moreover, efforts to devise reliable and valid tests that would minimize disadvantages of this kind have been unsuccessful."
But China's wealth exploded only in the last 45 years. 70 years ago most Chinese worked on the land and were poor. Is there historic IQ data for China? This might be helpful in estimating the influence of a changing environment, and the scope for future improvements in countries like Malawi.
Interestingly, as he points out, the increase in raw scores was fairly linear for cohorts born over a 45 year period. His main point is that the Great Famine didn't cause a drop even in raw scores, but it could similarly be noted (as he remarks later) that the final two birth cohorts who were born during or after the death of Mao (after which China began rapidly developing) don't show a spike even in raw scores, relative to trend. Nor do the previous two cohorts who would have been children of various ages during the the death of Mao.
The linear increase in raw scores suggests that something about exposure to the modern world increases raw scores, but it doesn't require economic development, per se, as the earlier cohorts increased, even while China remained economically stagnant.
Accordingly, future Flynn effect gains in sub-Saharan Africa may be more modest than the gains in China.
>The Flynn effect is not about differences in intelligence, instead, it primarily concerns test bias. The existence of the Flynn effect also doesn’t imply there will be convergence between countries, ... and the Flynn effect is explicitly adjusted for in national IQ computation. It just doesn’t have any relevance to the discussion because the evidence for larger Flynn effects during catch-up economic growth is extraordinarily poor.
So is the HBD idea that low IQ means one is more likely to commit crimes because one is too stupid to obey rules or are they not understanding that there are rules, or what? I don't understand why a low IQ means higher crime rates.
That is just one of the problems I have accepting that this type of research into comparative IQs has any value. I have read that the people who want to do it believe that they are helping the 'stupids' but I cant believe that.
Its clear to me that telling people you have proved they are stupid is a good way of making them stupid.
You say there is interest in the IQ differences betwen east Asians and whites, Is there a similar attempt to link the higher east Asian IQ to more intelligent aspects of their culture and achievements.
Perhaps not using gunpowder to make guns was a good decision and we whites went the wrong way. Or hey, they aren't really smarter at all, those Chinese, the difference is just an artefact of their language.
Anyway, maybe somebody will be outraged by the cancelling of this 'research'. I'm not.
> I don't understand why a low IQ means higher crime rates.
It doesn't very much; it's true that the correlation between IQ and criminality is negative, but it's also fairly small. There's obviously something else going on with crime besides IQ, since men aren't less intelligent than women, and still commit *far* more crime. I think HBDers just insist on talking about this because hey, when you have a hammer, it's fun to use it to hit as many nails as you can!
> Its clear to me that telling people you have proved they are stupid is a good way of making them stupid.
There's been a lot of discussion of this idea, and it hasn't panned out well. Stereotype threat was probably the strongest research paradigm investigating this claim, with initial findings that making a person's ethnicity or gender more salient caused them to score in more stereotyped ways. Now, however, stereotype threat is the example Wikipedia gives for its article on publication bias:
This is so good of people to answer my questions. Thanks.
That’s interesting about the lack of correlation between being told one is stupid and being stupid. I didn’t mean that it actually does make people stupid, more that it could affect one’s motivation to try hard and induce learned helplessness.
I did consider that as a possible reson to explain the results because I have seen it happen in individuals who are lacking that critical self-esteem and self-efficacy that goes with being intelligent in the way that western culture values. I’ve heard an old Aboriginal man with deep depression say his was a “rubbish culture'“ and it broke my heart.
It also seems to me that lots of Australian Indigenous people are ‘on the spectrum’. Does anyone think that the new knowledge about autism will have any effect on the direction of HBD research? Is anyone interested in comparing rates of autism genes in the various ‘races’. That would be interesting.
And where is all detail behind the division of humans into races. It doesn’t seem like groups deliberately isolated themselves and evolved culturally without any outsider input. The Australian Aborigines are the only group to have managed that it seems?
The cold weather hypothesis is really not very convincing. Humans are creative and spare time, such as hunter gatherers had in a warm and nurturing climate is a prefect environment for creative intelligence to grow and flourish a tes people tell stories about themselves and their relationship to the land, that inspire deep thinking rather than being miserable in a cold climate, having to work hard to survive.
And does anyone know how mixing of genes, between black and so called white (which are a mixture of many cultures anyway) happens. Does the intelligence gene come from the mother or the father? Is it dominant or recessive?
So in Australia, the half-castes as they were called once, now it’s ‘white Aborigines’ are said to be unfairly taking all the govt money for themselves because they are smart having white genes, and the full-bloods who don’t have any white genes are the ones who need the help.
Isn’t there a problem knowing how much white genetics blacks in the US have since there has been so much interbreeding? How do researchers determine who is black and who is not black enough to be a real black? Is there some sort of determination of how much admixture there is or just self-identification of ones race.
These HBD people really need to do some useful research instead of stuff like this if they want credibility.
“Rushton has supported his theory by documenting that the three races differ in brain size, intelligence, length of gestation, rate of maturation in infancy and childhood, and a number of other variables including penis length and diameter.”
Oh, you're from *Australia?* That's very interesting. You came across as being quite different; ACX is centered in the San Francisco Bay Area, and you actually sounded like a Blue Tribe activist!
Now I *have* at least been to Sydney, so I can say that Australia is a very different place. Most people in this thread are Americans quoting American research where African Americans are the most controversial minority. Even you quoted Rushton, but his "three races" are all old world African/Asian/Caucasian, and while Indigenous Australians are distantly related to Asians, they're really their own thing. While I'm actually learning about the cultures of Indigenous Australia right now (ironically because their antiquity suggests to me that they are most definitely not rubbish), the Aboriginal story differs markedly from that of African Americans and even Amerindians.
Being born and raised in a US context I'm on much firmer ground when talking about general findings regarding IQ: The heritable component is polygenic, just like height. This means that there are innumerable alleles which promote its development, and these come from mother and father in apparently equal measure. In contrast, the environmental component to IQ relates to education, nutrition, and test practice (you can literally practice yourself "smart," although the gains will really just be on your score, rather than your underlying ability). This kind of information can be found in places like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
I can also say with confidence that ancestry percentages are very easy to measure in Americans using commonly available options like 23&me; for example, here's a typical result for an African American: https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/African-American-Example1.jpg But you can see "Oceanian" is an undifferentiated yellow color - it's not well researched. If not enough people participate in the ancestry project, then it will be harder to accurately detect markers for Indigenous ancestry vs white Australian ancestry, and there may not be enough Australians involved. The general paucity of information regarding Indigenous Australians is pretty disappointing - you can see the IQ map Scott Alexander is discussing here just shows Australia as a whole, and the average IQ of Aboriginal Australians (and Torres Straight Islanders) isn't very well known.
Yes Australian lol. There are not that many of us but we do get around. Who are these blue people you refer to. They sound interesting.
Thanks for replying. I can see you know a lot about the HBD stuff. I don't know much and I find it so interesting but don't like the racist applications.
In the 90s I did a few psych degrees at Aus Unis (which are well regarded or were, things may have changed) and the received wisdom then was that there was not enough evidence to show that IQ tests actually measured intelligence, and that black people were not less intelligent than whites.
So I wasn't citing Rushdon. Rushdon was one of the evil racists that we woke uni students castigated. The paper of his that I cited was a ridiculous one in which Rushdon decides that the middle size penis is the best. It was a big joke back in the day at my uni.
And basically HBD seems to be saying the same thing still with better research that definitely proves a difference but doesn't tell us anything useful about the state of things in the world.
And they the HBDers are still pretty much ignoring the story about why whites score lower on the tests than east Asians. Maybe its the Denisovan genes?
Sorry if I am inappropriate. No social skills, as well as being Australian. But you've been here to Australia? I've not been to the US but your politics is bigly in our lives here at this time.
Research into Aboriginal IQ is totally not done. The indigenous are too intelligent to give us whites any more weapons to use against them.
I think racist Australians take the US black vs white IQ data as evidence that our blacks are not as intelligent as we whites who settled their land and it seems obvious on the surface that the indigenous were stupid and lazy, since they didnt develop a recognisable civilization or much technology that was obviously intelligent but their social organisation gets more and more complex the more we listen to their memories about the long gone traditional life and how it worked.
The Australian Aborigines have Denisovan genes too it seems but not Neanderthal genes.
Whether IQ measures intelligence is really a philosophical question - you define what you think intelligence is, and IQ either matches your definition or not. It's all the same to me.
Really thinking about it, while there is racism in HBD, it's more incidental than foundational, if that makes sense. Genuine American racists in my experience are less interested in IQ and much more interested in conservative ideology. In fact aren't they the same in Australia? Pauline Hanson doesn't strike me as very HBD, much more a garden variety racist.
Lol So true..poor Pauline. I used to walk past her fish n chip shop back in the 70's, which she sold when she was elected, but guess what? It was bought by an Asian family which is quite funny to me anyway.
It was racism against Asians that got her a platform that of course our conservatives ( faux conservatives or neoconservatives) helped her spread. It reslly tapped into our fears about being 'swamped' and losing our culture.
The neoliberal conservatives though, they do like the Asian entrepreneurial spirit and their money, so this anti-Asian beat-up died down and the terrorist Muslims became her focus. The racist tropes about Aborigines that have existed since settlement/invasion, bubbled along nicely flaring up anytime a particular incident focused our attention on some example of ourtageously bad behaviour.
It's youth crime now and aboriginal kids are of course over represented in the numbers of young men who think masculine energy means they have to drive a very fast stolen car at incredible speeds through a city, film it and put it on social media.
My state, Queensland, is a long way from Tasmania, and we are the most conservative state in the country. Our new conservative state govt has enacted 'adult crime, adult time' laws to allow police to lock up these criminals and very young children, 10 years old, in overcrowded watchhouses with adult criminals and sentence them as adults.
The racism against first nations people (that's the correct or best word to use now so the sensitive kind don't feel slighted). It's not the best word imo because what they were was not nations, but I don't have a problem changing my language if it contributes to the conversation about how aborigines and settlers can work together and respect each other as equally valuable humans.
Pauline seems very much like my mother I think from what I read and I watch her face as she speaks. My mother thought she was positively NOT racist, she would carefully explain that she just didn't like them because they were dirty and didn't keep their yards tidy.
If it was pointed out to her that 'they' aren't all like that, she just denied that was of any importance or meant she was wrong. She would say, its commonsense, most of them are like that and most of us are better, so they are the ones who just need to stop being stupid and lazy and work hard like I did.
She wasn't a stupid woman but born in 1924, in rural Australia she only went to school until she was 10 and then had to work at home to keep the farm going. Also raised as a Jehovahs Witness so not much encouragement in her life to be able to question her beliefs and to understand logic.
Ok such a blabber mouth am I. I am retired have lots of time to do what I like and it's quite wonderful to find people like you to talk to, or at. I never really know which.
So well off topic I am now, on this thread. And I thank you for your link. Some really thought provoking insights there.
But, just in case you are interested in this other controversy that is happening here in Australia, I'll link this about the idea of white aborigines.
Using gunpowder to make guns was obviously a good idea, since no serious military today would be without guns. The fact that China didn’t adopt guns widely had more to do with 300 years Manchurian rule.
The Manchus, just like Mongols, derived their military advantage from cavalry archers, which allowed them to rule a population 100x their size. Muskets favor infantry over cavalry, and the Manchu elites knew that if muskets were widely adopted, their cavalry would not survive, and neither would their regime
Yes of course if you want to have wars and win them you need killing weapons'. And the Mongols must have had a very high IQ to understand this but no matter how hard I try I just can’t think that being more efficient at killing others is an intelligent decision and fireworks are a much better use of gunpowder. Killing versus beautiful.
I did enjoy this movie though in which fireworks are used in a very unusual way.
I was wanting to know if there is there any speculation from HBDers that explains how a higher east Asian IQ didn’t result in the east Asians dominating the world with their culture, but the Caucasians with a lower IQ seem to have won or are the Chinese just biding their time to use their higher IQ to impose their culture on us?
Apparently though there are differences in IQ between conservatives and progressives. Definitely HBDers need to do more work on understanding this difference. Are HBDers conservative or progressives?
I like the lower rate of death from guns, that we have here in Australia where lol some Americans say we are socialists and have no freedom because of our universal free health care and the banning of guns.
We have the same divisions but not as deep or wide I think. We are lazier here. I was talking to the son of a friend who had come home after several years in the US and he very much noticed how we Australians are not as energetic in getting ahead as people are in the US where he said everyone has to hustle all the time. Is that what IQ does, impels people to hustle and climb the ladder to the stars or Mars.
In the case of South Africa, is it racist to suggest that if you (even for the good reason of ending apartheid) shift the leadership of a country from a group with an average IQ of 100 to one with an average IQ of 85 you might expect a degradation in your electrical, criminal justice and transportation systems leading inevitably to chaos? Just asking.
Intelligence shouldn't be equated with one distinctive cognitive style. Mind-blind "IQ" tests exclude any measure of the social cognition, perspective-taking prowess and co-operative problem-solving skills that helped drive human evolution. Instead, crudely, autistic "IQ" tests measure a Caucasian male Asperger's conception of intelligence. There are poorly understood tradeoffs. But unsurprisingly, populations with a high burden of Neanderthal "nerd" alleles score highly, whereas populations with a low prevalence of ASD tend to record lower "IQ" scores too. Sub-Saharan African "IQ" scores are further depressed by sub-optimal nutrition - and the role of bad diet in transgenerational epigenetic inheritance complicates the story further. Yet (IMO) general intelligence is a function of one's entire mind and the world-simulation it runs. We'd do well to develop richer measures of full-spectrum intelligence to replace simple minded notions of "IQ".
The whole point of a bell curve, or norm referenced test is to compare the test taker to a group of like people. Using a standard score on a group of people who aren't represented in the normed sample, of course you would see big differences. It's like the person who decided to test this theory forgot to research psychometrics.
The bi directional premise behind IQ <-> Development is a interesting hypothesis. But what is the take on brain development during human evolution as a result of eating meat ? I think the premise is actually compounding better nutrition -> better brain development-> better ideas for farming and nutritional supplements-> better brain development-> ect…
In my mind there are two important qualifications to whether these estimates are significant.
One is simply that people overestimate the importance of IQ, leading it to become a football in the culture wars. As an example of this, a story has recently been passed around the bloggers that someone estimated that Roman silver smelting put so much lead into the air that it reduced the average IQ of people in the Roman empire by 3 points. Whether or not this is true as a fact, I have no idea, but it's clear that it's not *significant* historically. Nonetheless, it really attracts eyeballs.
The other is that it's easy to assemble an argument that the observed national IQ differences are due to "environmental" factors. The biggest factor is the Flynn effect -- which is known to be real -- and amounts to a difference of some 30 points between modern people in advanced societies and people in the same societies maybe 150 years ago. A second factor is inbreeding. Cousin marriage is common in clannish agrarian societies, which includes most of the non-advanced peoples of today. I've seen estimates that the level of inbreeding in Pakistan reduces average IQ by 15 points or more. A third factor is malnutrition and persistent parasitic infection during childhood, both of which are notorious for stunting growth, which almost certainly includes brain development. So let me guess that can cost a population 15 points.
Adding these together, I get 60 points, a full 4 standard deviations. So we can explain away dramatic differences in population IQ averages by "environmental" factors which can likely be eliminated by development.
As a footnote, let me not that inbreeding is a peculiar factor, which is why I put "environmental" in quotes above. In regard to an *individual*, it is genetic -- how inbred you are is fixed when you were conceived. But in regard to *society*, it is cultural -- how inbred people are is determined by the cultural attitudes toward consanguineous marriage. And I will note that for some of the industrialized cultures, it is historically known when and why the culture turned from favoring cousin marriage to disfavoring it. In Western Europe, the western Christian church banned it in order to break up the competing power structures of clannish society. In Japan, there was an outright government propaganda campaign, IIRC in the early 1900s.
I think someone estimated that if IQ were entirely genetic, whites have 100, and US blacks have 85, then African blacks should have 80, which still isn't close to Lynn's estimates.
Per the value cited here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to/comment/86362101 of 18.7% European admixture of African Americans, you'd have 85 = (0.187)(100) + (1-0.187)(X), so X would equal 81.5, which is indeed much higher than Lynn's estimate of mean sub-Saharan African IQ of 69.
If both this and Lynn's study are accurate then this would imply that the IQ difference in sub-saharan Africa is 2/3 genetic and 1/3 environmental, right? Since ~20 of the 30 points are explained by genes and 10 are not.
Of course, either study could have noise or methodological flaws making the difference greater or lesser.
Not really? This is assuming that lower nutrition and such aren't *also* affecting black people in the US... which they *are*.
Right. If African Americans average 85 (although that may have gone up a little over the decades) and are 20% white, while whites average 100 and are 100% white, and if IQ is 100% genetic, then Africans should average 82.
That's not too far above Wichert's African IQ estimate, which would imply that IQ is 80% or more nature. In contrast, Lynn's lower IQ estimate for Africa implies that nurture plays a big role in the gap between African-Americans and Africans.
I was wrong, not 82 but 81.25 IQ in Africa.
American whites aren't 100% white.
Non-hispanic whites in the USA are pretty close to 100% white. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Americans#Admixture_in_non-Hispanic_whites
Doesn't Lynn's IQ measure also suffer from the IQ/g discrepancy that causes the Flynn effect?
That is, my understanding of the Flynn effect is that IQ doesn't exactly measure g (the true general intelligence factor) but measures some proxy that is somewhat improved by literacy/education, and for most of the 20th century those were getting better leading to improvements in apparent IQ (but not g). Shouldn't we expect sub Saharan Africans to have lower IQ relative to g (since their education and literacy systems are often terrible)?
And then the part about them seeming much smarter than a first worlder with similar IQ makes sense - they'd do equally badly at tests, but in their case it's because e.g. they barely had a chance to learn to read rather than not being smart enough to think of the answer.
(Or a slightly more complicated version of this - e.g. maybe they can read fine, but never had an education that encouraged them to consider counterfactuals so those just don't come naturally).
Yes, probably. I'll add something about this in.
There is also psychometric bias. I know that cremieux corrected for psychometric bias in the Israeli PISA results and it went up a lot of points. I don't know if he ran the analysis for other countries.
I guess a bad education system can cause psychometric bias.
In general, item-level data for between country comparisons are lacking. For this reason, it is difficult to evaluate measurement bias. Remember though, that bias does not necessarily cause a bias in the mean gap, nor does it always favor the higher scoring group, it may favor the lower scoring group. For this reason, some researchers like Russell Warne prefer to just speak of IQ score gaps, since we don't know the degree to which the international gaps are due to general intelligence specifically. Not yet anyway.
Yeah. For instance in this example the psychometric bias made Ashkenazi IQ look lower than it actually is.
It’s hard to tell a priori what genetic g is gonna be in all of Africa. It’s large and heterogenous.
Could I get a link to that discussion?
It’s paywalled Cremieux piece on Israeli IQ estimates
The notion that IQ test scores represent genetic potential while school achievement test scores represent nurture strikes me as dubious.
Uh isn't that the opposite of what he said? He was saying that IQ test scores are not a perfect measure of g.
It's a common assumption among people who participate in acrimonious debates over the average test scores data from around the world. But as I've been arguing since 2002, the much lower scores seen in sub-Saharan Africa than among African-Americans suggests that impoverished nurture plays a role in holding down African scores.
The high correlation globally between IQ test scores and school achievement test scores suggests to me that both nature and nurture play a role in both kinds of scores.
The variation due to heritability is often taken to be something like 50-70% when considering the US black-white gap. What percentage could we judge the variation between US whites and sub-Saharan Africans to be heritable? It has to be lower at least.
Is there a way of mathematically estimating what the same magnitude of Flynn Effect would do to SSA scores if they were exposed to the environmental components that caused it?
A reasonable point. However, all the national IQ datasets use corrections for Flynn effect gains, so as to keep things comparable over time. Since we lack proper ratio scales, arbitrarily, British Whites were set as 100 IQ, and everybody else is scored relative to them. It turns out that the gains across cohorts are approximately the same speed everywhere, so the countries have (so far) kept their relative gaps.
I've read that the Flynn effect has plateaued and reversed in first world countries while still being a thing in the third world. Not true?
If the Flynn effect is correlated with better nutrition and living standards, then when you see graphs for life expectancy stalling out or going downwards, and increasing numbers of people on unhealthy lifestyles, that would be the expected consequence.
Recent studies actually indicate that the Flynn effect has plateaued or even reversed in many developed countries. Norwegian military conscripts have been declining in IQ since ‘75. In Denmark, there was a minor rise in conscript IQ between ‘59 and ‘79, then virtually no movement for about 20 years then a minor drop more recently. A study of British teens between 1980 and 2008 showed decline of more than 2 points. In the U.S. a large Northwestern University study focusing on ‘06-‘18 saw a reverse Flynn effect as well.
This all jibes with my personal, general impression that people (including myself) seem less sharp than they did 30 years ago.
I'd be curious as to what portion of that decline is plausibly attributable to recent immigrant groups, or was this looking exclusively at the indigenous population of norway/denmark/britain? I guess you'd expect some nonzero dysgenic effects over the same period regardless.
Great question. I don’t know.
The selective service datasets should be less affected by this since immigrants will only have to do it when they become citizens.
Still you'd want to look at country data from time periods with relatively little immigration. Eg Denmark only had a few percent immigrant population by 1990 so you can trust the plateau data from Denmark as not being caused by immigration.
PISA test data break out school achievement test scores for natives, first generation, and second generation immigrants. In most countries other than Australia and Canada, immigrants have the net effect of lowering the national average.
Environmental cadmium has been increasing over time. I'm not sure how large the effect is. And, of course, the reduction of environmental lead might have an opposite effect. They are things to control for if possible, in any case.
I think that's true. It is also very strong evidence for environmental as opposed to genetic factors. Nutrition, education, and all the other environmental factors increased massively in Europe post-WW2. Even running water in private homes in rural areas, or electricity, are to a large extent 20th century innovations. (Yes ancient Rome had water pipes, but making them out of lead sort of disqualifies them again.)
Life expectancy, which is an ok proxy for environmental factors, also seems to have stalled if not reversed.
In experimental economics, it is well understood that it is not enough to translate a questionnaire for it to work in a place like rural Malawi. You need to do a lot more work to, say, elicit risk preferences in a meaningful way. This would presumably also apply to an IQ test. Clearly, if you just translate the test, your results would be pretty meaningless. Then again, you shouldn’t assume that it would be possible to reach a point where understanding is as good as in the West, as that would require average IQ levels to be the same. If I were to do this, I’d try to measure several different proxies of IQ and see how they compare with results from Western countries. If all proxies are roughly equally lower, it would be good evidence of an underlying difference in IQ. At the opposite extreme, if some are much lower but others are roughly the same, it would be evidence that there are no IQ differences.
As I pointed out in my 2002 review of Lynn and Vanhanen's "IQ and the Wealth of Nations," it's unlikely that the genetic potential of the descendants of people in sub-Saharan Africa is only a maximum of 70 IQ or whatever they currently score, because their relatives in the US score 15 points higher. On the other hand, IQ tests weren't designed to predict genetic potential, but instead individual potential. An adolescent in Malawi who scores a 70 on an IQ test is likely to grow up to be about as economically productive as a Westerner who scores a 70.
> An adolescent in Malawi who scores a 70 on an IQ test is likely to grow up to be about as economically productive as a Westerner who scores a 70.
How do you measure that? If you look at income, the westerner will likely earn much more money, just from being allowed to work in Western labour markets.
>if you just translate the test, your results would be pretty meaningless.
Not to worry: many efforts beyond this have been made; it's understood in psychometrics as well. In general, IQ tests are not considered to be very culturally biased, or at least not as far as anyone's been able to show (e.g., people tend to get the same questions wrong, rather than a differential in "cultural suitability" becoming apparent).
It's been a while since I had all the data at my fingertips, and people like Sailer or Kirkegaard will be able to discourse upon it more adroitly than I anyway, but if there's pushback I'll try to dig up what I've previously written re: cultural bias on IQ tests.
(Particularly amusing was when an especially "culture-neutral" IQ test was touted across Tumblr as finally closing the "IQ gap", because Africans scored higher than whites or Asians. Eat it, racists! ...Except they were interpreting the results wrongly: Africans had scored /lower/, just as in the other---[presumably,] evil white supremacist---IQ tests. I wish I could find my screenshots of the fallout---I believe Scott's old Tumblr had a post about it too---but I've lost them with my old hard-drive.)
>If I were to do this, I’d try to measure several different proxies of IQ and see how they compare with results from Western countries.
Unfortunately, even many proxies aren't available for African nations, but this has been tried---as far as possible---with stuff like e.g. African emigrant university admissions tests (obvious sample bias here, but when it's all you've got...), PISA and the like, etc. The results are roughly about what you'd expect.
I don't even know what 'culturally non-biased intelligence testing' is supposed to mean if intelligence has any effect on culture or vice versa. IQ tests just (attempt to) measure cognitive phenotype, disentangling causative factors comes afterward.
I'd interpret it as something like the difference between "look at this sequence of pictures and see which of these other ones should come next" and "which of these English words can be both a noun and a verb?", or something...
...although it is hard to imagine that there are very many ways to "culturally bias" a test without including obvious "general knowledge" elements; I've never actually encountered a different operationalization of the concept.
Here's what I wrote in my 2002 review of Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen's "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" on the nature vs. nurture issue:
"A clear example of how a bad environment can hurt IQ can be seen in the IQ scores for sub-Saharan African countries. They average only around 70. In contrast, African-Americans average about 85. It appears unlikely that African-Americans' white admixture can account for most of this 15-point gap because they are only around 17%-18% white on average, according to the latest genetic research. (Thus African-Americans white genes probably couldn't account for more than 3 points of the gap between African-Americans and African-Africans.) This suggests that the harshness of life in Africa might be cutting ten points or more off African IQ scores.
"Similarly, West Africans are significantly shorter in height than their distant cousins in America, most likely due to malnutrition and infections."
There has been a big increase since I wrote this in 2002 in NBA players from Africa, but also in 2nd generation Africans raised in Europe (e.g., Giannis and and the half-black Wemby). Growing up African in a basketball-crazed first world country like Greece, as Giannis did, seems pretty close to the nature-nurture sweet spot for NBA talent.
There is an interesting study of a district in Kenya where life improved notably on most measures between 1984 and 1998 (e.g., more electricity, more schooling, better nutrition, better healthcare, and other good things), and the children's IQ scores rose by an average of 11 points:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/10764139_IQ_on_the_Rise_The_Flynn_Effect_in_Rural_Kenyan_Children
I don't think anyone (including Lynn) disputes that there's room for environmental improvements in SSA or that these aren't hobbling cognitive development in various areas.
The question is what the target for social metrics like GDP or PISA scores or homicide rates are supposed to be if we're never getting to 'equal', and if you can convince blacks themselves to, shall we say, moderate their expectations.
I believe the current best explanation of the Flynn effect is that it doesn't represent a true intelligence gain. It's not measure-invariant, which is the statistical test used to validate that IQ tests are actually measuring IQ. Flynn effect gains are concentrated in visuo-spatial abilities and so may represent the effects of an entire population learning to drive or watching tv or some other culturally-pervasive skill.
That being said I suspect that the 60 IQ figure would probably respond rapidly to modern nutrition, literacy, or general familiarity with test taking. My guess is that African American IQs roughly represent the genetic potential of sub-Saharan Africans.
> My guess is that African American IQs roughly represent the genetic potential of sub-Saharan Africans.
I think that if you did an experiment where you took a sample of African American babies and sent them to be raised in Asian American households you'd find that there were still gains to be had.
Something as simple as a cultural value of "someone randomly hands you a test -- do you try really hard to do your absolute best, or do you just sorta do it casually while thinking about something else?" can make a huge difference on an IQ test.
Existing twin and adoption studies disagree with that. I agree that childhood performance can be influenced (somewhat) by environment, but the current consensus is that shared environment accounts for ~5% of adult IQ variance in the US.
5% isn't that small. If we raised all black babies in Asian households then maybe we couldn't get them to 105 or 100, but could we get them to 90?
I don't think the ceiling has been reached. If we could get pregnant women to stop using alcohol and drugs we could probably buy a few more points. If we solved childhood malnutrition then a few more points after that.
Ninety might be a reasonable ceiling. Look at racial IQ scores by SES. The white-black gap only closes by about 5 points at the top. I think that represents the most you can achieve with environment. Five percent is, in fact, pretty small.
The Minnesota transracial adoption study failed to show any benefit for black children adopted by white parents.
As Cremieux discusses in this thread: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1658951641142382593 motivation has been found to not make a huge difference on an IQ test.
I think there is a good chance that African-American culture has developed some dysfunctional tendencies over the last 60 years, more than some other black cultures.
As I recall from grade school, black boys who did well in school were told that they were "acting white", and beaten.
I suspect that the research on "motivation" hasn't involved randomized trials on the effects of physical violence and ostracisation from one's community.
Didn't see the New Yorker joke coming, good one.
New York Times, although the difference in joke is probably immaterial
What is a good general publication for people with an IQ of 100?
Substack
Ha! Ha!
Less Wrong
This might be the worst place to ask this, but I’m guessing something like People’s or Times Magazine. 100 IQ is the modal IQ, so presumably something mainstream and popular is what’s targeted to them.
imagine waking up from a head injury and finding that you now love people magazine
I didn't know it: my God! It's awful (and i'm not even 100...)
I'd have to know -more- than I do now to love People magazine. Whenever I see a copy, at a grocery check out line or in a dentist's waiting room, the cover is filled with names of people I've never heard of. That they're usually only given by first name doesn't help.
It's probably aimed a little lower. They don't want to bore the high level types, but given that, they want as wide an audience as possible.
As far as I can tell (dentists and doctors used to stock them) it's mostly gossip. They don't argue philosophy.
The scary thing is that People Magazine in the 1970s was written at a much higher level than it is today. Same for Time, of course.
No one here would know.
The Economist
The Economist ain't too bad.
Caught me off guard, as well. Scott needs to break out his comic chops more often. I had a good LOL.
> the difference in joke is probably immaterial
I feel like it matters to Scott.
I guffawed and then text-messaged my buddy a quote of the paragraph. Scott so rarely goes for cheap potshots, so it's fun when he uses the opportunity to indulge his grudge.
He has every right given how he was treated by some specific people at The New York Times. But I was nonetheless disappointed, since I expect better from Scott than to tar many guiltless Times workers collaterally. That and a cheap joke undercuts what was otherwise a serious post.
The implied point is that all the decent people (should have) resigned in protest after The Article.
What does decency have to do with IQ?
The remaining people are bad people. Unintelligent people are bad people. Therefore, the remaining people are unintelligent.
Ah yes! Excellent use of logical reasoning. Don’t forget the bad people are also ugly and virgins because of their low IQ and morals.
Be careful! Scott didn't say that the people working for the NYT are stupid.
Many of them are probably more intelligent than necessary for the job.
I enjoy a well-executed cheap shot as much as the next guy, but I really hope people don't explicitly hold this view w.r.t collective employer reputation!
...Why? Nobody is forcing them to work for mainstream media. They're all complicit. All guilty.
What's your response to a zealous prog attempting to cancel someone for working in finance, or tech, or defense, or fossil fuels, or real estate development, or health insurance, or anything explicitly right-wing? Overestimating the power of reputation effects is a real horseshoe move these days.
> I was nonetheless disappointed, since I expect better from Scott than to tar many guiltless Times workers collaterally . . . a cheap joke undercuts what was otherwise a serious post.
I don't think you'd hold either of these positions in other circumstances. That is, if the target was aligned more toward your political enemies, would you really still take a single-line (less!) throwaway gag as seriously "tar[ring the] guiltless" and "undercut[ting ...] a serious post"?
I dunno; I just have a hard time imagining anyone really thinks either of those things---that a single, less-than-one-line, obvious joke "undercuts" the substantive points around it, or that the targets need to be worried over.
Scott occasionally taking shots at the NYTs is one of my favorite ongoing ACX Jokes
Same. It is glorious.
A classic moment in the ACX NYT discourse was when Scott referred to a headline about a survey on minimum wages that said "Most Economists Don't Think Minimum Wages Reduce Employment". The result of the survey was roughly 30% said there's a reduction, 10% said not, and 60% said unsure
These are both good points. But the other major factor that I think should be reassuring about Lynn's estimates (and other cross-national IQ estimates) is that when you look at "non-problematic" sources that seem like proxies for IQ (e.g. World Bank data, educational performance), you see the same pattern as Lynn and others' IQ data.
It's easy for people to quibble about each and every IQ measure (and so people do), but that we see the same pattern of results using otherwise uncontroversial data sources should be reassuring.
My concern is that when we see a CIA fact book page about GPD per capita next to an IQ chart for the same country, the inclination is to think "they *deserve* to be poor because they're dumb." The people most likely to say this are also the people who oppose foreign aid. They oppose interventions even in our own country.
I'm not thinking of GDP per capita, I'm thinking of measures that are more cognitive.
I'd question how strong or universal "the inclination is to think "they *deserve* to be poor because they're dumb."," based on observing a correlation between national IQ and GDP per capita.
But, even so, I think it would be important to acknowledge that association and acknowledge that it is very plausibly at least partly causal. Even on an entirely environmentalist view of IQ differences, it's important to acknowledge that the proximal cause of poor outcomes is that the populations, in fact, have lower ability. Otherwise one will incorrectly assume that if you e.g. merely give currently-low-IQ people access to laptops or move them to richer countries or remove this or that other barrier they will be able to perform at the same level.
All good points. It's just that the reason Scott's post is "controversial" is that there really are racist people with influence in our politics who really do want to pursue pure social Darwinism. So it requires extra pushback (IMO).
The Enlightenment is, in my opinion, a good example to keep in-mine, where people gave up their old racist, prejudiced ideas based on religion and ignorance.
Then they turned right around and stated the Same Old Racist conslusions, only now it was "Scientific." Written examples abound.
While I'm on the topic, an excerpt from a letter by Charles Kingsley, the clergyman and writer who had been enlightened (to an extent) by Darwin:
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012Sc%26Ed..21..977H/abstract
"The nineteenth-century Anglican Priest Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) was a significant populariser of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Kingsley was successful in this regard because he developed such diverse connections throughout his career. In the 1840s he associated with Chartists and radical journalists; in the 1850s and 1860s he moved freely in scientific circles and was elected Fellow of the Linnean Society of London in 1856 and Fellow of the Geological Society of London in 1863. In 1859 he was appointed Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen. In 1860 the Prince Consort was willing and able to secure Kingsley appointment as the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University and he subsequently became tutor to the Prince of Wales. Thereafter he was frequently invited into high Victorian Society. A friend of `Darwin's Bulldog' Thomas Huxley, of the eminent geologist Charles Lyell and a correspondent of Darwin, at every turn he sought to promote Darwin's ideas as theologically orthodox, a life-long campaign in which he was eminently successful."
From a letter to his wife, dated July 4th, 1862, when he was on holiday in County Sligo:
https://ia801205.us.archive.org/18/items/charleskingsleyh02king/charleskingsleyh02king.pdf
July 4.—".... I have done the deed at last — killed a real actual live salmon, over five pounds weight. This place is full of glory — very lovely, and well kept up....
"But I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don't believe they are our fault. I believe there are not only many more of them than of old, but that they are happier, better, more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful ; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours...."
Yes, the poor English: nothing is ever their fault. And now I had better quit before I break into a rollicking chorus of 'The Wolfe Tones' Greatest Hits' such as "A Nation Once Again" and "Come Out Ye Black and Tans".
Lynn had his own prejudices on this topic, but I don't think IQ research overall has been particularly unkind to the Irish.
https://russellwarne.com/2022/12/17/irish-iq-the-massive-rise-that-never-happened/
The Enlightenment did a lot of good in a lot of areas, but it also spawned the Blank Slate as a fundamental political theorem (despite never actually having a particular basis in evidence or experiment), and the writings of Rousseau and the Reign of Terror can be considered a prelude to Marx and Mao.
The question is what kind of pushback is more effective. Personally I think it's entirely possible that the whole concept of applying IQ worldwide is a poor one to begin with - after all it's just a proxy metric, not the thing-in-itself we want to measure, so there's many ways it can fail and cultural/learning differences are obvious ones. But some people are so desperate to push back they deny that IQ can ever measure anything at all, call the g-factor itself racist as a concept and basically go all in into "you should not even suggest that there is something as human intelligence differing between individuals at all". Which is sort of insane and patently false. There is a point where pushback that is too obsessed to denying the opponents' arguments on a level as fundamental as possible just regresses to the point of trying to gaslight people about very obvious truths, at which point it just loses credibility and risks dragging down its entire enterprise.
Scott's post seems to be along the lines of "you don't need to deny these results even to be anti-racist, you can in fact point out that they are evidence of problems you already care about (namely: non-white countries having been driven into conditions of poverty and deprivation by colonial exploitation)". Of course it's still entirely possible that the results are false and wrong (I'm not that convinced myself), but his point is, you don't even need to concede that if they were true THEN scientific racism would be correct. They're not evidence for that.
I teach a university level course in psychology, and one of the modules we cover are the biological effects on intelligence. We review the IQ differences between racial groups in the US, and discuss possible causes. We almost always end up coming to very similar conclusions to those you outline.
> problems you already care about (namely: non-white countries having been driven into conditions of poverty and deprivation by colonial exploitation)
It's true enough that implied audiences accept such things as gospel, but the exclusive fixation on the cardinal sin of colonialism is about as silly as IQ denial. Poverty and deprivation are the human default throughout history, not the curse inflicted by White Devil (of course, he is often guilty of perpetuating and exacerbating them). The millionth excoriation of colonialist exploitation won't create a modicum of actual wealth, and "progressives" would do well to turn their attention to that instead of perpetual grievances and redistribution.
Fixing the problem (were that possible) would deprive the activists involved of substantial status and power gained by whining about this. This is true for many, if not all, of society's problems.
> of course, he is often guilty of perpetuating and exacerbating them
I mean, that's the core non-insane claim. Then of course all sorts of wilder ones get tacked on sometimes, and the question of why some areas of the world just suffer from worse economic outcomes to begin with is straight up ignored (I've seen Jared Diamond's famous suggested answer from "Guns, germs and steel" labelled as racist, which is kind of absurd since its whole point was to counteract racist narratives - no one does anyone any favours by denying that colonisation could happen because Europe obviously WAS leaps and bounds above other continents in military technology and productive capacity). But the fact that industrialised countries DID in fact exploit those regions and DID in fact stunt their economic development in doing so by funnelling out their resources and sometimes DO still keep messing with them for geopolitical or economic reasons is obviously kind of relevant to the whole thing, even if you think that without that messing those areas would still suffer a certain degree of poverty and underdevelopment for unrelated (geographical, cultural, climatic) reasons.
That's what I've been arguing since 2002, but it's not like the Southern Poverty Law Center has thus announced, "Steve Sailer's moderate reasonableness should be a model for thinking about this topic."
I live in hope for that press release.
I don't think Darwinism can actually be escaped, there are just more and less civilised ways to go about it.
Your complaint seems to imply that you would rather people believe things that are false so long as this leads them to favor your preferred policies. I find this stance even more offensive and outrageous than the object level policy differences.
But what policy conclusion should we derive from this? My conclusion is that one very good way to promote global GDP would be to invest in better educational infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa.
This is not the conclusion everyone comes to.
There's some truth to this, but there's also the question of sustainability, especially if the population of SSA quadruples over the next century while the tax-paying populations of investor nations keep shrinking.
That's why you design the infrastructure so that it produces it's own tax base. After all, that's what we did.
Can you elaborate on this?
Did you have any specific people in mind who are powerful in politics who believe this way?
I think you're failing to model these people's minds.
Your mention of *deserve* is interesting to me because that is related to moral fairness. Fairness is a kind of value that liberal people tend to focus on. I think liberals who focus on fairness are actually the kind to believe that dumb people do not *deserve* aid - precisely the reason it is important that there are no dumb people to be found!
Reactionaries might talk about IQ differences to explain hiring disparities in certain industries. Those reactionaries are not saying dumb people deserve to lose the job. They are not saying smart people deserve the job. Reactionaries do not believe jobs are status trophies to be allocated fairly. Fairness, and "deserve" is a strictly liberal concern.
That is just one example but the same is true for international aid or any other kind of policy that involves tradeoffs. In the case of aid, these people simply do not believe aid should be allocated fairly. They probably believe it should be allocated effectively or something.
I mean, Trump himself is a fan of the “racehorse theory” of people. It’s part of why he didn’t won’t to allow people from “shithole” countries and wondered why we weren’t attracting more people from Norway. He’s also talked in speeches about the “good genes” of his supporters and “bad genes” of immigrants.
Sure, allocate aid effectively, but that’s not the nuanced argument being made by Charlie Kirk and other MAGA influencers. Trump listens to people like that, not Scott Alexander.
Not wanting immigrants from low-IQ countries, absent an effective sorting mechanism (i.e., legal immigration, which Trump doesn't oppose), is perfectly reasonable under the assumptions above---not evidence of some sort of "they deserve to suffer, mwa ha ha!" mentality.
It might be more persuasive it Trump said that instead of calling them shithole countries.
> Those reactionaries are not saying dumb people deserve to lose the job. They are not saying smart people deserve the job.
Okay come on, where did you get that idea? Do you think reactionaries don't value justice? Everyone, regardless of political ideology, believe that there are people that deserve things and people that don't. The only exception are those few eccentrics that don't believe in free will.
You can deserve things through your own choices, but I have difficulty saying that someone deserves a job (or whatever) for being smart, because being smart is an accident of birth, not a choice.
Does someone deserve to be poor because they're stupid? No, that doesn't make sense.
On the other hand, you can simultaneously believe (a) being stupid will cause them to be poor, and (b) no injustice has been done.
Is it fair that a smart person also gets to be rich, and a stupid person also gets to be poor? There's a big difference between those who say "no" and those who say "this question is meaningless".
I don't think reactionaries are totally indifferent to concepts of fairness and merit and desert, it's just they don't believe that merit generalises in a universal manner across all possible status hierarchies. The smartest, most loyal, and most hard-working man in all of China might make a wonderful leader for his own country, and a terrible leader for, e.g, Japan, depending on where his ultimate loyalties lie. This is part of the problem with the H1B debate.
Do the rich deserve to be impoverished because they're smart?
Unless you're a hardcore equalising communist, some non-zero portion of a person's income is going to be attributable to their own talents, and unless you believe in global government, there isn't going to be a wealth-redistribution mechanism that scales across all nations. Under HBD assumptions, this means that some countries who are mostly filled with genetically handicapped people are going to be very poor relative to others.
Sure, you could have some non-zero level of charitable redistribution, at both the national and global level, and I'm not entirely unsympathetic to that goal. But then we need to settle on some workable target for how much poverty-alleviation would be satisfactory, precisely. If HBD is true, then we're never getting to equal, so... what should the per-capita income of Malawi be relative to Singapore, under ideal conditions, and what levels of wealth transfer would be involved?
> Do the rich deserve to be impoverished because they're smart?
Does anyone deserve anything? Everything about someone's early environment, including their genes and the culture they live in, is not under their control. So they haven't done anything to "deserve" anything good or bad their get out of it.
Later in life people do have more control over their environment -- but only based on their foundations laid down in their early life.
Some people might be cleverer than others and so earn more money. But they didn't make themselves clever. One might argue that some people work harder than others and so deserve wealth from that. But maybe they only work harder because their genes and early environment cause them to do so.
So "deserve" is empty, meaningless. The most we can say is that society can get good results if it rewards some behaviours (like increasing overall wealth) and punishes others (like murder).
If you're defining some behaviours as socially beneficial to reward and others as socially beneficial to punish, then you're defining standards of desert.
In any case, go ahead and solve for maximum global utility integrated over the next 1000 years under the assumptions of HBD and homo sapiens being an evolved primate motivated by self-interest with mostly parochial spheres of moral concern (which are close to being the same thing.) You can't alleviate suffering without funding, have to get funding through tax/charity, tax/charity has to be derived from incomes derived from work being done, people are motivated to work by keeping at least a substantial fraction of their income, and all long-term effective political/institutional hierarchies require decentralised delegation of local authority. Solve for X and I'm fairly confident it's going to look roughly similar to the picture I painted.
You know, barring some more radical scenario where benevolent AGI takes over the planet or we genetically engineer all humans to be saints, or something. I don't know if physics forbids this, exactly, but I wouldn't bet on it happening either.
I agree with what you've written here and above, and also with what Ponti* up there has written---they don't seem to be in any sort of tension, to me (see below).
.
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*...well, sort of. I think that "deserve" is, in fact, a meaningful concept, and the considerations Ponti Min outlines don't preclude this; e.g., perhaps Person A has responded to poor environment by becoming a murderous savage, and Person B was able to overcome the inclination under the same conditions: neither chose what they started with, but I'm comfortable allotting blame to one and praise to the other. We can argue over some Pure Ultimate Philosophical sense of "deserve", I guess---but for all practical purposes, everyone acts as if deserts are a thing, and acting this way leads to the promotion of "good results" anyway (so the concept is perfectly cromulent even by the standard alluded to at the end of P. Min's comment).
Hence, I'm not really sure what the user's point was meant to be, or how s/he thought it contradicted yours.
> and unless you believe in global government, there isn't going to be a wealth-redistribution mechanism that scales across all nations.
Georgist land value tax says hello.
A state capable of resisting territorial conquest and regulating commerce to any meaningful degree - which, granted, not all manage, but it's still a pretty low bar, difficult to credibly claim even the most dumpster-fire of a country couldn't *someday* achieve it - is ipso facto capable of allocating land-use rights, and assessing and collecting the portion of rent which is primarily attributable to the value of the location, rather than to personal efforts or accumulated capital.
Then that location-value revenue (modulo other state expenses, monetary supply concerns, etc.) can simply be handed out to citizens on a pure per-capita basis. Those with greater aptitude would then presumably make better use of what they get, and suffer no automatically scaling tax burden for having done so.
Georgist land tax is just a mechanism for adjusting how you appropriate wealth from your population in the first place with (in theory) minimal damage to incentive structures. It does nothing to solve the two problems I mentioned (vast, genetically-driven differences in ability to generate wealth in the first place, and the inefficiencies of attempting to scale central governance.)
I don't think people think "they deserve" to be poor. I think it's more along the lines of "this explains why they're poor and why sending them aid probably won't change that." Which seems like a reasonable thing to think.
Deserve ain't got nothing to do with it, as a quotable man once said.
You can't deserve to be poor because you're dumb, because you didn't choose to be dumb. However one might look at the data and draw other conclusions which may or may not be justified, such as:
1. It is not surprising that these countries are poor, because the people are dumb
2. Being dumb is the main reason that these countries are poo
3. There is no point in doing anything to help the economic situation of the people in these countries
or alternatively
4. We should try extra hard to help these people since they're dumb
I don't know what "deserve" has to do with it, but since the application of human intelligence is the primary source of wealth one would expect IQ to correlate to GDP per capita. This has very little to do with whatever principles of distributive justice one might prefer. The only difference it makes is that it refutes any claim that the richer countries got that way by plundering the poorer ones, but that's not a necessary premise to support foreign aid or domestic welfare programs. The popularity of things like disability benefits demonstrates that people will actually support taking care of people who can't take care of themselves.
What's problematic is that IQ is designed as a proxy for intelligence and people tend to assume it is one; what these results show is that it's only a halfway decent proxy within a specific cultural and socioeconomic context and the relationship breaks down when you apply it to very different countries. In other words the "IQ test" at the national level becomes equivalent to a school achievement test. But if you phrase it that way (people in poor countries score lower on standardized tests) it's no longer controversial.
> What's problematic is that IQ is designed as a proxy for intelligence
More precisely it was designed as a proxy for academic ability. That is to say, they asked people as load of questions and kept in the tests that questions that were well-correlated with how well the test takers did academically.
> In other words the "IQ test" at the national level becomes equivalent to a school achievement test.
Indeed, by design.
Raymond Cattell was developing 'culture-neutral' IQ tests back in the 1950s, and there are even tests that don't rely on a formal written education to be evaluated (picture tests, raven's matrices), but unless you think culture and education have zero influence on intelligence or vice versa I don't see why the two should be uncorrelated.
IQ tests evolved to measure potential for performing in the modern world.
The first American IQ test, the Stanford-Binet, was introduced in 1916 by Stanford professor Lewis Terman in what became the heart of Silicon Valley. Lewis's son Fred Terman, Dean of Engineering at Stanford, is probably the best candidate for Father of Silicon Valley, although others point to Fred's friend William Shockley.
My point is that early IQ test designers correctly guessed in which direction life was moving, which helps explain the Flynn Effect: the world has gotten more like what some Stanford professors hypothesized it would a century ago, so subsequent generations have more practice dealing with machine logic and the like in daily life, so they score higher on IQ tests than their forefathers.
By the way, all these people are considered deplorable eugenicists today: e.g., Lewis & Fred Terman Middle School in Palo Alto had its name changed to that of a city councilwoman who introduced bike lanes to Palo Alto, rather than a compromise proposal to drop outspoken eugenicist Lewis's name from the school and just name it after Fred Terman, because the hereditary taint of eugenics is disqualifying unto the seventh generation or something.
Not surprisingly, the former Terman Middle School had the highest test scores of any public middle school in the state of California. It's almost as if real estate values in Palo Alto are so stratospheric because Stanford and its offshoots like HP and Google have successfully carried out the Termans' strategy of finding and recruiting smart people.
>> What's problematic is that IQ is designed as a proxy for intelligence
> More precisely it was designed as a proxy for academic ability.
"More precisely"? Nonsense. What do you think the I stands for?
>what these results show is that it's only a halfway decent proxy within a specific cultural and socioeconomic context
How do they show that, exactly?
They... don't. Some people will latch onto anything that means they don't have to think about a world in which intellectual ability varies on anything but a purely individual level, though (and some don't even like to admit /that/).
I find the impulse people have, these days, to obsessively focus upon "group justice" a very strange thing. It isn't hard to find folks that are perfectly willing to contemplate that Person A has a higher (genetically-mediated) "IQ ceiling" than Person B---but suddenly, this becomes a huge issue if we say Group A vs. Group B... even though anything unfair about the latter situation is also unfair in the former, and no one extra is hurt by it (groups don't have sentience, as far as I can tell---only individuals).
The data is---for now, anyway---available to anyone who wants to look at it; and yet many will go around saying stuff like "I bet those dumb white supremacist psychometricians never considered that the tests could be CULTURALLY BIASED!" without ever themselves considering if /maybe this was, in fact, considered---and obviated./
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Similarly, you'll have people---as in these comments---saying stuff like "well, even if IQ does turn out to have a genetic component that varies between groups, we shouldn't let this get out because what's the point? this knowledge can only be used to hurt people!"... but they've either never tried to reason this out, or else did so poorly.
For example, perhaps knowing this could prevent resources from being wasted---could be used to prioritize interventions that don't depend upon a blank-slate premise? Or: if differential performance between groups is a thing not amenable to environmental influence, what does that say about legislation predicated upon the idea that it /is/---could one perhaps end up penalizing certain segments of the population over and over (because the results keep coming out unequal so clearly their environment still isn't good enough)?
Etc., etc. It's all very tiresome, though, and I have to stop scrolling because otherwise I'll waste all day replying in anger to people down here.
(Very few legitimately irritating comments encountered so far---except the comment you replied to, heh---but that's because SSC/ACX readers are generally a cut above; I know I'll run into infuriating takes eventually, though...)
I don't rule out the possibility of different genetic groups having differences in in their average genetic potential for intelligence. In fact, at least some small difference would have to exist if any of the relevant alleles differ in frequency in the two populations. The thing is, "genetic potential for intelligence" is nearly impossible to measure. You would have to find populations that differ genetically but are the same in all other ways. You certainly couldn't divide up by *country* which correlates only loosely with genetics and introduces tons of confounders. All the results I've seen (and admittedly I am not familiar with all of the literature on this) don't do any genetic testing, but base their claims on proxies like location or race that have obvious correlations to environment. You write off cultural bias as a solved problem, but culture certainly affects intelligence (by any definition for which you can devise a working test). If you're trying to measure the effect of genetics then whether the test is culturally biased is not really the issue; the culture, not to mention other factors in the environment like nutrition, can also be "biased".
I didn't choose my words carefully enough when I said these results "show" that IQ testing is a poor proxy for genetic intelligence potential when the variation in environments is large enough. Rather, these results reflect that fact, one which should have been obvious to begin with.
And to address your second section, the point is not that we have to hide information if we don't like it. The problem is people are trying to convince the public to trust in bad science that has been concocted to support their preferred policy approaches - namely, they want to ignore inequality of outcomes, so they pretend it can all be explained by genetics and there's no point trying to fix it. Whether or not trying to create equitable outcomes is a good idea (I think sometimes, but it's a tough problem), the science simply doesn't support the claim that it's all due to genes.
>I don't rule out the possibility of different genetic groups having differences in in their average genetic potential for intelligence.<
Then you're a good deal ahead of many other people, and we may not really disagree very much!
>The problem is people are trying to convince the public to trust in bad science that has been concocted to support their preferred policy approaches ... so they pretend it can all be explained by genetics<
/Are/ they? Most of the bad science on this issue that I've personally seen goes the other direction. There is an extremely strong bias against this sort of research, such that the fact it still exists at all is an indication of how strong the case is.
>they want to ignore inequality of outcomes<
I think, rather, people on "my side" have no problem acknowledging inequality of outcome; they just think it is a poor metric to use in assessing the "fairness" of society. If you have groups that will not achieve equality of outcome with other groups /given equal opportunity/, the question becomes: "is it fair to let them sink or rise to the level they are able, or are we on the hook to give unequal opportunities until outcome doesn't systematically differ?"
>The thing is, "genetic potential for intelligence" is nearly impossible to measure. [...] All the results I've seen (and admittedly I am not familiar with all of the literature on this) don't do any genetic testing, but base their claims on proxies like location or race that have obvious correlations to environment.<
I think that the first part of this isn't correct---depending on what exactly we mean by our terms and what standard we apply (it's been done to the same standard as, say, "genetic potential for height")---and that the latter is based upon a misapprehension regarding a) the correlation between race & kinship/ancestry, and b) the necessity of genetic testing for group membership at all (i.e., if we're interested in systematic differences between racial groups, "race" isn't a proxy; there may or may not be between-group variation, but if there is, whether or not your testees [haha] cluster tightly or loosely, in re relatedness, is a different question)...
...but I also think it doesn't matter too much---as mentioned below, as long as we agree that "a little of column A, a little of column B" is probably (or, failing that, at least /could be/) the case, in re group differences in ability, then I'm fine with that and don't much care where exactly the line ends up being drawn.
IME, it's a bit of a motte-and-bailey situation: the vast majority of anthropologists, psychometricians, population geneticists, and so on will report that they believe current between-group differences are most likely both environmental and genetic in origin (i.e., given equal environment, gaps would close but not entirely). But /in practice/---in our public & political discourse, say---you must hold to an "it's entirely & completely due to differences in environment" position. (I've seen it happen more than once that a hapless scientist or academic will fly too close to the sun, and say something insufficiently environmental-y enough... then the media/X-twitter feeding frenzy begins, of "DR. X SAID [GROUP] IS /GENETICALLY DUMBER/ THAN [GROUP]!!!" These days, most know not to touch the topic with a 20-foot pole, heh.)
>the science simply doesn't support the claim that it's all due to genes.<
I don't believe anyone holds this position... but I'm not sure whether I'm nitpicking here (i.e., if your position would be the same if we substituted "mostly due to genes" or "half due to genes"), or whether I'm advancing an important counterpoint (i.e., if you would be surprised to learn that most hold some position between "50/50" and "80/20", and/or to find that the science /does/ support the revised claims).
>I didn't choose my words carefully enough when I said these results "show" that IQ testing is a poor proxy for genetic intelligence potential when the variation in environments is large enough. Rather, these results reflect that fact, one which should have been obvious to begin with.<
No worries; I've probably made many statements that could be picked apart by an uncharitable interlocutor, heh. (E.g., heredity really doesn't have separate "genetic" and "environmental" components that can be disentangled in any given instance, so to speak of it this way isn't strictly correct---but everyone knows what one means anyway. I hope...)
I think I interpreted your statement to mean "IQ tests don't really measure intelligence"---although it's been a while, so I'm not entirely sure, heh---and I, of course, think IQ is a pretty /good/ proxy for what we mean when we say "intelligence". I also think that the evidence supports a contention of "some of the tested IQ difference between racial groups would vanish given equal environments, and some wouldn't"---but the exact proportion doesn't matter so much, to me.
What gets /me/ upset is those who will refuse to credit the notion at all, so that various interventions in society become a never-ending treadmill: all of any differential in outcome must be due to environment, so we must change environment; hmm, we still see unequal outcomes, so we need to give further preference to the lower-performing group; hey, the outcomes are still unequal even looking at populations like "Harvard students"---...
...sooner or later (sooner, usually), the idea "well, the better-performing group must be /doing something bad/ for this situation to obtain" is hit upon. But---in the case wherein we're dealing with a difference in outcome that isn't caused by some societal bias or inequality of opportunity---it will persist, and persist, and persist, and the "it's racism!" must become more and more totalizing (unconscious racism! systemic racism! everyone's a little racist! racism in tech, nation built on racism, math is racist, grades are racist, racism is racist---wait a sec...) as it appears that this problem is /even more insidious & deep-rooted than we feared/, and the societal interventions must become more & more drastic...
...and I don't think it ends up anywhere good. (YMMV, of course, as to how much of this treadmill you think we've already seen; I, obviously, think we're already running at a good pace.)
Anyway, /that's/ the reason I think it's important---not because I'm married to "IT'S 100% GENETIC", but because I think "IT'S 100% ENVIRONMENT" a) is definitely not the case, and b) becomes, when an article of faith, a pernicious influence.
>1: Isn't It Super-Racist To Say That People In Sub-Saharan African Countries Have IQs Equivalent To Intellectually Disabled People?
>
> No. In fact, it would be super-racist not to say this!
Yes! If any good at all comes out of the ongoing scandal of Pakistani rape gangs in England and the English legal system's long track record of enabling of them out of a fear of appearing racist, it will be discrediting this viewpoint once and for all. (Or at least for the next 20-40 years or so. That seems to be as long as it takes even the worst of ideas to pop back up anymore.)
>Or at least for the next 20-40 years or so. That seems to be as long as it takes even the worst of ideas to pop back up anymore.
Just long enough for the people in charge to retire and be replaced by a generation that wasn't there to learn the lessons the hard way.
I don't understand the connection you're trying to draw here.
The common pattern of:
A: *makes a fact-based claim*
B: No, that claim can't be true, and should not even be discussed, because it's racist!
This is a form of the "Appeal to Consequences" logical fallacy.
"X" cannot be true because it would be terrible if "X" was true.
In this case 'terrible' is 'massively racist.'
You seem to imply that the legal system is still enabling grooming gangs, whereas they are being investigated and brought to justice. The fear of appearing racist certainly did exist; as did other problems such as the police not believing the girls involved because they were from poor parts of the cities; but social workers, the police and the legal system now seem to be effectively investigating these crimes. (Or as effectively as the legal system works in general, anyway).
Yes, they are *finally* being investigated and brought to justice, but only after the problem had raged on for well over a decade, only after people who tried to bring the issues to light were ignored at best or legally persecuted at worst, only after Elon Musk stepped in and used the world's biggest megaphone to make the problem impossible to continue to ignore.
Continuing with the enabling at every turn, until you are compelled not to do so by overwhelming outside forces, does not earn you any credit for finally doing the right thing when you are only doing the right thing because you were compelled to do the right thing by outside forces.
You are badly misinformed. Here is a timeline of events. Note that effective investigations started about ten years ago, and have improved since. https://news.sky.com/story/grooming-gangs-scandal-timeline-what-happened-what-inquiries-there-were-and-how-starmer-was-involved-after-elon-musks-accusations-13285021
If the investigations were effective, it wouldn't still be going on ten years later.
Look at the middle section of the article: "What inquiries have there been?" It's a long list of investigations into the problem, that found there clearly was a problem, and that it was being covered up by people in positions of authority who should have been fixing the problem. And then there was another investigation a few years later that found the same thing. And then another one. And then another one.
What there never was was people putting a stop to it.
One thing I don't quite get here is... Musk is trying to use this to attack Starmer, who is a little left of center by US standards and that's some kind of red flag to a bull apparently.
But why isn't "Starmer's political opponents have been in power for over a decade now and drove all the failed investigations you describe; go kick them for failing the kids" being used as a rebuttal to specifically anti-Starmer rhetoric?
"we should expect blacks everywhere to have an IQ of 85, since they all have the same genes"
AFAIK, that is far from true. While "white" may be a descriptor for a group of somewhat similar genetic backgrounds, having common anchestors not too far in the past, "black" is different, grouping populations of similar skin color, but common anchestors diverging way further back in time.
That's fair - I just meant that US and African blacks come from the same genetic background. I'll make that clearer.
That's true for people from coastal West Africa (e.g. Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast), but much less so for other parts of Africa. Many African population groups are more closely related to Eurasian peoples than to each other, and internal genetic diversity is AIUI higher than the difference between non-African continents. (Caveat: not a geneticist, my impression of the field may be wrong. I tried summarizing it here: https://www.deviantart.com/concavenator/art/Human-Genealogy-1100506801 , but do note the generous corrections in one of the comments.)
I've edited it to make this clearer, but Lynn says Nigeria has IQ 69 so this isn't a big driver of any effects here.
I'd really like to find some proper IQ studies done for Nigeria, but failing that, all I can offer is a cruddy online test site:
https://brght.org/iq/country/nigeria/
"Based on the 1274100 people who completed an IQ test at BRGHT, the average IQ of people in Nigeria is 96.40. With this IQ score, Nigeria ranks #169 on the list of countries by average IQ."
Obviously self-selected, but better than 69!
As to how we stack up on that site:
"Based on the 1274100 people who completed an IQ test at BRGHT, the average IQ of people in Ireland is 101.56. With this IQ score, Ireland ranks #75 on the list of countries by average IQ."
Since I despise Lynn's fudges, I'm choosing to believe a stupid website over anything he pulled out of his arse.
There are at least eight different sources listed for Nigeria in the NIQ dataset, including four from researchers with visibly African surnames, so I think we can rule out racial bias as being an overriding source of data contamination here. You don't have to take my word for it, go read the original papers.
https://www.ulsterinstitute.org/ebook/THE%20INTELLIGENCE%20OF%20NATIONS%20-%20Richard%20Lynn,%20David%20Becker.pdf
Nigeria has a national test for college admissions. The highest scoring Nigerian state is one that's all Igbo. The lowest scoring states are in the Muslim north. Nigeria has big regional affirmative action preferences for northerners to keep southerners from getting all the spots in public universities.
> Nigeria has big regional affirmative action preferences for northerners to keep southerners from getting all the spots in public universities.
How does the system work? China does this too, except that they give big regional affirmative action preferences to... everyone. Chinese universities have much larger admission quotas for local students. ("Local" being defined by province.)
The Chinese will happily tell you that in the absence of the regional-quota system, all of the universities would fill up with people from Fujian. Interestingly, the top university in Fujian, Xiamen University, does not appear to be one of the very top schools in China overall.
There's also Chisala's arguments about Scrabble and Nigerian immigrants in the US/UK which make it extremely implausible that the average IQ is so low.
How? Pakistani immigrants to the US are very intelligent. Pakistani immigrants to the UK are not. Immigrants never give you a good read on what the average person who didn't emigrate is like.
Getting into the US or the UK from Nigeria is very difficult. What would you expect of those people?
idgi, shouldn't u at least select a west african country since malawi will be some genetically unrelated people who happen to have dark skin?
Most black Africans, including all the major ethnic groups of Malawi, are the descendants of the Bantu Expansion, when Bantu-speaking peoples, starting from about 4000 years ago, spread out from central west Africa and almost entirely replaced the indigenous populations of eastern and southern Sub-Saharan Africa (and the Bantu peoples are the largest branch of the larger Niger-Congo linguistic family, which covers most of tropical West and Central Africa). The Malawians are not so different from the ancestors of US blacks as to make it a specious comparison.
Yes. Afro-Americans derive about 70% of their ancestry from Niger-Congo-speaking peoples, who are about as genetically similar to eachother as native Europeans.
Right. The Bantu, along with their West African relatives up into, say, Senegal, are rather genetically homogeneous. For example, Lagos, Nigeria and Lusaka, Zambia are about 3,500 miles of bad road apart. Yet, as Harvard geneticist David Reich notes:
"…the frequencies of mutations in groups in Nigeria and in Zambia are more similar than the frequencies of mutations in Germany and Italy despite the former two countries being separated by a far greater geographic difference."
Bantu is primarily a linguistic and cultural grouping, though. You have all kinds of populations within it.
Pretty much all linguistic and cultural groupings are also genetic groupings (albeit imperfectly correlated) too, outside of colonial languages that have converted more conquered imperial subjects to speaking the language than there are members of the ethnic group whose original language it was. With the Bantus in particular, to the degree that they have absorbed admixture from Pygmy- and San-like populations, or other highly divergent human groups that once existed on what is now Bantu-occupied territory, they will be somewhat more genetically diverse than comparable linguistic groups in other parts of the world. But from what I gather, the fate of the pre-Bantu Sub-Saharan African populations tended to be extermination rather than absorption a lot of the time, with the net result that the Bantus are not _so_ genetically diverse as to make a comparison between Malawians and tropical West Africans unfair.
Malawi is still a largely Bantu country.
AFAIK, US blacks are overwhelmingly descendend from a specific west/central african group.
Well, whites and African blacks come from the same genetic background, too.
American blacks will be closely related to some African blacks, but not necessarily all.
All humans come from anchestors in Africa. Some left thousands of years ago and became white, others stayed, but those that stayed didn't all remain closely related, AFAIK.
So the distinction between whites as a genetic population vs African blacks as a genetic population is misleading. The latter is a group so wide it should include whites when we talk about genetic anchestry. We just overlook it for reasons of skin color and geography, which are not good shorthands for genetic anchestry.
It's like saying one is different from two, and two comes out of the group one-to-five, so one is different then the group one-to-five. Well, that is true, but not what we mean, and misleading.
But I am no specialist on this topic.
People like to say this, but the truth is that Descendants of American Slaves (e.g., African-Americans whose ancestors arrived via the Atlantic slave trade) are pretty homogenous in ancestry (other than their share of white admixture). Most are descended from Iron Age farmers who expanded over much of Africa, roughly the western half of the continent, from a spot near the Cameroon-Nigeria border, mostly displacing the hunter-gatherers who had lived there previously.
As we know, genetic differences within Africa are huge (because humanity spent so much time there that it had time to diverge, while far fewer groups exited Africa), so it would be interesting to learn if there are also wide IQ *differences* between these different African groups.
Potential example from Sweden: Ethiopian immigrants are _far_ more successful than Somalians, although at least part of this is likely cultural (Ethiopia is Christian) and social (Somalia is a failed state)
there are other differences. ethiopians are more likely to be immigrants, and more likely to come via selective channels like for education or employment; somalis are more likely to have come west as refugees. selection effects often dominate between-group comparisons, and i think this is no exception
The Christian Igbo do well on the Nigerian college admission test and the Muslim northern Fulani do not.
The Igbo appear to be culturally a little like the Parsis in Bombay: a minority group who welcomed the British Empire and molded their culture to emphasize European learning. In contrast, the northern Muslims did not look avidly on the new culture introduced by the British.
Whether the Igbo were seen as smarter than other Nigerians before the British Empire introduced the chance of European-style schooling seems to be up in the air. David Hackett Fischer's recent book on the African origins of American blacks notes that American slaveowners had differing opinions of the Igbo's economic potential. Slaveowners around the Chesapeake Bay sought out Igbo slaves, while slaveowners further north and south didn't like them. So, I dunno...
But it's not a single genetic background, is it? Africa is more genetically diverse than almost anywhere else on Earth (which makes sense: it's the only place where humans did NOT go through the bottleneck of "whichever group decided it made sense to go explore all that other land north").
That actually makes your argument stronger. If the measurements are even half accurate (which TBF seems a big point of contention and probably should be dealt with much more in depth), then why would you see such homogeneous results across a vast region that has a significant genetic diversity, if the thing measured was genetic? Makes no sense. But what that map does is correlate almost perfectly with a map of GDP.
> Makes no sense.
It makes perfect sense. Compare: "Why would you see such homogeneous skin color across a vast region that has a significant genetic diversity, if skin color is genetic?" Skin color is a genetic trait common to the entire population, in spite of all of the genetic diversity, and the same could easily be true for intelligence.
Yes, why would a human population that started out dark-skinned in the first place retain an obviously adaptive mutation to high UV irradiation in an area with high UV irradiation? One can not possibly guess.
Does this take into account race mixing? Given our history, almost all US blacks are actually mixed race, but still count as "black". Some quick googling tells me the average U.S. black has about 20-25% European DNA. If the effect from DNA to IQ is linear that's not enough to explain the gap, but the effect might not be linear, and regardless I think this merits some discussion as a potential counterargument for the pro-genetics side.
See my comments here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to/comment/86362101 and here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to/comment/86373707.
Until recently, most people who self-identified in the US as black tended to have some but not all that much white ancestry, the great majority being, say, 3% to 35% white. There weren't all that many Americans outside of Louisiana (and to a lesser extent South Carolina) who were more than 50% African but less than say 90+% white.
This is due to the workings of the One Drop Rule in America, which strongly encouraged marriages to not cross the color line. In Brazil, in contrast, there are plenty of people who are, say, 75% white and 25% black.
Recent studies of racial admixture have found a modest IQ gradient depending upon percentage of white admixture among kids identified by their parents as having two African-American parents. But because most historic African Americans are pretty similar in terms of their white admixture percentage, it's not that easy to see in daily life. My impression is that people sincerely disagree on this question of whether you can notice a Light and Bright pattern in daily life.
Of course, the admixture studies, while they could have (but didn't) falsify the hereditarian hypothesis, don't prove it either because perhaps the world in some fashion favors fairer-looking African Americans.
>Don't prove it either because perhaps the world in some fashion favors fairer-looking African Americans
You're probably aware that studies have analyzed that hypothesis with negative results: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1659285719708233741
My impression is that whites in America don't pay much attention to subtle differences in apparent racial ancestry between blacks: e.g., I've seen lots of movies starring Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, and Morgan Freeman, but I couldn't tell you who is fairest and who is darkest. I just have them mentally categorized as African-American.
I'd imagine blacks, on the other hand, pay more attention.
It seems to me that this should cause more confusion regarding what to make of Lynn's data. The (almost) only thing that the extremely diverse black people have in common genetically is some genes that make their skin dark. It would be extremely surprising if those same genes also had something to do with IQ.
Or on the reverse, it would be quite surprising and serms unlikely that the genetic mutations that make Europeans and Asians light skinned would also make them smarter.
Yeah, big mistake there. I think Razid said once that there is more genetic similarity between a British and a Japanese than some people living in the same savannah, that speak different but related languages. The genetic diversity in Africa is huge.
Technically true but the vast majority of black africans share bantu ancestry and they are the ancestors of african americans. There are a couple of big groups in NE Africa - the Horn of Africa. The big variation is given by tiny groups like the Bushmen and pygmies.
So most africans are pretty similar but a few are very distinct.
Right. The great majority of African Americans are pretty similar West Africans or Bantus.
Vast majority of African Americans derive ancestry from the Yoruba people from West Africa and not Bantu people. This is a fairly easy fact check that I don’t think even a low-IQ NYT reporter would have missed.
Yoruba is a Niger-Congo language so is related to Bantu.
Yoruba (and Igbo, and Wolof, etc.) is a Niger-Congo language, but is not normally considered "Bantu".
Have a look at this map, for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantu_peoples#/media/File:Map_of_the_Bantu_languages.svg
That's linguistics, of course. You're still right that all these groups are closely related genetically.
Much of Africa's diversity is in earlier branches of humanity as pygmies or San, but most of population is product of late expansion of agriculturalists and pastoralists. Slaves shipped to Americas were of some mixes from Western Africa and it doesn't seem that different countries of destination got different mixes of countries of origin.
Indeed.
David Hackett Fischer's recent book African Founders uses the outstanding data that now exists about where African-Americans come from, but doesn't find much of interest.
Yes, though with some caveats. There is an ancient DNA boom happening currently and we're still in a phase of much discovery, but generally speaking the data is pointing in a direction that a distinct population of people went somewhere roughly around the area between the arabic peninsula and the black sea, underwent a rapid (in historical terms) evolutionary adaption towards northern climates, and then from there spread west and east, which developed into modern caucasian/asian classifications. The people who stayed behind in africa are the ones we consider black (subsaharans at least, mediteraneans, even if they have very dark skin, often have had considerable caucasian admixture for centuries).
This means that yes, subsaharan blacks have a much higher diversity than either asians or caucasians. But at the same time, they all collectively lack the highly functional adaptions that caucasians and asians share, so especially if you compare all three groups, blacks will often end up collectively being the outlier. But for IQ in particular I agree; There is good evidence for significant diversity.
>But for IQ in particular I agree; There is good evidence for significant diversity.
Like which evidence? Igbos seem much higher in IQs, but they do not have their own country (it's hard to win war of independence when all countries in UNSC except one are against them).
Countries are in general a bad classifier in Africa. Tribal/ethnic groups are much better, of which Igbo is one.
Most regions in africa have a multitude of tribal/ethnic groups with significant genetic diversity, and these groups also consistently perform differently when tested. Especially in africa this is likely partially due to environmental factors and selection effects, but together with the mounting evidence towards the very high polygenicity of IQ and that the test score differences can also be seen for immigrants from these groups in western society, it's quite unlikely to be entirely.
We are discussing here a dataset for countries not ethnicities. Do you have one for the latter?
High genetic differences doesn't mean high genetic differences in IQ. High genetic diversity means they sit in one place for tens of millenia and do not evolve. Most of this variance doesn't affect phenotype at all.
I was replying to a post relating to a specific claim that all africans are likely to have the same IQ average since they share the same genes. That claim is false, since the assumption is false. That Scott's article is overall about Lynn's dataset has little bearing on the the statements veracity. In addition, since the tribes have distinct geographic spreads, we still expect some considerable variance on the country level, which is what we see. That variance will just be horribly mangled since, as said, the country-level is not a very good lens.
On the second paragraph, that may be a claim one can make. Given the large diversity of environments in Africa, I find it wildly implausible to say the least. In addition, most studies on evolution in general, especially the well-known Lenski lab 50.000 generations e-coli study, show that evolution pretty much never stops, and that even in equal environments, while the direction of evolution might be broadly similar, many functional differences will develop.
There is also the problem that under most mathematical models of evolution the expectation under weak/absent selection pressures is not stagnation, but regression, since genetic drift dominates, and genetic drift in turn is dominated by LOF (loss of function) mutations. See the concept of mutational load if you're curious.
>Given the large diversity of environments in Africa
Africa does not have populations that have diving adaptations. Africa does not have population with high altitude adaptations.
Africa does not have island archipelagos
Almost no snow. In Eurasia glaciers went back and forth. You evolve faster if you go from 20 lattitude to 60 and then back to 40.
https://www.cremieux.xyz/i/140558598/igbo-brilliance
I'm actually not aware of *any* country in modern Africa which corresponds to actual tribal/ethnic divisions among population groups, because modern borders are based on colonial divisions which had nothing to do with those, and after decolonization, the various countries of Africa decided that reorganizing borders according to ethnic divisions, given decades of history maintaining borders and infrastructure set by colonial powers, was unfeasible.
Well you would ask yourself why there is no such thing that some African country got such mix of tribes so their average IQ is >85. With so many countries, wouldn't one, just by accident, get it?
I don't think that follows at all. It depends on what the distributions of the different tribes/ethnic groups is like and what averages are more common among them.
States within Nigeria represent tribes to some extent. Here's a Nigerian op-ed with data on Nigeria's college admissions test and how much scores differ between the most Christian Igbo state and the most Muslim Fulani state:
https://www.vanguardngr.com/2013/06/why-govt-should-revisit-admission-quota-system/
Yes, but whether this changes the conclusion depends on how long it takes for selection effects to impact the genetic component of IQ. As it turns out, SSC posts suggest this can happen pretty fast!
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/29/four-nobel-truths/
IIUC, this implies that for any populations that diverged much more than a handful of centuries ago, if their environmental influences are similarly impactful, then selection effects should push them towards a similar level of genetic-component-of-IQ, even if the specific genes and specific environments are very different. It shouldn't matter too much whether the divergence happened 1kya or 5kya.
It would be interesting if there were large IQ variations between comparably-unrelated-to-European-people populations in Africa living in societies with similar levels of wealth, economic development, and exposure to Western culture and education. Are there?
Came here with the same objection. Was annoyed enough by it to unsubscribe; glad to see Scott amend the sentence, at least.
Though if you put your thumb on a globe when looking at historical sources of immigration to the US, that's less true than you'd think. A remarkably large fraction of the "white" "blood" (that is, ancestors circa 1500) were from a zone of Europe from Ireland to Germany, roughly 500 miles. But given the patterns of the slave trade, a remarkably large fraction of the "black" "blood" in the US comes from a zone of West Africa that is ... roughly 500 miles. Africa has tremendous genetic diversity, and there are "black" Americans who carry almost all of it, but on average, US blacks are a narrow sample of that diversity. (I once read somewhere that the burliest people in the world happen to be West Africans, and given that slaves were taken to be used in heavy field work, it's not surprising that the savers focused there.)
Leaving aside more recent arrivals from Africa like the Obama line, African-Americans appear to be a pretty representative sample of sub-Saharans from, roughly, the western half of America. I recently reviewed David Hackett Fischer's "African Founders" about where African-Americans came from in Africa, hoping to find "Albion's Seed" like regional patterns. But, instead, African Americans tend to be fairly mixed from most parts of western Africa.
E.g., the Gullah of the Sea Islands in South Carolina, whose dialect is the most African of various African American dialects and who appear to have mostly lived there at least since the trans-Atlantic slave trade was banned in the early 1800s, are a mixture of people from Senegal and from Angola, which are a long way apart.
I've been looking for years for evidence that African-Americans include descendants of the more exotic sub-Saharans such as Pygmies and Khoi-San, but haven't found much.
Harvard geneticist David Reich points out that the popular talking point that Africans are the genetically diverse people doesn't really imply what people think it implies.
As you probably know, but would almost certainly appreciate knowing on the off chance that you don't, Clarence Thomas's first language was actually Gullah.
Estonians and Albanians are also over 1 SD apart. This can happen in a couple of generations.
There were probably also selection effects involved in enslavement and transport across the Atlantic (which had a high death rate) as well as admixture from rapist slave owners.
I've always thought it weird that people will assert that IQ tests just measure your parents' income and then say that countries with three-digit GDP per capita, widespread malnutrition, and limited formal education can't possibly have very low IQs.
Of course, it's not true that IQ tests just measure your parents' income, but obviously there's some level of environmental impoverishment that can lower IQ, even if it's far below the poverty line in wealthy countries like the US.
I think that argument is made in pure bad faith, as in no one who makes it really believes it or uses it's conclusions.
Agreed, except for the bad faith. I think they've convinced themselves that they do believe it, but it doesn't actually govern their expectations. Or they've just never noticed the implications.
I think "never noticed the implications" is the most common. Most people rarely think through their models of the world to actually take note of what they predict and how this does or doesn't align with their observations.
Right. I've been pointing out the evidence that nature and nurture both play a role in African average test scores for 23 years, but my taking a moderate, reasonable stance on this controversial question has yet to make me all that popular.
but it's coming
I think you are right "bad faith" is the wrong term, it is well described by Hanania in the below article. For instance there are lots of people who believe in body positivity and would praise their friends for it but would be horrified if you said they looked plus-size, it is sort of sublimated preference revealed under even light examination.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/anti-woke-as-autism
This has struck me before - there are an incredible amount of people online who officially believe:
1. X impairs mental development significantly (X ranging from poverty to lead poisoning)
2. US black people suffer from X disproportionately
3. Anything showing a difference in mental development between US blacks and other racial cohorts is biased and untrue.
But if 1 and 2 are true then 3 must be at least somewhat true (across the population, obviously not individually).
Are you sure that's true though, I would think the much more common alternative belief to 3 is:
3'. Anyone wanting to research and talk about differences in mental development between US blacks and other racial cohorts is probably motivated by racial animus or sinister goals.
That's a bailey version of a response that I've seen a lot. But it doesn't make sense in a lot of contexts where it's deployed.
For instance, if there's an employer (let's say in Tech) who has a 1% black workforce. Would those same people accept 1 and 2 above and agree that this employer is making a rational decision to only hire qualified people and that black people, owing to 1 and 2, are far less likely to be qualified?
The implied further argument is the OP's #3, rather than yours. Otherwise disparate impact would not be a thing and all interventions would be about poverty and pollution or whatever.
A 1% black workforce doesn't in itself prove anything. Even accepting that the objective of an employer is simply to hire the highest IQ employees, we'd still need vastly more detailed data including on distributions and local demographics to tell if 1% is the expected proportion of black people in a truly colour-blind (but myopically IQ-obsessed) company.
(I personally think such a statistical approach is on a hiding to nothing and that it would be better if everyone focused more on fair hiring methods rather than on achieving or defending specific hiring outcomes.)
In any case though the implied further argument is not OP's #3 in my view. It's that big companies have the power to reduce #2 by giving more people more opportunities and therefore they should. It's that it's part of their social responsibilities and will help create a world where #2 is not true, and – once in that ideal world – #3 will hopefully follow. A degree of idealism is at work, which many find preferable to the fatalism of using stats to limit aspirations and influence perceptions of an individual just because of the group they are in.
It's almost certainly that. Ask someone who doesn't believe in IQ or in real IQ differences what their reasons are, and mostly what you get is a summary of racist science that was used to justify exploitation. I think what you have here is a population of people (at both ends of the political spectrum) who have very low trust in the power of objective research to drive policy agendas.
This doesn't make them right, but it does mean they have what appear to them to be rational reasons for opposing certain forms of research. The risks outweigh the potential gains, in their view.
A huge fraction of well-educated people are simply ignorant of the social science data on racial differences in test scores and crime rates. For example, Bowdoin professor Tyler Austin Harper is a bright and fair-minded guy, but in his review in The Atlantic of Richard Hanania's book on affirmative action, most of his ire was concentrated on a few of Hanania's lines that assume that racial differences in average test scores exist. Harper simply didn't know about the social science findings, nor, it appears, did his editors at The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/richard-hanania-origins-of-woke-book/675348/
As someone who does believe in IQ as a concept but not as a useful one, I wonder why so much interest is in the differences between African and whites. Seems like some sort of obsession to me.
And that too, who is white? When did we become white?
Why not be interested in why East Asian IQ's are higher than we whites. That's fascinating to me. And what about Indians. Do Hindus have a higher IQ than Muslim Indians. That would seem rational. And how do they score against Africans?
So many interesting comparisons to be made and all you bang on about is whites are smarter than blacks.
As I sais, I think IQ is a useless concept to measure people's abilities. I actually used to administer real IQ tests like the WAIS and there are so many reasons why a test does not explain anything about what intelligence is. Clearly not, if you look at the stable geniuses who are going to be taking over the free world and makeing it more free.
Most HBD-interested parties _are_ interested in higher East Asian IQs. But surely the reason the white/black gap is so salient is that that is the one which underlies most of the racial grievance politics in the US - far more people are outraged by the fact the blacks are underrepresented in prestigious occupations and the ranks of the wealthy, and overrepresented among arrestees and victims of police violence, relative to their population numbers, and are agitating to tear down meritocratic and law-enforcing institutions for those reasons, than are outraged about any analogous white / East Asian gaps. Therefore, if you are a fan of keeping crime under control, and of allocating high-stakes, cognitively demanding positions to the people most capabale of fulfilling those duties well, it is of particular importance to have good information on whether average intelligence differences, rather than racist discrimination, accounts for the disparities observed.
The "Who is white" question is of course a valid philosophical question, in a Sorites paradox sort of way, and stems from the human tendency to lump things into a finite number of discrete categories rather than dealing with the complexity of smooth, continuous gradations (note that we do this with literal colors too, of which there are infinitely many possible locations on a color chart, but that does not make concepts such as "blue" or "green" vacuous), and there are countries where any racial classification system quickly becomes untenable given the amount of admixture (e.g. Brazil, where, regardless of whether you call yourself "white", "black" or "mixed", almost everyone has some non-negligible European and Sub-Saharan African Ancestry), but for the USA, you can pretty much just use "what race people say they are on a census form" as a workable proxy for any purposes where you need to compare outcomes vs racial ancestry.
Hmmm in Australia we have a similar problem with some people asserting that the first people here, some of who are having trouble choosing to use their intelligence to adopt our western way of intelligent life, are blamed for their unintelligent choices.
I like your philosophical explanation of whiteness but I want some specific estimations from the HBD people about how this difference in IQ evolved. 🙃
Unfortunately the article is behind a paywall, and I can't read it. Can you quote the relevant section?
"Hanania has a habit of punctuating dense, judiciously footnoted paragraphs—which cite academic books, law reviews, and government documents—with racist or sexist claims that aren’t backed up with evidence. For example, a section on the paradoxes of “disparate impact” laws provides several pages of properly cited legal history before arriving at this claim: “An employer who wants to use intelligence tests to hire is potentially barred from doing so because whites could do too well.” This claim, that white candidates would be likely to outscore Black candidates on intelligence tests, is not footnoted or otherwise supported with evidence..."
"a few of Hanania's lines that assume that racial differences in average test scores exist."
I have nothing to go on but the section you quote, yet it seems even from that the reviewer was more concerned with Hanania's claim that employers might be barred from using intelligence tests because whites might do too well, not simply that racial differences exist.
Yeah, the lead poisoning explanation is a particularly clear example of environmentalists not quite realising the implications of what they're saying. Arguing that a significant portion of the black/white IQ gap in, say, the US is due to lead poisoning is to argue that black americans have brain damage (given that lead poisoning literally damages brain tissue.)
I mean... okay, if that was true, it would definitely warrant serious investigation and thorough efforts to repair water infrastructure and improve health and safety standards and maybe issue public apologies and compensation for the families affected, bu-uuuuut.... we don't give brain-damaged people special dispensation to get into Harvard or try to promote them as doctors or civil engineers or act mystified if they rarely become partners at law firms. These are not things one would expect from a brain-damaged population. It wouldn't be fair to them, let alone their patients and clients.
This is kinda the fundamental problem with all affirmative action programs. Even if you disregard the problem that you can't discriminate in favour of X without discriminating against all not-X, it's essentially a license to claim injury while insisting there is nothing wrong with you. That story doesn't add up.
It's worth noting that if the black/white IQ difference is due to some fixable environmental difference, it would be worth spending the whole military budget on fixing it. We're talking about millions of Americans being condemned to a worse life overall, plus vast sums of wealth being lost because less intelligent people are on average less productive.
Sure, but... what is the secret formula supposed to be, exactly? Do you think the US government hasn't already allocated many trillions of dollars to attempts at closing racial performance gaps?
Every human problem is theoretically fixable with enough genetic engineering, of course, but that would require acknowledging that the problem was genetic to begin with.
I think it’s very important in this conversation to examine what an IQ test is- what kind of intelligence it actually measures- it is specific and intelligence is a much broader phenomenon than something to be tested in a western model (literacy dependent?) exercise. The question ‘what is intelligence’ should be in the center.
This is one of the five stages of IQ grief. The bargaining stage, specifically.
LOL, good one.
"Different intelligences"
That would be a much longer post. And then Taleb might show up and call everyone Imbecile
I'm reminded of Cosma Shalizi's writing on this, in particular the phrase "liberation from the concrete" in http://bactra.org/reviews/flynn-beyond/
> As well as preferring answers which show familiarity with our current scientific concepts, IQ tests also reward certain kinds of problem-solving abilities, what Flynn describes as solving "problems not solvable by mechanical application of a learned method" (p. 53; I don't think he really means to deny the possibility of AI). Prime examples, to his mind, are things like tests of similarities and analogies, and pattern-completion tests like Raven's Progressive Matrices. In the latter, each question consists of a series of line drawings, followed by a choice of several extra drawings from which the test-taker is supposed to pick the one that completes or finishes the sequence. (See here for an example.) Raven hoped that his test would be a fairly pure measurement of ability to "educe relations", i.e., to discover patterns, which he regarded as the essence of intelligence. Raven's test is often said to be subject to little or no cultural bias (a claim resting on basically no evidence whatsoever). Yet it is on tests of this type that the Flynn effect is strongest, 5 points per decade at the least. Below them come similarities and analogies tests of the rabbit/dog kind. Scores on vocabulary, arithmetic and general-information tests, on the other hand, show the lowest rates of improvement, and even some small declines.
> Flynn refers to these transformations in how we think as "liberation from the concrete" and "putting on scientific spectacles". His claims that the Flynn effect is a consequence of the changes in how people live and what skills they cultivate brought about by the industrial revolution. We now overwhelmingly keep dogs as pets, not to hunt, and we go to schools where we are not just taught to read but to think abstractly, and to use a common set of abstractions. Flynn refers here to the well-known work done by the great Soviet psychologist A. R. Luria in the 1930s, described in the latter's Cognitive Development: Its Social and Cultural Foundations (1974). Luria claimed to show, by means of fieldwork among peasants and nomads in Uzbekistan, that the kind of abstract reasoning skills Flynn points to developed in tandem with literacy, schooling, and participation in the modern economy. While Luria's work has flaws (an Uzbekistani peasant who had abstract reasoning skills, confronted in the 1930s by a Russian Communist official asking them strange and leading questions, had many excellent reasons to play dumb), his findings are broadly consonant with later work on cross-cultural psychology.
Right. But the implication of this is that IQ test designers in the 1905-1940 did a good job of anticipating in what direction daily life would evolve. The Ravens test, for example, looked super alien in the 1930s but by 50 years later, it seemed less bizarre, so the Flynn Effect on it was huge.
Similarly, on the Wechsler, the subtests with the smallest Flynn Effects tended to be in the most culturally loaded ones, such as vocabulary and general knowledge and were bigger on the weirder-looking more culturally-fair subtests. If the good friends Charles Dickens and Charles Babbage came back to life in 2000, Dickens would probably find that people with his literary interests didn't seem notably more clever than in 1850. But I suspect that Babbage would quickly find that a much larger fraction of the population could grasp what he was interested in than in 1850.
Exactly that. Some time ago I was looking through historical exams, it is very remarkable how the tests in language and general knowledge have gotten easier while mathematics have gotten harder and better at testing actual ability, instead of requiring memorisation of proofs, during the last 200 years.
This is an unironically stunning and brave article and I'm here for it. I appreciate your post.
> US blacks are a little more intermixed with whites than African blacks
Are you suggesting black people in africa are commonly mixed with white people? Why would that be the case outside of south africa?
It reads the opposite to me: he's suggesting that US blacks are commonly mixed with white people, while African blacks aren't.
I read it again, still reads to me like he is saying both are similarly intermixed, us ones a bit more. If I am saying House A is a little closer to the beach than House B, I am not saying House B is not at all close to any beach. I am implying House B is also close to the beach.
It's a rhetorical phrase. I don't know where you're from, but it's pretty common for Americans to say "X is a little bit more Y than Z is" when what they literally mean is that Z is not Y at all.
no idea if that is what he meant
Scott isn't an idiot, so presumably he doesn't mean that Africans in Africa have similar white admixture to US blacks.
Indeed this. Or maybe he knew that non-African admixture in SSA is very low but did not bother to look if it 0% or 0.1%. Why care? ~20% in American Blacks is a significant thing.
But seems like he is building a whole argument around the two groups being comparable.
81.25 x 0.8 + 100 x 0.2 = 85
Most Africans have some significant ancestry from ancient Arabian pastoralists, calling them White is a bit of a stretch but it is definitely West Eurasian.
I don't believe this is true. maybe in somalia
Sources
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1313787111
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.22.600206v1.full
interesting
My IQ is not high enough that I can easily read studies. I wanted to find some percentages and this older popsci article from 2015 gives figures up to 20% in Ethiopia:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34479905
"Quite remarkably, we see in Ethiopia about 20% - so a fifth - of the genome of people living there right now is actually of Eurasian origin, it actually comes from these farmers," explained Dr Manica.
"But it goes further than that, because if you go to the corners of Africa, all the way to West Africa or South Africa, even populations that we really thought were purely African have 5-6% of their genome that dates back to these western Eurasian farmers."
Prof David Reich, from Harvard Medical School in the US, added: "The claim that all sub-Saharan Africans today have a substantial amount of ancestry due to back-to-Africa migrations is quite interesting, and while I won't be 100% convinced until I look at the data myself, I think the analyses seem careful and thoughtful.
In Olympic distance running races, the Ethiopians tend to be brown and the Kenyans black. The Ethiopian national origin story is that they are descended from the son of the Queen of Sheba in Eurasia.
Nineteenth Century people like H. Rider Haggard, author of the adventure story "King Solomon's Mines" set in East Africa, liked the idea that East Africans have some Eurasian admixture.
...if you go back far enough, everyone is African.
African blacks don't have literally 0 european ancestry, but less than US blacks.
Does it mean I can keep saying "IQ 83" whenever my Brazilian fellow citizens do something utterly stupid? Good. I thought this research was bs, and I used to say IQ 83 as tongue-in-cheek, but good to know it's good.
> If IQ was 100% genetic, we should expect blacks everywhere to have an IQ of 85, since they all have the same genes.
"the genetic diversity in Eurasians is largely a subset of that in Africans" https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/161/1/269/6049925. I know everyone involved knows this already, but still.
I don't think "they all have the same genes" should appear in this blog, no matter how much we understand that it's a deliberate simplification.
Yeah, I understand where Scott is coming from, but it seems unwise to leave an obvious vector of attack like that open when one writes a controversial post.
I was a bit shocked to learn recently that blood lead levels in the leaded gasoline era might’ve lowered IQ by something like 9 points.
It was also heartening to hear that some rapid progress has been made of late in certain jurisdictions against colour enhancement of turmeric using lead (with much more to be done on other sources).
I'd also heard that, but Cremieux (who I usually trust on things like this) thinks it's not true. I still haven't gone deep enough to have a strong opinion one way or the other.
I'm skeptical of any claim that the leaded gasoline era had minimal effects on IQ given that the average blood lead level was insanely high, like, an appreciable fraction of the level of acute lead poisoning.
[EDIT: Removed a study link because I've clearly read less about this than Cremieux but I remain skeptical given the above.]
Lead poisoning seems to be overrated, and the impact of IQ gaps is minimal. https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/how-bad-is-low-level-lead-poisoning
If lead poisoning from living near freeways was so deleterious, then rural Southern blacks should have higher IQs than urban Northern blacks. That does not appear to be true.
Similarly, I went to school from 1964-1976 in Sherman Oaks, CA, home to the 101-405 freeway interchange, at that time the busiest in the world. I have looked for evidence that kids who grew up in Sherman Oaks during leaded gasoline are notably stupid, but so far have no findings to report.
Reference to Cremieux for those interested: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/who-gets-exposed-to-lead.
And a follow up reference to a sibling control study showing a null finding: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1781821837950726575
Thanks. Will have a look at all this.
I hope it also means that I can eat chocolate again without worrying about it making me dumber and more prone to disease.
Cremieux has noted that lead in unhealthy even if it only has a minimal effect on IQ: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1867023702396948860.
Hopefully you can still find tasty food that doesn't cause you concern or harm.
I take it this is a reference to "Understanding How Low Levels of Early Lead Exposure Affect Children’s Life-Trajectories" which interestingly does still say that a decrease from 10ug/dL to 5ug/dL is associated with a significant difference in high school graduation rate and (mediated by that) a 4.4% difference in earning among males, which is still pretty substantial (the present value of lifetime earnings for a newborn in the US is something like $1.4m so that's about $60k for somebody in that group). Lead exposures in the US are mostly well below that but something like 1-in-300 kids still tests at or above 10ug/dL.
So it doesn't support IQ effects specifically but the overall impacts, apparently mediated by non-cognitive effects, still look high enough to justify expensive remediations for relatively-high-exposure cases. (And "relatively" is doing some work there - in the late 70s the MEDIAN level for kids was 14.9ug/dL.)
Did you mean to respond to me? What's that a quote from? I don't see it in the Cremieux article or the Cremieux Tweet that I quoted. Did you mean to respond to my comment about lead being unhealthy regardless of impact on IQ? I don't think Cremieux was referring to such claims, and suspect that he'd be suspicious that they'd be the results of the same sort of confounding that he discusses in his article, see e.g. endnote 2 in his article.
The tweet seems to be a reference to that study, is what I'm saying. I'm noting that the referenced study supports the notion that low-to-moderate lead exposure does indeed strongly hurt lifetime productivity.
This is usually what people actually care about re:IQ impact to justify why it's worth spending on exposure reduction, because cognitive reduction is associated with lower productivity.
I do think Cremieux's overall point seems plausible but I'm not sure my sense of the policy implications has really changed.
There was an older Mother Jones article (reprinted more recently in, I think, Forbes) about lead in gasoline. They tracked crime stats county-by-county as lead was phased out, and found an incredibly strong correlation (i.e. falling crime rates tracked lower levels of lead in the environment).
I don't think the effects of lead can be discounted (although I'm assuming high crime is a proxy for low IQ, which may not be valid).
We know the crime rates went down, we really don't know the cause. I've heard at least a half-dozen explanations for crime going down. They all are pretty good at correlation, and have at least a passingly plausible mechanism behind it. None of them come close to proving causation.
Besides for the link between IQ and lead apparently being greatly exaggerated due to confounding, as noted in this comment below: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to/comment/86332638, the lead-crime hypothesis has many other issues discussed here: https://medium.com/@tgof137/debunking-the-lead-crime-hypothesis-949e6fc2b0dc.
Does that replicate? While there is evidence of an effect, my impression is that the consensus says the impact is much smaller than initially thought.
Lead gas is still used (legally in US) in certain types of aviation fuel for older piston-based planes, the most common type is 100LL (LL = low lead).
Apparently its hard to make a fuel that works for those engines due to specific octane requirements and older design that can get corroded by unleaded substitutes.
Now I sort of wonder if the IQ and other health damage from lead is worth keeping these old planes running, but as a lead-addled gen-X'er, thinking about that makes my head hurt too much so I stop.
Most of causality runs in another direction -- dumber children eat more lead paint and other things having lead, or their dumb parents let them. Effects found in later studies are very minor as these are much less lead in environment what even dumbest can access
The more amusing one is that lead dosage in kids used to correlate well with poor urban people. These days, it correlates well with rich suburbanites who raise their own chickens. The chickens love to peck at flaking old lead paint in search of bugs to eat.
A couple of generations ago, the Chicago Tribune editorialized in favor of building the Cabrini-Green public housing project on the grounds that it would stop poor kids from eating lead paint flakes.
It was built and quickly became notorious and now is demolishd.
Do they eat lead paint because they're dumb, or because they live in poor households where paint peeling off the walls is tolerated?
Probably both, but it matters little in this context. Suppose you replaced all lead with expensive unobtanium which isn't harmful. Still dumb and poor would eat more paint and you will see unobtanium blood level vs IQ correlation. You can derive a proxy for IQ from gut bacteria based on what high IQ people and low IQ people eat.
People who drink expensive wine are smarter and richer that people who drink beer, but it doesn't mean that if you replace beer with wine for all population you will get same benefit.
Little kids put everything into their mouths. It's part of why sending your first child to daycare amounts to plugging your family into the global virus network for the next few years.
I found someone in HN claiming that while our current lead exposure decreases, the IQ gap stays constant, so the reported IQ decline/lead keeps getting bigger. I'm actually still trying to find the supposed study he's talking about but so far I think it's just an amusing possibility.
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/who-gets-exposed-to-lead as referenced in the comments below.
It's hard to imagine how that would be consistent with the Flynn effect.
Hopefully SCOTUS and state legislatures will also realize that IQ under 75 doesn't necessarily mean intellectual disability but I'm not holding my breath.
I'm not aware of this debate or why one might take that side of it - can you link me to something that explains what you mean?
Atkins v. Virginia (2002), is a case in which the SCOTUS ruled that executing people with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments, and the proof that Atkins had an intellectual disability was his low IQ of 59.
This decision led to lots of state statutes that qualified for the purpose of punishment an IQ under 70 as intellectual disability .
Hall v. Florida (2014) ruled that a bright line like an IQ of 70 is unconstitutional and practically qualified an IQ below 75 as intellectual disability.
That seems like the problem is the ruling itself, not the definition of disability. What could possibly be cruel and unusual about executing an intellectually disabled person who's too dangerous to be allowed to live? Isn't putting them down the ethical thing to do? We understand that it's the right thing to do for animals, why is it so different for humans?
I also find this confusing. I mean, if one wants to argue that someone who committed a felony was lacking mens rea because they literally did not have the intellectual capacity to recognize what they did was wrong, that is an argument I can follow. (I will however notice that young children and even dogs do have the ability to recognize that they did wrong and exhibit wrong, so good luck convincing me that your IQ 70 adult did not pass that threshold, unless the charge is that they misspelled their address on their tax form or something.)
But saying that it is ok to punish them by putting them in prison, but not ok to execute them feels incoherent.
I am generally anti-death penalty, but do not find executing very-low-IQ felons specifically offensive. If anything, it is the opposite: the IQ 80 criminal will understand a prison sentence of a definite length, but might live in anguish of their impeding execution. Someone who is severely mentally disabled will not understand being put into prison for a crime they might not even recall committing. But they will not lose any more sleep being on death row if they don't recognize that fact.
https://russellwarne.com/2020/07/19/thoughts-on-low-national-iqs-intellectual-disability-and-data-quality/
I wrote about the Supreme Court's decision in 2002:
"Several IQ researchers, accustomed to having their field of expertise ignored or denounced as racist and fraudulent, were bemused by Thursday's vote by six Supreme Court Justices to ban the execution of murderers, in effect, who score poorly on IQ tests.
"As staunch defenders of the much-maligned concept of the intelligence quotient, these scientists found vindication in the Supreme Court's embrace of intelligence testing, though they cautioned that the Justices' understanding of the complex subject was simplistic.
"The IQ experts were particularly amused that newspapers that routinely condemn IQ tests as biased and meaningless were quick to endorse intelligence exams in this case. The New York Times, for example, editorialized, "[I]nflicting the death penalty on individuals with I.Q. scores of less than 70 who have little understanding of their moral culpability violates civilized standards of justice.""
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/2002/06/24/Analysis-IQ-defenders-feel-vindicated/47121024936667/
>"The New York Times, for example, editorialized, "[I]nflicting the death penalty on individuals with I.Q. scores of less than 70 who have little understanding of their moral culpability violates civilized standards of justice.""
Of course the NYT would take that position, it's in their (low-IQ) self interest! /s
Now can we have a conversation about the non-predetermined nature of the genetic component?
Of the three people talking about national IQ, the subset who are talking about the effect of sexual selection -- i.e. social values prioritising intelligence in mates -- rounds off to zero.
If nutrition can get you from 70 to 85, then a general decision at a population level to make babies only with the smartest partners can get you from 85 to 100.
And I suspect it doesn't have to take very long, either. Maybe 2-3 generations.
The 2-3 generations claim is definitely false, unless you're talking about some kind of extreme scheme like only letting the top 10% of people reproduce at all. Under any remotely plausible selection pressure, maybe 20-30, if you're lucky.
Why are you so sure? Sexual selection has essentially unlimited potential pressure. I'm not specifically excluding an "extreme" scheme imposed by force, but I don't think we need to go there to see change much more rapid than 20-30 generations.
Because there are populations where this has happened to some degree (eg high-performing test-takers getting elevated the nobility in China, rabbinical scholars being hot stuff on the marriage market in Eastern European Jewry). Both of those "experiments" continued for ~20 - 50 generations. If you got 15 points per two generations, Chinese and Jews should have IQs of 250+. But the actual advantage is 5 - 10 points, and the people I've read who look into it say that even this is on the high side of what you'd expect and probably included some contributions from founder effects, weird genetic diseases, etc.
I think embro screening is not an extreme intervention, and could work in as little as 2 generations. Essentially you remove the bottom half of the distribution. Do this 3x and you'll get something like a 1SD improvement. What's unclear is how far you can push this, but look at the chickens and how big they are now.
Embryo screening requires every baby to be born through IVF, and IVF is a very unpleasant procedure to go through especially when compared to the alternative process. I'd call it an extreme intervention.
Embryo screening seems worthwhile if you're doing IVF anyway. In which case we get the problem that in a few generations intelligence will be correlated with a genetic predisposition towards infertility.
>IVF is a very unpleasant procedure to go through
Hopefully it will become less so: https://www.gametogen.com/fertilo.
I mean, my husband and I are doing elective embryo selection. (My insurance covered it.) I don't have any history of fertility issues. It's my assessment of this community that we're mostly affluent enough/have jobs with good enough benefits to do IVF electively. Health insurance in some states is also required to cover IVF. The clinics all know the magic shibboleths that need to get said in order for insurance to cover it, even if the couple doesn't *really* have infertility.
I just wanted the peace of mind that our future children are safe and sound in a cryo canister. We didn't shell out for the full polygenic scoring, but we did the basic check for aneuploidy. They're also from my Age 28 eggs, so they'll be healthier than if we got pregnant the old fashioned way with my Age 32/33/34 eggs.
>
Tell me about it! Getting a good result (i.e. making your ovaries produce a bunch of eggs) requires adhering to a strict drug dosing schedule. These drugs are all injectable, so "adhering to the schedule" involves stabbing yourself in the abdomen 2-3x, at the same time each evening, for 8-12 days in a row. Doing so requires a certain amount of executive function and conscientiousness. (Aella recently froze some eggs and had a ton of trouble with the "stabbing herself with a needle" part. She posted about it on Twitter.)
This is absolutely true. I am aware of this had to do itto avoid a genetic disease I was a carrier for. I think with recent advances this will get much easier. Still I think with enough of a payment, Make IVF free, give people a baby bonus if they do the screening and have a live birth, might be able to get over this hump. This will be worth it because a person with an IQ below 85 is very likely to be a net drain on tax revenues, so getting someone to 90 or 95 would really be worth it for society. Also IVF for people who don't need it for infertility will be easier and require many less cycles. Perhaps we can further innovate and make a non injectable versions of hormones. Current treatment regiemes are based on older woman who have trouble conceiving.
It's going to be highly non-linear though isn't it. There will be downward pressures that mean you don't just keep adding points indefinitely for each generation that prioritises high intelligence.
But at the low end, I would expect the gains to be large. For instance, I could imagine for a constant "maximal" amount of social/sexual pressure you might get from 70 to 85 in about 2 generations, from 85 to 100 in maybe 3-5 more (yes, I'm revising my earlier guess), but 100 to 110 might take 10 more and then hit a ceiling.
Anyway my question is more about why this isn't even really featuring in the conversation. I mean, once you've waded into national IQ, what's a bit of eugenics? But seriously, if it worked for those Chinese and those Jews, why should it not at least be raised as an option some Africans might avail themselves of? There's a good chance under certain conditions it's actually the most effective/cheapest intervention.
And if you're advocating for a "hopeful" angle on this topic then I don't see a whole lot better than pointing out there's a relatively simple personal decision that can improve matters.
A less hopeful corollary is that low national IQ has a choice component as well. The positive spin on that is that other priorities are higher, they'll get to it, but then the question is, when?
There's likely to be low-intelligence "social traps" that are stable and very difficult to change.
I think you should look up the Breeder's Equation some time, then plug in the numbers for heritability, plausible selection pressure, and the standard deviation for IQ. That should give you some idea of likely gains-per-generation.
Unless you achieve an utterly totalitarian level of social control which effectively sterilises ~90% of the breeding population, you're not getting anywhere fast.
(Not that I think eugenic selection pressures aren't worth achieving- the alternative being the eventual collapse of civilisation and all- but there isn't any instant-gratification solution here short of wholesale gene-editing or maybe multi-generational embryo selection using test tubes and stem cells. Personally I'd settle for a world where heroin addicts and violent offenders weren't having six kids.)
Well, obviously the effect is not linear; you *could*, hypothetically, have a gain of 15 points in two-three generations due to a well-focused eugenics program (something that the Chinese examination system, let alone a non-system in Ashkenazic populations, wasn't designed to be) and then basically flatline. The first gains in anything are often the largest and the easiest.
You're thinking about the difficulties of doing eugenics that's pushing at the top of the range. But what's going on in this case is simply shifting the average up to a region that's already inhabited by a good fraction of the population.
Suppose you have a population with IQ mean 100 and SD 15. If you allow only the top 50% of the population to reproduce, you'll get IQ mean ~= 110.5 in a *single* generation. 110 is +0.7 SD, which is roughly the midpoint of the top half of a normal distribution.
This holds under a simplifying assumption that a child will have IQ equal to the average of its parents +- some random noise, and that everyone in the top half of the curve has an equal number of children on average. Sounds like a rough but reasonable model to me.
Now, I haven't accounted for regression to the mean here. IANAGeneticist, but IIUC this isn't a big issue this close to the center of the bell curve. If you claim this will be anywhere near the same order of magnitude than the straightforward math that I did, then the burden of proof rests on you.
Assuming a heritability of .8, regression to the mean pushes it to 108.4 = 100 + .8 * 10.5. The breeder's equation is dead simple.
Very good answer. 0.8 might be a bit on the high side for estimates, but let's leave it with that for now. Even so, aren't we ignoring the fact that currently the people in the top 50% of IQ usually also grow up in the let's say top 60% of income / SES households, and that this has an effect in keeping them at the level of their parents? If we now forced only 50% of people to have children those children would grow up in better-than-average conditions but THEIR children might grow up in less intellectually stimulating conditions as their parents would have to take over the menial jobs currently performed by the people who will not get children? You can't expect the entire population to be doing office jobs.
Also, if you don't want to collapse your population totally, each woman would have to get twice as many kids which would mean less adult time per kid and poorer upbringings since the parents would have less time for working.
(And in the real world one would of course also have to include the great fall in living standards that would inevitably follow a totalitarian government with powers to sterilize 50% of a population coming into power.)
As far as I know, such effects from SES/income/... on intelligence are very small compared to genetic effects under normal (i.e. WEIRD) conditions.
While the entire population of any country will probably never be doing office jobs, I would expect the proportion of office jobs to increase with IQ. E.g. Malawi has a 39% employment rate with 77% of the labour force in agriculture and 19% in services, whereas Singapore has a 65% employment rate with 1% of the labour force in agriculture and 74% in services.
I think it would more like making babies with the smartest *available* partner.
I'm reasonably sure the selection was for intelligent men, not for intelligent women.
I think I partly agree, if I'm understanding you correctly. Women would generally be the ones doing the discriminating in intelligence-prioritising cultures, as elsewhere. But I also don't think this leaves no role for men.
Necessary conditions would be that a) women are actually empowered to discriminate effectively and b) that this is held to be a high-priority dimension on which to do so.
Men are involved in both aspects to the extent they refrain from violence a) towards women and b) towards each other, so that brute strength is not objectively the #1 virtue in a male.
But it's also not impossible for men to have a preference for intelligent women (!) and if we settle on monogamy (a prerequisite for intelligence-prioritising culture?) then men can at least contribute some selective pressure, and perhaps at the margin this is vital.
I think “anti-racists” will not start loving Lynn, because they rightfully believe that agressively upholding a taboo around race and IQ is their most effective rethorical strategy..
Not just a rhetorical strategy, we all know IQ is widely equated with “value as a human being” (once we’re talking about strangers). And because it’s a group table, it encourages human value linked to race, not to individuals.
Has anyone really seen this table meaningfully used for anything other than promoting a racist agenda? (Excepting that the authors will often point out they’re against low-IQ people, not color, so the racism is only coincidental.)
I get Scott’s defence of the table’s data, but the racism threat is how this data is used in policy/political discussions, and I’ve never seen it used in any direction but pro-racism.
Or to use an analogy, I could see people justifying research into how to design a disease to kill only white people. The science might be sound, but I’d still be very dubious about anyone displaying a lot of interest in it.
If we shout down everyone who tries to discuss it reasonably, the reasonable people will stop talking about it, and the only ones left will be the ones who don't care. It's no wonder only racists talk about it--anyone who talks about it gets branded as a racist.
Having a balanced discussion and working to remove the taboo opens the door for more respectable people to look into the topic.
Exactly right -- once you establish IQ measures standardized applications of mental acumen, nothing but itself in other words, you're left with little more than a political tool, which the left is right to oppose as such.
I agree with this entirely. While I am generally very wary of shutting down research avenues, the combination of potentially disastrously racist use with the already existing and already destructive if often insidious using IQ as a proxy for human value (especially in technocratic circles) seems potentially dangerous.
I *CAN* actually imagine it used beneficially, if it led to recognising the need for certain areas or groups requiring significantly more resources and support to thrive -- by analogy with special educational needs at school for example: those children get the level of support and one on one attention well above anyone considered normal. But for that we would need a world government and a universal extension of moral sphere to whole humanity which isn't coming anytime soon.
As an aside, I'm really curious what developing AGI will do to those currently dominant human value criteria. I'm not likely to live to see this change but I bet it will happen.
Does it take substantially more effort to convince people that IQ is not a proxy for human worth than it does to convince them that discussing race and IQ is morally wrong? The former has the advantages of being true and of actually combatting racism (and ableism as a bonus). The latter leaves people quite vulnerable to learning these statistics for the first time through the interpretation of racists who have been granted a strong argument in favor of 'don't trust the mainstream on this, they are lying to you' (speaking from experience here).
Very plausibly, the answer to my question is 'yes', but I would still prefer if we tried both.
I think Charles Murray has come out quite clearly against equation IQ and human worth. Probably many others are like him.
That said, it might be possible that humanity as such can never really come to a reasonable point on issues like this, and if we have to fail in one direction or the other I personally would much rather live in a overly woke world than in something like apartheid South Africa.
I think Charles Murray is clearly full of it. In the Bell Curve, in the last chapter, he says they are "present[ing] for your consideration another way of thinking about equality and inequality. It represents an older intellectual tradition than social democracy or even socialism. In our view, it is also a wiser tradition, more attuned to the way in which individuals go about living satisfying lives and to the ways in which societies thrive." And then goes on to describe things like Confucius, ancient Rome/Greece, and the caste system in India. And says the founders had some good ideas about "natural aristocracy" and all but that their ideas had the flaw of leading inevitably to modern ideas of equality.
Those "older intellectual traditions", as far as I can tell, don't make any pretense to any sort of equality of human worth, and certainly didn't produce societies that treated humans as equally worthy.
Actually in the same chapter and the one preceding it Murray and Herrnstein deals mainly with the issue of making society easier for a person wit low mental ability to live in. They then warn that the current system is heading towards a 'Custodial State' where large groups of people are incarcerated in order to make life safer for the smartest part of the population. This was written in 1994, just a few years before US incarceration rates skyrocketed.
It does seem that Murray was genuinely concerned with creating a society where people with low IQ could thrive, and just believed that in order to do that an open debate about IQ was necessary.
Also, recently on twitter Murray came out clean against Nathan Cofnas, when the latter claimed that IQ was an important part of human worth.
Of course in the end a writers intention does not matter as much as the subject of the book. Even the best intentions can lead to terrible outcomes, I just don't think there is any reason to assume bad faith in this instance.
In 1994 incarceration rates were in the middle of a yearslong increase:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate#/media/File:US_incarceration_timeline-clean.svg
Problem with their argument on crime, which I really think (like other things) is just standard conservative policy wrapped up in this "concern for low IQ people" frame, is that around 1994 crime suddenly started sharply declining, just as fast as it had been rising, with no change to what they said were the causes.
"It does seem that Murray was genuinely concerned with creating a society where people with low IQ could thrive"
Doesn't seem like that to me - seems like his whole thing is to propose rules making it worse for them and pretend it's for their own good.
"I just don't think there is any reason to assume bad faith in this instance."
IMO the quintessential Charles Murray story is that in high school he burned a cross on a hill, and claimed befuddlement that anyone would think there was a racial element.
Well, a basic tenet of DEI is that unequal outcomes are ipso facto proof of an unfair racist system, and we should put our hands on the scales until the outcomes are equal ("affirmative action", "positive discrimination").
As long as this attitude is widespread, rebutting it seems useful. "The fact that Jews have more than their population share of Nobels is not evidence that a secret cabal of Illuminati Jews controls the Nobel committee, the data just indicates that Ashkenazi Jews enjoy a significant genetic intelligence advantage over gentiles".
As Quiet_NaN has already alluded to, there is potential racism on both sides of the argument. In the current climate, vast numbers of people, including many in positions of power to do something about it, believe that racial disparities in socially relevant outcomes cannot stem from biology, or even cultural differences, but are entirely the fault of the more successful groups, whether due to present day discrimination, or the downstream consequences of past discrimination, and therefore the only fair and just way of ordering society is to actively disadvantage present-day members of more successful groups in order to allow social outcomes to equalize.
Needless to say, to the degree that those different outcomes are _not_ the result of things that are the fault of the more successful groups, any such policies based on the assumption that they are, are themselves every bit as racist as they would be if the groups were reversed ... and if the disparities do largely stem from hard-to-eradicate biological differences, then the people who seek equal outcomes at the group level will never stop agitating for ever more vindictive discrimination against the more successful groups until they have successfully hobbled them enough to make them as dysfunctional as the less-successful groups - and at that point, you may have Harrison Bergeronned yourself into a situation where there are not enough capable people in critical positions to be able to maintain anything like current levels of wealth and prosperity.
If the idea of researching this topic disturbs you, the only justifiable position is to say that we do not know anything about the causes of the disparities, that we do not ourselves want to know, that we will seek to prevent anyone else finding out, and, crucially, that we will sculpt our social policies such that they would be fair to individuals regardless of whether the racial hereditarians or the blank slatists are correct. That last part is what many blank slatists, I fear, would never be willing to agree to.
its a terrible strategy; if your willing to talk about iq being real instantly 1/5thish the people you talk to entertain holocaust denial, its such a shit test I willing fail and the left looks like idiots.
Its a bad idea to look that stupid.
Nutrition, yes. Nutrition causes IQ, we know this on the basis of iodine, and it only needs one example.
Education? No. IQ causes education. If there were evidence that it were possible to teach someone stupid how to be smart, we would have that evidence, and we do not.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325832102_How_Much_Does_Education_Improve_Intelligence_A_Meta-Analysis
This article: https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/no-country-has-an-iq-below-60 cites a number of studies finding that "Education does increase IQ scores, but the increases are on specific abilities, not general intelligence."
Regarding that particular study you reference, Cremieux notes issues with it here: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/adjust-your-expectations and notes that a reanalysis of the same data found a considerably smaller effect of education.
Further regarding environment and IQ, in that article, Cremieux notes the surprisingly small effect of minor traumatic brain injuries on IQ. In fact, in this thread: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1811565886148350304, Cremieux notes that the Dutch Famine, the Chinese Great Famine, and the Holocaust didn't affect IQ.
In Scandinavia (where the best IQ data are often taken from), the Flynn effect has reversed and this seems to be caused by environmental factors:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6042097/
Of course education is only one part of the environment, and it is probably very hard to tease out how much of this effect is from schools getting worse and how much is from other effects, like media.
Education raising IQ, but not g, and education potentially reversing the Flynn effect aren't contradictory, given that the Flynn effect itself seems to largely act on IQ, but not g. Cremieux discusses that in this paywalled post: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/subscriber-preview-taking-the-flynn, and points to this article: https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289613000226 whose paywall is evaded by Sci-Hub.
It *is* pretty easy to teach people how to perform better on IQ tests through training, and formal education seems to produce it as well (although far more slowly and as a side-effect).
It is not. See https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Test-retest-reliability-data-gathered-from-34-separate-studies-on-common-IQ-tests-the_fig1_316640643
I'm curious if the paper Scott shared changed your mind.
> Nutrition, yes. Nutrition causes IQ, we know this on the basis of iodine, and it only needs one example. Education? No.
What if you eat the textbooks?
Well, if this wasn't a red rag to a bull, no post of Scott's will ever be!
First, I think Lynn is politically motivated. Notice in the accompanying graphic how the Paddies in the Irish Free State/Éire/Those Ungrateful Rebels are *just* slightly stupider than our brethren in Norn Iron and (of course) The Mainland, Great Britain Itself, Ruling The Waves (and Waiving The Rules)? The slight difference in shades of green between The Republic and, miracle of miracles once you cross the border, the Six Counties and the Blessed Mainland Itself?
Mmm-hmmm. Cross from this side of the road (in the benighted priest-ridden peasant potato economy of the Republic of Ireland) to the other side of the road (staunch stalwart Loyalist Protestant Ship-building Still in the UK Northern Ireland) and get a 4-5 point jump in IQ. I believe it!
Second, I will have to grudgingly admit that the rigorous and oft-repeated (you are all noticing the crushingly heavy sarcasm here, I trust?) tests done to get those results seem to be adequate. I haven't been able to track down the actual content of the 2 or 3 tests done in the 70s, but okay. Maybe. Irish education was terrible up till about recently.
And having done an online Ravens' Matrices test myself (with all the rigour and scientific reproducibility that entails, which is "none, it's a free online test, what do you expect?"), yes I too came out as a 97 IQ moron (and proud of it!)
All that being said, I still find it very difficult to believe that we are that much stupider than our confrères Up North and our neighbours across the Irish Sea, and that the miraculous effect of crossing the Atlantic Ocean bumped up Irish-American IQs relative to those of us still hunkered down on the Ould Sod.
But what do I know, I'm just an ungrateful rebellious Papist peasant! 😁
EDIT: And because as far as I'm concerned, Lynn can blow it out his ear when it comes to Irish national IQ, that causes me to cast a *very* jaundiced eye over his assertions when it comes to non-white British people.
You probably know that Lynn himself was Northern Irish - if not, I hope you find that fact amusing.
But actually, Lynn's estimates were higher than other people's at the time! Hans Eysneck had somehow convinced everyone that Ireland had an IQ of 87, which was completely false, and Lynn upgraded it. I think Ireland c. 1980 or whenever was very poor and an IQ of 96 (which I think is what Lynn found then) isn't unreasonable. See https://russellwarne.com/2022/12/17/irish-iq-the-massive-rise-that-never-happened/ for more information.
Also have to consider brain drain in any discussion of Ireland. ~4-8 million came to the US in the 19th-ish century. Seems about a million moved to mainland Britain.
Good point. Canada and Australia have their own Irish-descended populations, also.
The mass migration post-Famine wasn't "the best and brightest", though, it was "the absolutely desperate". So if miraculously Irish genes burgeoned once on the hallowed soil of Columbia, maybe you guys *should* be importing all the immigrants of the world to turn them into smarter folks!
But it also wasn't random. You had to have enough brains to successfully leave rather than die. It could easily chop off the absolute bottom of the distribution.....
I would say it selects for the most desperate who have the capacity to leave. Probably not the absolute poorest.
The Famine mass emigration is fascinating because of how it shaped the nation; it really does chop things up into "pre-Famine" and "post-Famine". E.g. the Scots-Irish, or as we'd say over here the Ulster Irish, who tended to be Protestant and descendants of Scottish settlers, were a large part of emigration in the 17th and 18th centuries pre-Famine. Mass emigration of the Catholic stock from the rest of the country is a 19th century thing. And emigration was a fact of life up until the 1980s, and - depending on how the economy is going at any particular time - even still.
It's not so much a case of "I want to go" but "You have to go". During the 80s when things were really bad here, a government minister even said in an interview "We can't all live on a small island" (the population of the Republic then was about 3 million, it's about 5 million now). So that was the attitude: "don't expect us to do anything about it, get the boat to England or the plane to the US/Canada/Australia".
So, back to the 19th century. A lot of emigration was paid for by family members who had emigrated earlier and sent tickets back for the rest to follow, or in some cases, similar to the Highland Clearances, landlords paid for their ex-tenants to emigrate. And many Irish went to Britain, as always.
https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/Collections-Research/Folklife-Collections/Folklife-Collections-List-(1)/Other/Emigration/Irish-Emigration-to-America-The-Journey
"The Irish Emigrant Society of New York expanded its activities to found the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in 1850. This made it possible to more easily send remittances home to Ireland. Between 1845 and 1854 when the famine was at its worst, $19 million dollars was sent back to Ireland much of it in the form of prepaid tickets so that families could be reunited. This encouraged ‘chain emigration’.
Historian Arnold Schrier has calculated that the Irish in America sent over $260 million back to Ireland during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Dennis Clarke called this phenomenon “the greatest transatlantic philanthropy of the nineteenth century”. In 1864 one writer asserted that not more than five per cent of the emigrants from Mayo paid their own passage (Mayo Constitution, March 15th 1864)."
https://jeaniejohnston.ie/story/the-story-of-the-irish-emigrants-paid-to-emigrate/
Assisted migration schemes
However, in many cases, boat passenger lists show that whole families left Ireland together. The poorest of these families often received assistance from landlords, local workhouses and the government.
The first state-supported assisted migration took place early in the 1800s – shortly after the Napoleonic Wars. But, after the famine, it became more prevalent.
At first, the British government was reluctant to sponsor assisted emigration because of the costs involved. But it did give tenants of estates owned by the British monarch tickets and financial support to leave for North America.
According to historian Hidetaka Hirota, after struggling tenants from two ‘Crown estates’ in Galway called for public work projects, they were instead provided with passage to Quebec.
...According to Hirota, emigrants from Kingwilliamstown came from a list made up of those who volunteered to leave. As well as those whose compulsory removal was necessary for the estate’s “improvement”.
Other landlords began to follow the process laid down by the Crown estates. While passage to North America wasn’t cheap, many decided it would cost less than maintaining tenants who couldnt pay their rent.
At the Strokestown Park estate in Roscommon, landlord Denis Mahon ran an assisted emigration scheme. In 1847 to clear some of the 12,000 tenants there.
As well as receiving passage to North America, participants had their arrears settled and were paid for the crops they left behind. However, one letter from the Strokestown Famine Archive highlights Mahon’s disappointment. That “many of those applying are of the better sort of tenant and if possible should be kept at home”.
...In 1838, the Irish Poor Law Act introduced local workhouses to help relieve poverty. The Board of Guardians, which was elected by taxpayers in each of Ireland’s 130 districts, funded these workhouses.
However, with the consent of local taxpayers, this act also allowed for the introduction of a levy to fund the emigration of those who’d been in a workhouse for three months or more. This helped officials reduce ongoing costs.
However, by 1847, the workhouses were full. So the act was extended to allow for the assisted emigration of those outside workhouses too. However, only the wealthiest areas could afford to do this. So, in 1849, another change was made to further facilitate emigration. The Board of Guardians for each workhouse could use loans to pay for passage.
This is when assisted migration took off.
...Between 1846 and 1855, landlords assisted the emigration of up to 100,000 people, while workhouses funded the passage of 20,000.
However, these numbers grew in the latter half of the century with workhouses helping another 25,000 leave. In the 1880s, the government also subsidised the transport of 54,000 and two philanthropists – Vere Foster and James Hack Tuke – funded around 30,000 departures.
While these assisted migration schemes account for a small proportion of the people who left Ireland, it facilitated more chain migration among families. It also impacted how North Americans viewed the incoming immigrants and led to calls for immigration restrictions."
As for those who went to Britain, after a while "compassion fatigue" set in as emigration continued over the decades (while technically of course we were British subjects just like the natives in Great Britain and so it wasn't so much 'foreign' immigration):
"A creature manifestly between the Gorilla and the Negro is to be met with in some of the lowest districts of London and Liverpool by adventurous explorers. It comes from Ireland, whence it has contrived to migrate; it belongs in fact to a tribe of Irish savages: the lowest species of Irish Yahoo. When conversing with its kind it talks a sort of gibberish. It is, moreover, a climbing animal, and may sometimes be seen ascending a ladder ladden with a hod of bricks.
Satire entitled "The Missing Link", from the British magazine Punch, 1862"
So Irish emigration wasn't really so much about "the best and brightest, the most capable who can get it together to get out", which is why the miracle of the genes where the Irish-Americans somehow became smarter and more successful once they set foot on American soil is so miraculous!
I feel like in that situation, you would want to leave even if you were well off. Imagine being the one person with plenty of food in a nation of starving people. ...It's not going to end well.
In this thread: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1668022134528933889 Cremieux discusses this paper: http://neilcummins.com/tie_cog.pdf that finds that the Irish who went to America were positively selected, while the Irish who went to England were negatively selected.
That wasn’t a brain drain. It was often the poorest who left Ireland.
Sorry, Scott. He was *English", born in Hampstead, donchaknow! And if you wonder if that makes a difference, just ask the Duke of Wellington - born in Kerry, allegedly said when asked if that made him an Irishman "Being born in a stable doesn't make you a horse". He *taught* at the University of Ulster, among other places, so that's where the Northern Ireland connection comes in.
See how I love you, I went and searched online for the horrible old racist's attitudes towards we Paddies.
From "A Conversation with Richard Lynn":
http://eugenik.dk/static/pdf/2011/Nyborg2011-2.pdf
"HN: Let us begin with your roots. Where are they?
RL: They are all from the east of England. My father’s family are Viking stock from North Yorkshire and were small trade people until my father obtained a scholarship to King’s College, London. My mother’s family are from the southeast and are Saxon stock from the North plain of Germany."
So no dirty admixture of Celtic blood here to taint the pure Anglo-Saxon flood coursing through his veins!
"HN: This brings us to 1967, when you quit the University of Exeter and took up a position in Ireland.
RL: Yes, I was appointed research professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) in Dublin, where I worked until 1972. The brief was to carry out research on the economic and social problems of the country. So I settled down to investigate the economic and social problems of Ireland and think about what contribution I could make to finding public policies that would help solve them. The major problem was the economic backwardness, and when I researched the literature it was not long before I discovered that the Irish had a low average IQ. So I formulated the theory that the low IQ was likely a significant reason for the economic backwardness*. The solution for this problem was obvious. What was needed was a set of eugenic policies that would raise the Irish IQ.
(*Typical English, they never take a fucking iota of responsibility for the effects of at least three hundred years of trying to turn us into worm food. No, it's our dumb genes to blame for our economic backwardness, not their deliberate destruction of native industry and anybody smart enough to be bothersome.)
HN: This sounds a bit scary!
RL: Indeed. I reflected on the likely headlines I would get if I wrote one of the monographs that the ESRI produced analysing the problem and its solution. Headlines like Professor advocates sterilizing the mentally retarded and incentives for graduates to have more children. I didn’t see these going down well. Ireland is a deeply conservative and Catholic country and the Catholics had been the only group that opposed eugenic programs in the first half of the twentieth century, when everyone else thought these were sensible. Virtually no-one supported eugenic programs any more and anyone who proposed doing so would be accused of being a Nazi.
HN: And how did you deal with this problem?
RL: I chickened out! I did not think I could go public on this, so I sat on it for 35 years. It was not until 2002 when I published IQ and the Wealth of Nations with Tatu Vanhanen that I set out the theory. Nevertheless, I did write something on the issue in a circumspect way. In 1968 I published The Irish Brain Drain. It reported research showing that there was a high rate of emigration of graduates from Ireland, and warned that this would reduce the average IQ of the remaining population. I looked next at some of the demographic and epidemiological characteristics of Ireland to see if I could find any problems I could tackle. The first thing I noticed was that the Irish have an exceptionally high rate of psychosis. I knew that chronic hospitalised psychotics, consisting mainly of those with simple schizophrenia and retarded depression, have a low level of anxiety. I wondered whether a low level anxiety in the population might explain the high rate of psychosis and looked at other data that might corroborate the theory. I took the 18 economically developed nations for which there were reliable statistics and examined calorie consumption, coronary heart disease, caffeine and cigarette consumption as indices of low anxiety, and suicide rates, alcohol consumption, and road accident death rates as indices of high anxiety. I factor analysed the inter-correlations and found a general factor that accounting for about 50% of the variance and identified this as anxiety. The final step was to treat the nations as if they were individuals and use the data to score the nations on the anxiety factor. The result was that Ireland emerged as the nation with the lowest level of anxiety."
Ah, yes: we happy-go-lucky Paddies, too stupid to worry about anything because we have the child-like approach to life and are incapable of adult cognition about the responsibilities and worries of the world. The English have loved this take for a couple of centuries, now. Take it away, Dylan Moran:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4MwblcGZbI
…HN: We have come to the year 1972 and you were soon to leave Dublin.
RL: Yes, I had completed my work on national differences in anxiety and was keen to develop my ideas on national and racial differences in intelligence. But because I had discovered the low IQ in Ireland, I did not think it possible to do this while I was in Dublin. So I had to look for a new base. Then in the fall of 1971 the University of Ulster advertised for a professor to set up a psychology department. I thought this would suit me, so I sent in an application, was offered the job, and accepted. So in 1972 I moved to Ulster and began my work on national and racial differences in intelligence."
Oh, I'm damn sure certain parts of Northern Ireland suited him down to the ground. As far as I'm concerned, Lynn can [redacted due to the use of industrial language in the workplace].
'... alcohol consumption, and road accident death rates as indices of high anxiety.' That is certainly a special way to look for signs of high anxiety! And if those measures put Ireland as the least anxious among the developed countries, I certainly have to update my beliefs about Irish beer consumption.
Just drink 20 pints of Guinness each weekend and you too could live to be 100.
It's in the papers! (Granted, having excellent genes seems to be doing the heavy lifting here, but still - truth in advertising, 'Guinness is good for you')
https://www.corkbeo.ie/news/local-news/kerry-man-who-drinks-20-30776697
"A Kerry man who enjoys 20 pints of Guinness every weekend has been declared as fit as a fiddle on a TV health show. Mick O'Brien, a retired ESB worker in his 70s, received a clean bill of health despite his hefty weekend drinking habit.
He shared his love for Guinness on The Clinic For Well People, which airs tomorrow on Virgin Media One. Tests revealed that Mick, who walks 25 miles a week to keep fit, had a metabolic age of 68, excellent blood pressure and a healthy heart, the Irish Mirror reports.
Dr Jean Kenny confirmed his thyroid was perfect and his liver was in good shape, adding: "If you mind yourself, you could live until you're 102."
However, she cautioned Mick that his alcohol consumption was more than double the recommended intake and suggested he reduce it to eight pints a week. A jovial Mick responded: "I'll have to consider whether I'll comply with what the medical people say."
The GP noted that Mick's weekly alcohol intake of 40 units - equivalent to 20 pints - was well above the recommended limit of 17 units, reports Dublin Live.
She warned him about the dangers of excessive drinking, saying: "Going down that slope can be bad," and "Alcohol is a grade 1 carcinogen. You have alcohol-free days which is good, but you need to address the drinking at the weekend."
Dr Jean praised Mick's "superb" genetics, noting that his father worked until he was 90 on the family farm, drove until he was 93, and passed away at 97 due to a stroke. His mother also lived into her 90s, and an aunt reached the age of 102."
Who's that poor fool of a billionaire who wants to reverse aging and live forever, so he takes so many supplements he rattles when he walks and he gets transfusions of his son's blood? Let him give all that up and take to the black stuff instead! 😁
Lynn, so far as I know, didn't do any tests himself and relied on tests carried out in the 70s on (so far as I remember) two tests on school children and one on adults. He kludged together the results of those to get his average for the Irish IQ.
Were we all poor and stupid in 1980? Well, that's the year I did my Leaving Certificate so, er, no comment 😁
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaving_Certificate_(Ireland)
Well hang on, obviously the framing in the map above is super lossy because a) not all countries are ethnostates and b) not all parts of the country are the same, so you get a map that has a 5 IQ gap between RoI and NI (which is on the face of it silly) because its the score for the UK as a whole. Now you might still think that the score difference between say English and Irish people is silly or racist (genetically v. similar) but as Scott points out the Flynn effect takes care of most of this.
FWIW if test scores were repeated today I'd expect Ireland to outscore or equal the UK scores, due to larger demographic changes in the UK and rapid catch up amongst the native Irish. Ireland outperforms the UK on PISA scores for example.
"you get a map that has a 5 IQ gap between RoI and NI"
No, no, see, that is totally right because of the perfidious Celts down south versus the pure Protestants up north 😁 If you read the conversation with Lynn*, he's very clear on the superiority of the Angelfolc blood** and second to that, if you are unfortunate enough not to be able to trace your Viking and Germanic ancestry in your parental lines, is to be a Protestant and not a Catholic.
EDIT: Damn it, I really must be as stupid as Lynn considers us to be, since I never back up things when I write them, but a few years back I was considerably exercised by yet another story in the media about "Irish IQ is low" based on Lynn, so I did some online digging around and found that he had graded IQ for the British Isles. It moved neatly from stupidest (us rebel Southerners) to the Northerners (slightly smarter) to the Welsh to the Scots (nearly as smart as the English) to, of course, the 100+ IQ titans in London.
Very revelatory of his mindset, I always thought. "In spite of all temptations to belong to other nations, he remains an Englishman!"
*"My father’s family are Viking stock from North Yorkshire and were small trade people until my father obtained a scholarship to King’s College, London. My mother’s family are from the southeast and are Saxon stock from the North plain of Germany."
**I've lifted this shamelessly from "Private Eye":
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Magazine/PrivateEye
"Aethelstan" is a "true Englishman with a thousand years of Angelfolc blood" who hates the "mongrel British".
I'm reasonably bright, I think, though not extraordinarily so, and I'm lousy at Raven's Matrices.
I'm not proud of it. It's frustrating. It feels like I can't focus adequately on them. Possibly lack of the specific kind of short term memory needed.
I'm not sure the difficulty has much to do with the rest of my life, except possibly difficulty navigating.
I'm terrible at maths and pattern-matching (did some arty-type courses and I was the one person in the class consistently not getting the "sort all these colours into families" type questions correct), and the one time I've tried the Raven's type test, I of course squelched like a deflated water balloon.
But I also think it's the type of test where coaching/training *could* make a difference - some of the questions, it's clear that there's One Weird Trick to work out the solution. The really smart will figure it out on their own, the stupid like me won't, but the moderately smart if they get taught "this is how you answer it" would certainly be able to improve scores on tests after that.
IIRC (it's been many years since I've taken it), some of the questions are highly correlated with mathematical stuff that could theoretically been reasoned out geometrically, but which has a shortcut if you recognize what it's doing. Like I recall there being a problem that ended up being a geometric version of a square root.
Related: https://nonzionism.com/p/ashkenazi-iq-figures-are-underestimates.
Yeh. I get that. I’m
English but have family in Northern Ireland. The schools there do better than the U.K. as a whole and Catholic schools even better.
It never made sense even in lynns era that Northern Ireland would have an IQ of 100 if the republic is 92 and Britain 100 (of course).
It should have been averaged out between the two.
I recommend his regional breakdown of the British Isles for hilarity. The Nordies are just that teenier bit brighter than us Free Staters, but the cream of the crop is in London/South East.
https://gwern.net/doc/iq/ses/1979-lynn.pdf
"The Social Ecology of Intelligence in the British Isles"
Us: 96
Norn Iron: 96.7
The Mainland Proper (a selection):
Scotland (the stupidest): 97.3
Wales: 98.4
London up at the top with: 102.1
London is a chicken-and-egg case; is it rich because all the smartest people live there, or do all the smartest people live there because of the opportunities to become wealthy and famous?
So this whole thread started out because you were incredulous that Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland could really have different IQs. But when we drill down, it's only a 0.7 point difference, which is barely meaningful?
If I go by that map in Lynn's early book, yes. Which is why the map graphic is so poor - they're lumping in "Results for the UK" meaning "Northern Ireland is part of the UK, so make them a darker shade of green than the Republic".
But as you point out, if we believe early Lynn, there's only 0.7 point difference. So I imagine the rest of the map may have similar problems. It's a very crude measure.
Lynn, though, doesn't seem to have been working off pure IQ difference alone; he considered the Republic to be too backwards due to being conservative, Catholic, agriculturally based, etc. Why, they'd even disapprove of things like sterilising the unfit! But the North being part of the UK meant it was Protestant, industrial, and liberal (not so much on that last in reality) so they'd be fine with "we superior Anglo-Saxon stock must ensure the bad weeds don't breed".
As I said, I don't believe there was really that much of a 5 point difference between us here and those in Britain; if you're measuring London as highest in average IQ, you have to take into consideration that it's probably *much* more racially mixed than the rest of the country, so that also contradicts what he later chunters on about "skin reflectance". Or that London does not score so highly because "all the white British are there and they're the smartest", but "as the capital city and centre of pretty much everything, the smartest (including smartest brown, black and yellow people) end up there due to the range of opportunities to succeed and have a good life, the same way everyone gravitates to Silicon Valley even from overseas if they're looking for VC for a start-up".
Just to trigger, news from Britain: "Fourth, on PISA Irish Travelers obtained the lowest score of 77.78
and on CAT3 Irish Travelers and Gypsy/Roma obtained the lowest scores of
84.88 and 84.37, respectively." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351935350_Recent_Studies_of_Ethnic_Differences_in_the_Cognitive_Ability_of_Adolescents_in_the_United_Kingdom
Travellers are their own special case, and it's hard to have a discussion on that without running headlong into accusations of "racism!"
Travellers are not the same as Gypsies/Roma, but they have the same background of living apart from settled people, moving about in caravans (now motorised) and living by the side of the road, a separate culture, a lot of poverty, not much emphasis on education or opportunity for the same as kids are constantly being pulled out of school to move around, their own dialect or cant called Shelta, and a certain perception of criminality (and that's another hot button topic).
They have worse outcomes in pretty much everything than the settled Irish population, and their culture does emphasise early marriage, not staying in school, and not interacting much with the settled community. Modern times mean they get the worst of both worlds: the casual sexual affairs, breakdown of families, drugs of the settled community on top of 'no school, drinking, fighting, married at 16 and a heap of kids' traditional lifestyle.
https://www.hse.ie/eng/about/who/primarycare/socialinclusion/travellers-and-roma/irish-travellers/
"The health inequalities that lead to such poor health status are highlighted in the findings of the All Ireland Traveller Health Study (2010). These include:
- Traveller women live on average 11.5 years less than women in the general population;
- Traveller men live on average 15 years less; and
the number of deaths among Traveller infants is estimated at 14.1 for every 1,000 live births compared to 3.9 for every 1,000 live births among the general population;
- the study also showed that deaths from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases and suicides increased in Travellers compared to the general population."
The "indigenous minority" stuff is modern liberal/progressive notions slapped on top of the Irish context; they're Irish, not a genetically different sub-population. There *are* differences, but that's more to do with being a small group that intermarry and don't mix with the majority population:
https://usher.ed.ac.uk/news-events/news-2017/gene-study-reveals-irish-travellers-ancestry
"They found that Travellers are of Irish ancestral origin but have significant differences in their genetic make-up compared with the settled community.
These differences have arisen because of hundreds of years of isolation combined with a decreasing Traveller population, the researchers say.
The findings confirm that the Irish Traveller population has an Irish ancestry and this comes at a time where the ethnicity of Travellers is being considered by the Irish State.
The team estimates the group began to separate from the settled population at least 360 years ago.
Their findings dispute the theory that Travellers were displaced by the Great Famine, which struck Ireland in 1845."
So I'm not surprised at all they score badly on tests, but is that indicative of low IQ in the general Traveller population? Hard to know. The ones that settle/are willing to interact with settled population such as on that early school leaver programme I worked at, are on the low normal to normal side (so far as I can see). Not really that much different from the low normal to normal peers in the settled population. Some do want to live respectably and improve things for their kids and their community, some are perfectly happy to be criminal scumbags - just like the rest of the population.
>We know that in the US, where we do give people good IQ tests, whites average IQ 100 and blacks average IQ 85.
I think that in general, the people who consider Lynn's figures implausible, offensive and racist are generally highly suspicious of this as well. Many are simply not aware of the studies to begin with, but among those who are, before inferring that there is either a genetic *or* environmental gap in intelligence, they tend to infer that the tests are flawed in some way and do not accurately capture a real gap in intelligence. I agree that there's a case for optimism based on these sorts of figures, but I think the argument here is likely to miss the sort of people who register these complaints, because they get off the train before the point that its basic assumptions are grounded in.
I think this might be a case of not actually disagreeing much. The standard objection to the 85 average is that it's due to stuff that the test measures other than g, not an actual large difference in g between the populations, and that same objection is probably also the objection to Lynn.
The most common claims I've heard for what else is driving the difference is that IQ tests measure a combination of g and what might be termed "scholastic ability", with the latter encompassing test taking skills (both familiarity and comfort with standardize test formats and procedures and the skill of applying executive function to taking a standardized test), vocabulary, general literacy, familiarity with particular genres of puzzles, and motivation to perform well on the test. These correlate with g in first-world countries, especially among middle-class and above subpopulations because in those environments the main limiting factors for scholastic ability are g and executive function. But among people who grew up in poor or marginalized communities, and especially for third-world populations, cultural and institutional factors compete significantly with g as limiting factors and may increase the impact of executive function and the "lottery of fascinations" relative to g as well.
Scott is suggesting an additional hypothesis that to the extent that there may be a difference in g, it may be driven much more by environmental factors (early childhood nutrition, disease burden, etc) than by differences in genetic potential. This seems pretty similar to the standard objection in so far as it rejects hypotheses that involve innate genetic superiority, and that either hypothesis suggests that bringing third-world countries towards first-world standards and improving conditions for poor communities in first-world countries should be expected to close the gap, and is likely to have broader social benefits to the extent that scholastic ability is a useful proxy for practical skills or for a good foundation for acquiring such skills.
>Even if you’re generally skeptical of charity because all good things come from development, Lynn’s IQ estimates suggest there’s lots of room for charitable nutrition/health/education interventions to work.
I don't see how Lynn's work shifts the balance much on the respective roles of charity and development. It shows that environment affects outcomes. But that's not what the "charity vs. development" debate is about. That debate is about the extent to which charity is impactful vs. development in aggregate, the extent to which marginal dollars have impact in one vs. the other, etc.. Environment having an impact doesn't indicate anything about the respective roles of charity and development - they both impact environment.
Indeed, Africa is distinctive in being less developed - not in receiving less charity. If a lesson would be drawn from sub-Saharan Africans performing more poorly in the African environment than other environments, it's not obvious that the lesson would be "invest more in charity directly impacting the environment," rather than "invest in development."
I think it establishes a charity -> development pathway, because presumably charity includes things like health and education, health and education (according to this theory) improve IQ, and IQ increases development.
I'm not entirely sure we're connecting so let me know if I'm misunderstanding something you're saying.
I'll try again, but if we're miscommunicating or something, that's fine.
I may have misunderstood the position being referenced in the beginning of the quote "you’re generally skeptical of charity because all good things come from development."
If it meant that exogenous interventions like charity only improve the symptoms of the problem but not the cause, and that true improvement can only can from within, then I agree that Lynn implies that that isn't the case - the same people themselves - not just their material conditions - will probably improve (e.g. in IQ) depending on exogenous factors in their environments.
If, however, the position referenced in that line is less radical, denying not that exogenous factors can impact individuals and their outcomes, but rather asserting that the impact of general economic development dwarfs that of targeted environmental interventions, or that the marginal impact of the former is greater than the latter, then I don't think that Lynn sheds any light one way or the other.
Lynn doesn't shed light on which elements of the African environment lower IQ.
If someone believes that a particular intervention (e.g. education) raises IQ, then of course, that would imply that it would in turn foster development and all the benefits that that entails.
But if someone believes that, then the point from Lynn is superfluous, as it implies the conclusion of Lynn, but not vice versa. That is, Lynn shows that environment has an impact, but it doesn't show that any particular intervention is impactful. If someone already believes that a particular environmental intervention improves IQ, then Lynn (environment affects IQ) is superfluous.
Lynn doesn't even show us that any known intervention is effective at increasing IQ, even in the context of Africa - just that *something* about the environment of Africa suppresses IQ.
It certainly doesn't imply that investment in targeted interventions has greater marginal impact than investment in development.
Separately, I think that there's reason to be skeptical about the effectiveness of particular proposed interventions, and I may elaborate on that in a separate comment, but that's distinct from my point that knowing that environment affects IQ only shifts the needle from development towards charity inasmuch as one doubted that exogenous factors can impact a person's characteristics, at all, but that if one accepts that (which I think most "development" advocates do), then I don't see it moving the needle.
You can have development without high IQ, as long as the development comes from outside forces. The problem is that they're not even worth exploiting.
The interesting question from this, is what are the implications of this conclusion? It seems to me that a lot of unsavory people who have ends I would call very racist focus quite a bit on this information, so my assumption is the conclusion it leads to gives support to justifying racist beliefs.
“The “racist” position is that all IQ differences between groups are genetic. The “anti-racist” position is that they’re a product of environment - things like nutrition, health care, and education. “
At the very least, the conclusion that certain ethnic groups (let’s say Haitians) have an inherently lower mean IQ (and IQ highly correlates with many of the things in life we generally consider good, like not committing crimes, being a productive citizen, caring about long term consequences, etc.) then the extreme anti immigration stance seems reasonably justified, and maybe much more than that. Perhaps “they’re eating the dogs!” is overkill (since it’s probably not true) but statements like that can be taken as a more emotional and broadly appealing slogan that is bringing one to the same conclusion a levelheaded look at the genetic component of racial IQ differences would lead you to.
Shouldn’t the question here be “is this true,” not “what beliefs are more justified if this is true”? You seem to be implying—but I genuinely can’t tell, so please correct me if I’m wrong—that the fact that anti-immigration and/or racist sentiments might become more justified if national IQ data is accurate is itself a reason to reject national IQ data. That seems clearly wrong to me. Either the data accurately describes something out there in the world or it doesn’t. What conclusions people might draw from the data should be irrelevant.
Given that it is true, what are the implications?*
Debate as to the truth of this is being had by more well-researched people, over longer periods of time, then this post or the comments under it promise to reveal.
The heritability of most everything else that can’t be intentionally controlled (it’s very difficult to impossible to meaningful improve one’s IQ, as is the case with height) has been well established, so I personally would be surprised if it was revealed IQ is not heritable at all (especially with the significant evidence that it is). The “is this true” question seems to be well-answered, leaving only “how true is it?”, as in, what proportion of IQ is nurture vs. nature? Maybe 10%, maybe 90%, but I suspect the better and more consistent we get at the nurture part, the higher proportion nature is the reason for variation.
I think the repetitive conversations about “Is IQ heritable and different across genetically distinct groupings of people?” is more of a distraction when compared to “What are the implications of this is true?” which seems to be a conversation mostly racists and unsavory people are having. If the conversation about implications is only left to them, then if it ever becomes a generally accepted that certain racial groups have different inherent intelligence, then they will be in a much stronger position for advocating for policy.
The non destructively racist implication could be: these groups need MORE help and resources to flourish, just like we give to INDIVIDUALS with special educational needs at school. I'm not saying it's realistic, but it's a possible outcome.
There are real genetic differences in the 'mean' of every measurable characteristic between any pair of groups you can conceive of. Characteristics would includes IQ and height and darkness of skin. Groups could include blacks/whites, men/women and left-handed/right-handed. One is racist (or possibly just annoying) if one repeatedly picks out particular pairings and opportunities to harp on the difference (usually without understanding statistics, at all).
"US blacks are a little more intermixed with whites than African blacks"
A little? In some cases, it's a lot? I'm guessing the vast majority of black Africans are 100% black African, while most the average black American is about 25% European. And some black Americans are more than half European.
(Side note: I remember when I was a kid in the 1990s and "biracial" was a pretty commonly used term for someone with one white parent and one black parent. But Obama was the first "black" president, Patrick Mahomes is a black quarterback, Notre Dame's coach Marcus Freeman is a "black" coach (he's half Asian). Oh but, Miami Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel is biracial because he talks like a nerd, went to Yale, and looks really white.)
I thought the average was 15% European.
maybe 25% figure comes for 23andMe or the likes -- which would be biased upwards, as blacks with more white admiture more likely to be 23andMe customers
I just did some quick googling, and I wouldn't be surprised if 23andMe puts out a higher figure.
Nevertheless, the European admixture is significant enough that if there's a genetic difference in IQ based on race, you'd expect to see it reflected in the data. I don't know of much writing trying to tease out these differences, apart from some of the stuff Steve Sailer has written about data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study.
In this Tweet: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1752378059473232382 Cremieux cites an average percentage of European admixture of African Americans of 18.7%. He discusses a study finding that admixture predicts IQ. Such admixture studies are discussed here: https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/the-first-admixture-mapping-study.
The ABCD finds an average of 16% white admixture for kids whose parents both self-identify as African-American and only African-American. But that leaves out people a bunch of people who might identify as only African-American but who might have, say, one parent who self-identifies as mixed.
Here's my 2021 article explaining a study of IQ and racial admixture using the spectacular ABCD database.
https://www.takimag.com/article/a-matter-of-tone/
Scientists have been talking about doing this kind of admixture and IQ study for a century. For example, anthropologist Margaret Mead published in 1926 a lucid critique of early admixture studies in which researchers guesstimated the degree of white admixture in blacks by looking at them. She said, no, that's not reliable enough, you need to get a good genealogy. She was otherwise open to the logic of the study, but suggested scientists search for ways to find ancestry more accurately.
Now we finally have reliable ways to estimate ancestry.
I think 23andMe let David Reich look at their data in 2014. I believe they came up with self-identified African-American clients being 27% white. But there's probably a selection bias. If you look like Steph Curry you are probably more interested in what a DNA ancestry scan could tell you about your racial background than if you look like LeBron James.
A more interesting finding was that self-identified whites tended to be really white, like 98%.
And there weren't many Americans at all in the 40% white to 90% white range. Outside of Louisiana, the One Drop Rule pushes people toward being quite black or very white.
"A normal person with 60 IQ...."
I think you just stated they are not "normal"! Why do we have to be so squeamish about IQ? I've lived in small villages nearly all my life, where everyone has a valued place. The handyman might not be as smart as the doctor or the teacher, but he is appreciated no end when he comes to fix a burst pipe.
By "normal" here, I mean "a person with no specific medical diagnoses".
Chortle! Love the NYT gag. They'd probably be over-qualified writing for the UK's Mail Online, having to write articles like "You're Eating Bananas all Wrong"
And speaking of charity and IQ, the lowest of low hanging fruit is putting iodine in salt. You can donate to the Global Iodine Network like I do for the long term benefit of poorer countries without worrying you're just delaying Malthus's reemergence. Givewell calls Salt Iodization "slightly below the range of cost-effectiveness of the opportunities that we expect to direct marginal donations to" which in the grand scheme of things is quite good.
Iron fortification of flour is another thing that might help. Both iron and iodine supplementation were begun in the US between the Wars.
The US military first used IQ tests in World War One and many of the results were distressing to elites about the masses, especially in the hillbilly districts. So lots of steps were taken in the 1920s and 1930s to improve common people's lives.
My vague impression is that by WWII, American draftees were considerably more literate and healthier than in 1917.
> His opponents pointed out both his personal racist opinions/activities
That's the mildest possible way you could've put it. He wasn't someone who had "personal racist opinions" that he kept as "personal racist opinions". He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, a white supremacist journal that was founded by people like:
Henry Garrett an American psychologist who testified in favor of segregated schools during Brown versus Board of Education, Corrado Gini who was president of the Italian genetics and eugenics Society in fascist Italy, and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer who was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of anthropology human heredity and eugenics in Nazi Germany. He was a member of the Nazi Party and the mentor of Josef Mengele, the physician at the Auschwitz concentration camp infamous for performing human experimentation on the prisoners during World War 2. Mengele provided for Verschuer with human remains from Auschwitz to use in his research into eugenics.
It's funded by the pioneer fund, an organization he was a board member of and that has been classified as a white supremacist hate group, with one of its first projects being to fund the distribution in US churches and schools of "Erbkrank", a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics.
He's not just called racist, he *is* racist, he even describes *himself* as a racist.
The second half of that sentence is also, to put it extremely mildly, a bit of a downplay:
> and his somewhat opportunistic methodology
I don't know what he did for his Malawi estimates that you're referring to, but I know what he did for his South Africa estimates. He would use the IQ of 69 for South Africans, cited by Owen (1989), which is referred to by Richard Lynn as:
> “the single best study of Negroid intelligence.”
The study in question examines test and item bias in the Junior Aptitude Test (JAT), a standardized test originally designed for white pupils in South Africa. Owen’s study aimed to assess whether this test was suitable for students from different racial backgrounds—white, Indian, and black pupils.
The abstract of the study states:
> “This study was undertaken to shed light on problems concerning the construction and use of a common test battery for various South African population groups.”
Essentially, the study evaluated whether the JAT, developed for white students, was appropriate for non-white groups. It selected schools across South Africa but faced challenges, particularly with black schools. The study notes that the majority of the selected black schools could not participate “owing to the unrest situation.” As a result, the testing was limited to black schools in the KwaZulu region, one of the segregated areas designated for black residents under apartheid.
The study analyzed the performance of students on various JAT subtests. A significant issue identified was that the test was administered in English to black students in KwaZulu. Several JAT subtests heavily relied on language ability. Owen assumed that language would not significantly impact the results because the black students in KwaZulu had ostensibly been learning English in their schools. However, this assumption ignored or disregarded critical issues, such as the lack of teaching equipment, the low number of certified teachers, and pupil-teacher ratios that were more than double those of white schools. As the study itself states:
> “Language was not expected to play a significant role in test performance in this investigation.”
However, the results showed this assumption to be entirely incorrect. Language played a critical role, and the black students’ poor knowledge of English rendered certain sections of the JAT, such as the synonym test and the memory paragraph test, “virtually unusable.” Yes, that's an actual quote, the study explicitly states:
> “Certain tests proved to be virtually unusable.”
Owen further noted that language bias was not the only issue. In a section titled “Item Bias in the Tests of the JAT,” he identified other forms of cultural and economic bias. For example, several test items presupposed familiarity with objects like electrical appliances, microscopes, and Western-style ladies’ accessories. Owen writes:
> “In the case of both the Indian and black testees, it seems that the single largest cause of bias lay in the fact that the pupils were not familiar with the objects represented by the pictures. Cultural and socioeconomic status factors probably also played a role in this regard.”
Despite the study concluding that the JAT was biased and that some results were “virtually unusable,” Richard Lynn still considered this “the single best study of Negroid intelligence.” Lynn used this study, which, again, tested children in segregated schools using a non-native language, as a key foundation for his estimate of the average IQ of black Africans. In his own words:
> “The mean IQ of the sample in comparison with Caucasoid South African norms is 69. [...] It is proposed, therefore, to round this figure up to 70 and take this as the approximate mean for pure Negroids.”
Yeah, "give a test in English to a bunch of Zulu kids in the Bantustans in the middle of apartheid" isn't a great way to measure anything except how disinterested those kids are going to be in said test.
Incidentally, language seems to matter for non linguistic items too, I don't have research data but I've recently discovered that my short term memory for digits (forward and backwards) which is one of the Wechsler tasks differs by TWO between my native language and English. And I'm functionally bilingual, highly educated, reasonably intelligent adult who works as a translator/interpreter. And I still lose 2 raw score points on that task if it's given to me in English. Yes, anecdote/personal weirdness but possibly pointing to something real in situations when any cognitive task is administered in a non-native language to even HIGHLY FLUENT speakers, and compared with native speakers. That's not even starting on culture of course.
This all sounds pretty convincing. I totally buy that apartheid-era IQ measurements were hopelessly confounded and useless, which begs the question, why hasn’t anyone tried new tests to come up with a better number? Or maybe they have, but I never see them cited in these discussions.
I don't know. My guess is that if there was better data out there that shows high IQ, the racists would do everything in their power to make sure no-one sees it. But I think that probably there isn't better data out there because of the moral compass of psychologists. I mean, you only have a finite amount of attention/energy/time on this earth, and I guess they'd prefer not to spend it on research that helps racists make the lives of people worse, rather than the myriad of research that needs to be done on topics that will make the lives of people better (e.g. trauma, biases, bystander effect, stereotype threat, positive psychology...)
"The racists" don't have power to prevent others from seeing a study. If there is a study, I suppose the reason people aren't seeing it is that the topic itself is too politically incorrect for its results to be discussed.
I was never interested in delving into the topic myself as long as influential people in my social landscape had bizarre takes like "IQ is a fake, there's no IQ gap, and the gap is explained entirely by environmental factors, and look over there! That person believes the junk studies on IQ and should be canceled."
I mean, I care what's true, certainly, but I care about it from a policy perspective. In the case of "IQ is 100% environmental vs 50% genetic vs 25% genetic vs fake", all plausible conclusions lead me to the same policy: support better education in places with worse education. I always figured, too, that telling children that their race has lower IQ is potentially harmful to them, so why promote such information? The frustrating answer may be that if you don't, the "IQ is fake and also 100% environmental" people keep talking and thereby win the debate.
There have been many more which agree with the original. See comment above and linked paper. You can also read https://www.ulsterinstitute.org/ebook/THE%20INTELLIGENCE%20OF%20NATIONS%20-%20Richard%20Lynn,%20David%20Becker.pdf and search "South Africa"
"Owen assumed that language would not significantly impact the results because the black students in KwaZulu had ostensibly been learning English in their schools."
Oh, boy. Even leaving out South Africa, imagine doing an IQ test in Spanish or French in an American or British/Irish high school on the assumption that the native English speaking kids had, after all, been doing years of study in that language. Imagine the results for intelligence you'd get out of that!
Lynn says he uses seven different tests. That was one of them, and he defends it against your claims at https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289609001275 . Since then school standardized test scores have come out which I think confirm these results.
The fact that there are so many accusations like these floating around, each of them trying to take one test out of context and each of which can be described back and forth forever is part of why I didn't try to focus on the methodological issues.
I was quoting from his article "Race differences in intelligence" published in Mankind Quarterly (since I was talking about Mankind Quarterly), so you have the wrong article. You can check that by copying the quotes and doing Control+F (or Command+F if you use a Mac) to see if they appear in the article.
EDIT: Also I object to "each of them trying to take one test out of context", it wasn't just one random test he used, it was the test he himself described as “the single best study of Negroid intelligence”. That's a bit of a different story.
Bob has a point. If Lynn called one study "the single best study of Negroid intelligence", that seems like a pretty good reason to take a closer look at it. If its headline results are very flawed, it doesn't necessarily mean that all the other studies are worse―it could just mean Lynn is extremely biased as Bob suggests.
I'm puzzled about what you're trying to accomplish, both with this post and with this reply. If Lynn is a self-described racist allied with fascists, as is Bob's central point[1], then proposing that we "Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates" is a very insensitive take at best. And okay, Lynn has counterarguments, but why should I trust them?
Another example: a fellow named Scott Ritter, a convicted underage sex offender, is perhaps the most popular Russian propagandist from America. I don't argue that he's wrong *because* he's a convicted underage sex offender―that would be absurd. I certainly *have* the knowledge to properly argue Scott Ritter is wrong[2], but arguing against his supporters would be exhausting and take forever (and they wouldn't change their minds by a millimeter). So instead I point out that Russian State Media has to lean on "that guy" because they have so few American supporters. Doesn't that give us a prior about the position itself? So, going back to Lynn―isn't there *any* other source you could use? Can we not Learn To Love Professor Reasonable's results instead?
[1] See also: Shaun's rebuttal to The Bell Curve, which discusses the same study https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
[2] Well, not quite properly. I simply followed the war very closely from the very beginning, learned about the history since ~2009 or so, and was epistemically careful―I did *not* build a database of sources I could use for debate purposes.
I wonder -- did you stop reading the post after 'Lynn'? None of what you've written engages with the post.
I wasn't aware our comments had to engage with every claim in the post, I thought we were allowed to just comment on one claim. My bad /s
> Corrado Gini
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=gini+coefficient
300k articles published based on the work of some fascist pseudo-scientist. Clearly the white supremacists have taken over academia. Someone better tell Trump before he razes the university system because wokism!
--
The Ashkenazi are basically the poster kids of the HBD hypothesis. This seems at least a 120 degree turn from good old racism. "Do you remember that 'parasite race' our founders in the Nazi party tried their best to exterminate, and which our white supremacist readers in the KKK hate with a passion? Turns out that they are not successful because they have a base instinct for exploiting their host population, but because they are actually, on average, really smart. Ooops."
--
Now, I would very much prefer if the Gini or Galton had been less racist, or if the co-discoverer of the Lynn-Flynn effect was a social democrat, alas, this is not the world we live in.
I would like nothing better than if I could trust respected academics to fairly investigate issues such as group differences in IQ, but I don't think I can, anyone who would argue that such group differences exist and are perhaps even genetic would clearly be cancelled. Thus, I must presume that any article they write starts with "In conclusion, Lynn is wrong (and also racist)." This makes whatever they write before a lot less relevant.
Of course, I would also take Lynn with a giant grain of salt given that it seems just as likely that his world view influenced his research results as vice versa. I will notice though that he published articles in Intelligence (which has then been criticized for platforming a racist pseudo-scientist, obviously). So even if Mankind Quarterly was in 2025 what der Stuermer was in 1937 (I do not read either, so I can't say), this would not disqualify his academic credentials per se.
Also, the academic left labeling anything that challenges blank-slatism 'racial pseudo-science' seems rich given that there seems some correlation between a field suffering from the replication crisis and how woke it is (possible confounder: softness of the field). This is not to say that there is nothing which is genuine racial pseudo-science out there. It is the problem of the boy who cried wolf.
Edit: fixed s/Flynn/Lynn/ -- stupid mistake on my part.
> fascist pseudo-scientist
> 'racial pseudo-science'
I don't know what you're quoting, but it's not my comment. Show me where I labeled Gini a pseudo-scientist, let alone advocated for blank-slatism.
> the Lynn-Flynn effect
It's not called the Lynn-Flynn effect. It's called the Flynn effect.
> anyone who would argue that such group differences exist and are perhaps even genetic would clearly be cancelled. Thus, I must presume that any article they write starts with "In conclusion, Flynn is wrong (and also racist)."
"Anyone"? Every single academic in every single university in every single country? Yeah, nah. But even if that was true would that mean that every single academic would care about cancelling to the point that they'd throw out academic rigor and start with the conclusion before the research? Doubtful. Also:
> Flynn is wrong (and also racist).
> Of course, I would also take Flynn with a giant grain of salt
My comment is about Lynn, not Flynn.
> correlation between a field suffering from the replication crisis and how woke it is
Do you have a source for that?
> The Ashkenazi are basically the poster kids of the HBD hypothesis. This seems at least a 120 degree turn from good old racism.
That's 11 million out of 8.2 billion people, or ~0.1%. So, not so much a 120 degree turn as a 0.36 degree turn. I don't think the half of the population that's brown are going to be reassured.
> Of course, I would also take Flynn [...] this would not disqualify his academic credentials per se.
I do not talk about Flynn's academic credentials. I don't even talk about Lynn's academic credentials. The comment you're responding to talks about whether Lynn (not Flynn) is racist.
> I don't know what you're quoting, but it's not my comment. Show me where I labeled Gini a pseudo-scientist
Well, you were arguing that Mankind Quarterly was white supremacist because it was founded by a bunch of fascists. I was pointing out, tongue-in-cheek, that at least one of the fascist founders was also a social scientist whose work remains relevant today, casting doubt on the idea that we can safely disregard anything based on the ideas of horrible people.
> It's not called the Lynn-Flynn effect. It's called the Flynn effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn#Publication_on_secular_increases_in_IQ
> In 1982, Richard Lynn published a paper about the generational increase in performance on IQ tests, now known as the Flynn effect slightly before James Flynn's publications documenting the same phenomenon.[40][41][42] A few researchers have called the phenomenon the "Lynn–Flynn effect" as a way of recognizing both their contributions.[40][41][43] In a 2013 paper, James Flynn offered his comments on this aspect of the effect's naming:
>>Calling massive IQ gains over time the "Flynn Effect" was an accident of history, a label Charles Murray coined in The Bell Curve in 1994. It is not a verdict a court would have been likely to hand down if it had an eye for the historical record. [...] Therefore, I give my thanks to Charles Murray and my apologies to Richard Lynn.[44]
> My comment is about Lynn, not Flynn.
Yeah, I got confused. Hopefully fixed now.
> "Anyone"? [...] But even if that was true would that mean that every single academic would care about cancelling to the point that they'd throw out academic rigor and start with the conclusion before the research?
No, I was being hyperbolic in this paragraph. Still, I think that there is a publication bias. If your findings fit the common academic narrative (which is woke), you will want to publish them in a high impact journal. If your findings clash with the common narrative, and furthermore rhyme with the claims of racists, at best you could publish in a lower tier journal. However, you have to balance the career risks of being called a proponent of racial pseudo-science against that, and will likely conclude that your time is better spent taking some less contentious data and polishing that to a publication.
The Jews might be a tiny minority, but they were disproportionally the victims of racism in European fascism. A significant departure of the attitude towards them between old Nazis and HBD proponents indicates that the ideological continuity between these movements is limited.
> casting doubt on the idea that we can safely disregard anything based on the ideas of horrible people.
Show me where I made that claim.
> wikipedia
Your source shows I'm right. It's called the Flynn effect, just because some people call it something else doesn't mean it's not called the Flynn effect. The fact that Lynn was before Flynn is also irrelevant since Runquist was before Lynn.
> woke
I repeat, do you have a source that wokeness leads to worse replication? Otherwise woke ideas are just straightforwardly supported by the evidence.
> continuity between these movements is limited
Given that after all this time they're publishing in the same journals that Nazis started, using the same Funds that were distributing Nazi propaganda, attacking 99% of the same people that they used to, with white supremacists sharing sharing forums, and conferences, and prominent speakers, and websites, and journals with HBD, I think the link is pretty crystal clear.
What is your response to people talking about the Gini coefficient when discussing inequality?
That's fine, see my discussion with quiet_NaN.
> A normal person with 60 IQ will seem . . . normal
People think having a low IQ is a terrible thing because the people in the First World who have low IQs are mostly people who got really unlucky in some other way.
I wonder if this applies to other conditions as well. For example, homelessness.
A homeless person in the Third World can be a mildly unlucky person who lost their job, or a family member died, or their house burnt down. They have low to no savings, take a long time to recover from random disasters, so they might stay homeless for a long time. If someone were to just give them a home, they probably won't become homeless again.
For someone in the First World to be homeless, and remain homeless for a long time, they have to be really unlucky. Most have some terrible chronic condition that makes their life difficult and, in addition, as a side effect, leaves them homeless. If someone were to give them a home, they might lose it again. The sort of homeless people who are easy to help already got help and don't remain homeless for long.
This would dramatically influence people's perceptions of the homeless in the First World, and even first-worlder's perception of the Third World. For example they might be more skeptical of a charity like Give Directly because all the poor people that they personally know are extremely unlucky people with some terrible chronic condition that makes their life difficult and would not leave poverty just with a cash transfer.
I would add that most homeless people sleep in their car or something, and nobody ever notices them. The homeless who drive debate are additionally selected for being visible and obviously homeless, which usually means a level of negative selection beyond just homelessness.
I don't think people with the IQ of 60 in the First World are otherwise terribly unlucky? Why would they be? Unless you mean "visible" or "noticeable" people with the IQ of 60, which is the point Scott already makes? It's quite possible that you encountered people with IQ below 70, even of 60, in normal life without noticing. There's a girl working in my local convenience store with perinatal brain damage and IQ assessed in childhood years as 57. Perhaps it was underestimated but she's certainly formally intellectually disabled. She's indistinguishable from many other people in the same role, including those who finished high school normally without formal diagnosis and extra support.
Yes, I was restating the point Scott made as a starting point to comment on how poor people are perceived in rich countries versus poor countries.
In rich countries the proportion of noticeable to unnoticeable homeless people, or intellectually disabled people, is higher than in poor countries. This affects the public perception of them, so that in the First World poor people are more likely to both be, and be seen as, responsible for their own plight, homeless people are more likely to be perceived as dangerous or violent, and so on.
Whenever one talks about people with low IQ, they imagine a person with visible traits of some kind of very obvious birth defect, rather than the actual typical case of the girl at your local shop.
"The sort of homeless people who are easy to help already got help and don't remain homeless for long." - what's this part based on? I'm not denying, just want to understand the detail
I'd say if anything, they are easier interventions, but by the nature of homelessness you describe, there's a group of homeless constantly generated like that? but I get this convo is about the other group, and the important point is that some folks think people move from this cycling group into the structural group, while you're saying they don't
It might help to think of the people who "already got help" not as actual homeless people who got help and are no longer homeless, but as potential homeless who avoided homelessness.
For example, maybe they lost their job but they were helped by unemployment insurance, or even by a strong economy that let them find a new job right away before they missed too many rent payments.
Maybe they left the stove on and their house burnt down. No matter, insurance covered it.
Maybe the bread winner died and their spouse was left with no means of supporting themselves. No matter, the bread winner had life insurance or their extended family had some savings and the spouse had an education so they managed to find a job before the money ran out.
I think people in the First World take that stuff for granted and don't see those situations as "I was nearly homeless but got lucky".
If this national IQ data is true (I’m not saying it necessarily is), would that make the people in nations with low IQs “subhuman”? If I introduced you to someone and told you they had an IQ of 60 would you think, “here’s a subhuman”? Even if you don’t believe in IQ as a metric at all—which seems possible given the tone of your comment—surely you think some people are smarter or stupider than other people; are the very stupidest people (who are still functional) “subhuman”?
...and yet most weeks there's a discussion in the open threads about the best way to encourage the outgroup not to breed. It's hard to claim this community doesn't look down on some groups.
Any guess as for the percentage of those "discussions in the open threads about the best way to encourage the outgroup not to breed" ? 5% of threads? 1%? Less than 0.5%? I guess it is the third option (I believe I can recall one, and I read all posts and many threads). Even if it were the first, it should "make it hard to claim this community does look down on some groups". - Or: You met one x-skinned person in your life. And saw him smoking. Now you see a bus of x-skined persons and assume they are all smokers. That makes you a .... .
Oh come on, a past survey already showed us that this blog's readership is relatively pro-eugenics as long as you don't call it eugenics.
It is a generally a pro-natalist blog, I admit. And it does discuss ways to improve the chances for healthy and smart kids. Eugenics, literally. It even may have expressed sadness about nerds and women with college degrees having even less kids on average.
Discussion how to make specific ethnic/IQ groups have LESS kids, let alone none - as in: eugenics in the Nazi-version: hardly ever - though there are some weirdos on this 95% free substack. See also Bryan Caplan`s position as in https://www.betonit.ai/p/a_eugenic_experhtml?utm_source=publication-search
Scott actually asked this on last year's survey, and readers were pretty positive about non-coersive eugenics (as in, paying undesirables to sterilize themselves): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdTw4xhkP5Awgn0xhL4ScjvZp8ieaojGrnSPgDTM-lSH8m--g/viewanalytics (ctrl+f "eugenics")
For the record, this was the original question:
How do you feel about non-coercive eugenics?
For example, a government program (let's say funded by private actors so it wouldn't raise taxes) focused on:
- Getting sperm/eggs from Nobel Prize winners, and subsidizing couples who want children to use them via IVF.
- Subsidizing polygenic selection for health and IQ.
- Offering people with severe genetic diseases or violent criminal histories money to get reversible contraception.
...I mean, there's at least three separate conversations about this literally happening in this post's comments section now. Meanwhile, I've not encountered a single one in any other blog or forum I follow on the internet in over a decade.
This place allows people to speak freely so long as they maintain a minimum standard of civility towards their interlocutors (and only them); and as the man said in the past - if you declare a space safe from witch hunts, you end up with a space containing a couple of bemused normies and about ten thousand witches.
The only person here who's suggested that a lower IQ could make someone "subhuman" is you, buddy.
"we're only trying to find ways to help the inherently stupid countries"
Yeah, actually
Given the demographic conditions, trying to improve Sub-Saharan African countries so as to make them into places that their citizens are less likely to be desperate to emigrate from, thus making an African demographic swamping of Europe less likely, is exactly the sort of thing you would expect the most ardent white ethnonarcissists to be willing to support. And in order to be able to know what actually would improve the economic prospects of those countries, we need to be willing to be open-minded about what the causes of their current low levels of development are.
How does the genetic bound on IQ help you, exactly?
It puts a limit on how much money you are going to shovel down a bottomless pit - if environmental interventions are only going to help you reach the genetic ceiling, then the more accurate an assessment you have of what that genetic ceiling is, the better you can estimate when you have maxed out the gains you can get from pouring resources into environmental interventions. If you then still want to continue throwing money at the situation, you can, .e.g. just give people a UBI, which may be far more efficient at improving their lives than maintaining an elaborate educational system that few are able to take advantage of. Or you can do something like this: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/the-best-foreign-aid-money-can-buy?utm_source=publication-search
I'm new to this blog and particularly its IQ discussions, but one of my early impressions is: if the general POV here is other people (read: me) have moved too far in saying IQ has zero value, then maybe, these have moved back into overconfidence in it, by way of translations to policy like this
like, don't you have to be a little more confident to say an upper bound of a 'slice' of IQ should set a limit for interventions, than to make some vague (and less useful, that's the point) claim about "the intelligence of a country" or even just "IQ of a country?"
some other things maybe I just haven't read into yet, or assumptions that seem lazy because the conversation has yet to get there: like the concept of a genetic ceiling that cannot be exceeded; certain solutions as only beneficial to IQ (education seems like obviously something where there's no cap on returns, even if they're diminishing); associating "elaborate educational systems" with precisely that gap in IQ between sub-saharan Africa and say, the US (unless you think a massive portion of education spend in this country is utterly wasted); or just looking much further into a way-too-handwaving statement like "few are able to take advantage of." then I think policy wise you'd want to avoid (have to, right?) the classic mistake of applying an average-based policy to an entire country and chopping off an entire top end of a distribution. but again, these might just be down the road
btw shotgun of issues above is mainly to make clear that I have many challenges to this whole idea, everywhere along the stream... but, I'm doing what I think we agree is good, engaging with all the thinking here too even though I viscerally hate most of it
I don't think anyone who takes these ideas seriously _is_ in favor of applying an average-based policy to an entire country and chopping off an entire top end of a distrubution - provided you are actually allowed to do the intelligence testing to identify the high-IQ kids from disadvantaged backgrounds who would actually stand to benefit from it. If anything, it is anti-hereditarian progressives who are most keen on shutting down programs and schools for gifted kids, or even academic streaming within schools for children not too far from the average, often precisely because the intake criteria for such programs and schools tend to result in severe under-representation of kids from the racial groups that progressives are keenest to uplift. There is, inevitably, something deeply inegalitarian about providing special accelerated schooling for a minority of kids who are already expected to do better than average in life, even if removing those opportunities results in a colossal waste of talent which could otherwise have gone on to create more inventive solutions to society's problems and make us all wealthier in the long run than we would have been.
That said, enough people around here are sufficiently Caplan-pilled to be entirely on board with the idea that a massive portion of education spend in most developed countries is indeed utterly wasted, and that instead of trying to funnel as many young adults as possible through a humanities degree on the basis that people with such degrees have historically done better in life than those with no degrees, one would be better to provide more vocational training for trades and let employers test for IQ directly without fear of disparate impact lawsuits.
But my comment was in response to to someone asking how knowing the genetic bound for IQ helps you. Of course knowing a country's _average_ genetic bound does not preclude you from providing more educational resources for children in that country whose genetic bound is above the average, I just mean that the genetic bound, if there is one and it can be accurately gauged, sets an upper limit on the phenotypic average IQ that country can expect to achieve, and the closer you are to that bound, the less likely it is that plowing more resources into environmental interventions is going to net you gains that justify the costs.
Notice, though, something curious: you comment "I'm doing what I think we agree is good, engaging with all the thinking here too even though I viscerally hate most of it". Does your own emotional reaction to what is, after all, a factual discussion, surprise you? From my own (admittedly sporadic) reading of the relevant parts of the blogosphere, pretty much no one on the hereditarian side will admit to a visceral hatred of the idea that at least some of the variance in intelligence, whether between individuals or between group averages, is environmentally caused. They mostly just think that the environmentalists are simply mistaken, and, sure, may express disdain for people pushing policies that, from a hereditarian perspective are likely to be counterproductive, but rarely express such an intense negative emotional reaction to the environmental hypothesis itself as an idea to discuss. Why do you think you have such a reaction to the hereditarian hypothesis?
I have a family member with something like a 60 IQ due to an event near birth I won't derail here, and you insinuating he's a subhuman is... Not the level of discourse I expect from this community. That's more bluesky or Twitter level.
surely the level you expect here is recognizing that he isn't claiming they're subhumans, but rather obviously, that he thinks the IQ-focused contingent feels that way? like... to me your comment looks from the same mold as the "actually, as someone with X, let me willfully misinterpret so that you're actually the offender" that is the hallmark of other sites and discussions (I don't know if it was ever a comment to come from the social justice-side, or if its genesis was opposing parody)
but still, like, that's just clearly not his argument dude
Seems like a deflection? If you disagree with what people have to say, explain your disagreement. Just expressing your general disdain makes you look like someone with nothing substantive to say.
> folks in the tech sector take on race science. Such clarity and equinamity.
Strong disagree, id argue autists are more likely to support genocide then the general public the germans love trains after all.
It would be quite the disaster if the numbers of some stupid model was widely believed and the "rationalist" "shut up and obey math" instincts landed on the side of mass murder.
Something rubs me the wrong way about this. The reason approximately no one supports phrenology any more, is that it had an opportunity to prove its validity, and it failed - it turned out that you _can't_ make detailed predictions about someone's personality traits from the pattern of unevenness on their skull. Whereas psychometrics _does_ have enough predictive validity to be useful. What you are doing here is kind of akin to dismissing some actually workable branch of chemistry as "astrology", as if the differences between them are unimportant.
Banned for high-temperature, low-value comment that tries to make you hate other people by lying about what they believe.
I knew the late Richard Lynn.
He was a frustrating fellow because, at least in his old age, he was somewhat sloppy, but his mistakes tended to be random enough that his basic conclusions were highly accurate.
For example, when reviewing his 2011 book on the high achievements of Jews, "The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement," I discovered so many mistakes that I redid his entire analysis of Jewish Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry, and medicine-physiology. I discovered numerous mistakes, but also that his conclusion that Jews win an incredibly disproportionate share of hard science Nobels, was absolutely on the money.
Well, why is it so important? I would think it maybe affirms how Jewish populations historically value education and culture, by way of religion perhaps. Just thinking aloud.
Why when gaps between Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Mizrahim exist? Zionism is a powerful force to revive old liturgic language and destroy with numerically superior enemies, but cannot remove gaps from populations speaking same language and same religion?
Well on the genetics front, I would think these populations have been through different admixtures, while on the culture front they might have similar adherence to the continuity of the Torah, good schools etc. Again, just speculation.
My take is that it affirms eugenics, more than anything else.
If you wanted to improve the average IQ of a given population, it'd be nice if education and culture would do the trick. But no one can argue that removing the bottom half of the distribution would do wonders for the average IQ.
Low IQ Jews either died or assimilated. High IQ Jews either fled or were too valuable to forcibly convert. Over time, that adds up. It's still not an option most people would seek to emulate for their ethnic or religious group.
I never knew Richard Lynn when he wasn't in his old age, but I also found him frustrating. He gave the impression of being a rather smart guy who absolutely obsessed over one thing and had little awareness of the nuance and color of existence, which translated to the kinds of social simplemindedness people were calling "autistic" a decade or so ago.
Once upon a time - before I knew him - he'd been doing some very interesting work on national Extraversion and anxiety levels, relating them to objective sociological data like rates of liver cirrhosis, caffeine consumption, and suicide. This kind of interest in measuring culture was, to me, really impressive for its time, and suggests he was at least a little different when he was younger.
I'd never noticed any errors in his intelligence-related work like you did, but do you think he was so old by 2002 that his IQ and the Wealth of Nations was also full of errors? He was over 70 by the time it was published, and while he had Tatu Vanhanen working on it as well, I don't really know enough about Vanhanen to say what influence he had, if any.
I spent 18 months in a country where people are supposed to have an iq of about 70, according to the map. My neighbors and friends were mostly non-literate. They did not seem less intelligent than the people I know in my current (US) neighborhood or the people I grew up with (in the US). Most of them would not have performed well on IQ tests, though. They'd never attended school and had no familiarity with puzzle-solving. This was 35 years ago and most people had not seen movies or even photographs. I remember sitting with one older woman and helping her interpret a black-and-white photograph: this is the arm, here's where it connects to the body, etc. It's hard for people from literate societies with tons of exposure to text & graphical representations to see the extent of the gap.
I would think IQ is based on a familiarity with modernity, standardization, etc. School and literacy are supposed to get you there, but farmers were also wise in a way we're not, for thinking different than we do.
Agreed, otoh: I assume 80%+ of adults between 20 and 40 in this country own a smartphone by now. If it is not North Korea.
maybe, but I don't think smartphones imply engagement with second or third-order skills like puzzle-solving (if first-order is literacy)
this gets at another point I've wondered... to me, it seems impossible that there aren't significant portions of populations, like in the US, primed with puzzles specific to IQ tests. like, I took various smaller ones or saw mini-sets of problems when I was <10. and I can't imagine that can be stripped out of results by anything other than self-reporting, which, you know. if I have a chance to validate myself that strongly... it's hard to resist. but surely this has been covered in methodology, I'll take a glance, but curious for thoughts
Well, of course abject poverty and disease eat up IQ (on average), and I'd hope we agree that that's a tragedy, an outrage and a crime.
That said (and bearing in mind that the title makes it pretty clear that the author does not hold Lynn's estimate to be a wonderfully precise weapon of mass construction),
- Lynn's estimates *are* often amazingly shoddy, or based on very shoddy work,
- Aren't newer estimates on average IQ among African-Americans often closer to 90 than to 85? A new estimate linked to gives a figure of 85 point something, but (a) it seems people (including Sailer!) are having a very easy time poking holes in it, (b) that's suspiciously on the nose, a bit like the "1 in 4" figure (rape and dullness are not cosmological constants)
- I find the entire "people with a 60 IQ are smarter than you think" line thoroughly unconvincing - and spending some time in different supposedly-dumb countries does seem like a valid common-sense way to get some calibration.
- The Aporia article is pretty astonishingly cheap (drawing a level line to strawman your opponent? really?).
- Perhaps, if we genuinely want to be politically incorrect for the sake of truth, the test case should be to float hypothesis that make most people uncomfortable, or some people with mainstream platforms *really* uncomfortable: split the amorphous 'white' category (urban/rural, Catholic/Protestant, actual Anglo vs. Scots-Irish, etc.) or ask questions such as "Wasn't Spanish Catholicism particularly keen on eliminating local intellectual elites, in part because of their perceived role in sustaining paganism?" (and so forth).
"Wasn't Spanish Catholicism particularly keen on eliminating local intellectual elites, in part because of their perceived role in sustaining paganism?"
Consistently removing your most intellectually qualified into (at least supposed) celibacy can't be a *good* thing, at least.
Well, that too, but (a) most priests aren't that smart, (b) plenty of priests (including some of the smarter ones?) in the global periphery sired (and often supported, educated, etc.) large families with their housekeepers. Used to be pretty common in Europe in the Middle Ages (note: in France, well into the 18th century, to trust some anticlerical writers), and in parts of Latin America (away from large cities) well into the twentieth century.
Where are you getting the idea that most priests aren't that smart?
... compared to some sort of idealized image of them as William of Baskerville or premodern academics? Historically, sure, priests had to be able to become literate (at times when the great majority wasn't, though not because of an innate disability), and no doubt some went into the priesthood because that a religious education was the only kind of education available. Still, it's not as if we were talking about an imperial examination. The most selective requirement in many societies was probably being born "legitimate".
I don't think you answered my question, but perhaps I'm being dense. Where are you getting the idea that most priests aren't very smart?
I'm not sure they are _now_, but if we go back a few hundred years, it was definitely the case that a lot of smart kids from the lower and middle classes were sucked into the clergy.
I don't mean to say that they're stupid either - more like a typical office worker.
That’s more of what I meant. And of course some of those smart kids *did* have children (“nephews”), and also supported their literal nephews - there was a guy like that in my family tree.
I think it's fair to say that at least since the Gregorian Reforms, catholic clergy has had fewer kids on average?
Francis Galton pointed that out in the 19th Century.
I don't think comparing whites is considered especially uncomfortable. People joke about dumb blondes/rednecks/polacks etc all the time, but nobody seems to pay much attention when their IQs are actually studied(yes, there is a "hair color and IQ" study). Perhaps because the differences are small. Nobody seems very upset that East Asians score higher than whites. Jewish IQs are a bit more controversial.
>"Wasn't Spanish Catholicism particularly keen on eliminating local intellectual elites
Well, Cremeiux already did almost that, but you do not read him, do you?
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-ottoman-origins-of-modernity
I was talking to a really bright guy from Mexico two years ago.
Mexico seems kind of weirdly lacking in extremely bright people, judging from comparing high end PISA scores in Mexico and Turkey. Overall PISA scores are pretty similar but Turkey has more top tier scorers. (Turkey has some exotic endogamous elites, such as the crypto-Jewish Donmeh, followers of the false messiah Shabbati Zevi.)
He figured it was because the Counter-Reformation kept puritans out of Mexico.
Barely know of him - doesn’t strike me as the kind of person to discuss Andean amautas or Mesoamerican calendrical priests.
Malawians and US Blacks (which mostly orignate from West Africa) are genetically not very similar. It would be better to compare with the region US black people originate from.
The result would probably be similar, though
>The “racist” position is that all IQ differences between groups are genetic. The “anti-racist” position is that they’re a product of environment - things like nutrition, health care, and education.
This is a weird lie to tell. It might make sense to lie to your opponents about what *your* position is, but what is the point of lying to them about what *their* position is? You've obviously read enough liberal media to know that the so-called "anti-racist position" is "there is no intelligence gap, any IQ differences can only be a result of flaws in the tests". Who exactly are you trying to fool by saying "actually, both sides have always agreed that black people are dumber than white people, the anti-racists just disagreed as to how black people *became* dumber"?
I had the same thought. Perhaps he meant the "racist" and "anti-racist" positions *among scholars* and people otherwise educated on the subject.
The educated take is that IQ science is nonsensical and so are Lynn's numbers
My biggest qualm with this type of study is that, generally, they insist that tests like "Raven's Progressive Matrices" are the most cross-cultural and resistant to education influences (because it doesn't involve languange). My view of Raven's is that it tests skills that are *relentlessly* trained in modern Western society, but are irrelevant to agricultural/pastoral society.
If you view IQ as "how well can you function in modern Western society", this isn't a problem. If you want to view the same number as also measuring genetic potential, it is a major problem.
As you and some other people have pointed out, the biggest problems with these cross-national comparisons come down to these cultures that are so different from the West that even something like Raven's isn't doing a good job of capturing the "genetic potential" of some illiterate farmer in an undeveloped African country. Unfortunately, I don't think there's really a way to create a test that could be administered in a scalable way. Presumably you could develop an oral interview to test IQ, but interviewing people one-by-one is a lot harder than sticking a whole bunch of people in a room to take a paper-and-pencil multiple-choice test.
But when you look at people with similar cultural upbringings and educational backgrounds (say, white and black Americans), and then you see that IQ tests are correlated with all sorts of positive outcomes, you can't just dismiss all IQ tests as biased and racist, as some of the left-wing types do.
I think that Raven is MORE broad-culture bound than for example (well translated and adapted) Wechsler for EXACTLY the reasons you mention and I've never understood why this doesn't seem absolutely obvious on the surface.
You don't need pastoral vs industrial/scholarly for this kind of phenomena really. I remember coming to the UK (well familiar with pictorial and numeric puzzles already) and encountering for the first time in my life ones using letters of the alphabet. I still can't do them at all, 25 years on.
The IQ advocates actually claim that appearance of agriculture (which is a major historical change) pushed IQs of agricultural groups compared to their hunter-gatherer neighbors.
Dunno, in my 13 years in German schools I was *never* given a task like that:
https://testlify.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Example-of-a-ravens-progressive-matrices-test-1536x864.png.webp
Otoh, I do admit that other "non-language" tests Lynn counted in involved stuff like "drawing a person as detailed as you can" - and many adults could not do better than western 5 year olds (German kids do a lot of drawing in kindergarten, but then again: most suck at that age). Again: there were differences among individuals even among bushmen. And those who were said to be "smarter" tended to draw better, to.
I think Raven matrices are one of the easiest sorts of IQ test questions to study for. There's simply not that many variations on the theme. A kid who has regularly done IQ tests in the past will be familiar with most of the different question forms, whereas a kid sitting his first ever IQ test is going to waste time trying to figure out what is being asked.
>If IQ was 100% genetic, we should expect Africans to have an IQ of 85, since American and African blacks have similar genes. This isn’t exactly right - US blacks have some intermixing with whites, and only some of Africa’s staggering diversity reached the US - but it’s close enough.
No, it really, really isn't. Saying US blacks have "some" intermixing is a hell of an understatement when the *average* "African"-American is ~one-quarter white. This is like saying that there probably isn't a genetic reason why lions are smaller than tigers, because ligers raised in zoos grow bigger than tigers raised in the wild.
"But it does suggest that the genetic component is less than 100%. Practically nobody ever claimed it was 100% (Charles Murray estimates 50%), so this doesn’t refute anyone in particular."
Murray's estimate, from The Bell Curve, is about within group heritability, not the between group one. The Bell Curve declined to give an estimate of any between group heritabilities. They wrote:
"If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmen-
tal explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not
done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems
highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something
to do with racial differences. What might the mix be?We are resolutely
agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not
yet justify an estimate"
I'm pretty sure I've seen Murray say half and half elsewhere, I'll see if I can find it.
It would be interesting to see IQ scores grouped by actual genetic ancestry rather than by country, which is often a poor proxy for genetic ancestry, especially in Africa and the New World.
That would also allow you to more directly compare groups with similar genetic ancestry living in countries with different levels of nutrition, healthcare, education, etc.
With all due respect, I found this particular post disappointing because it seems out of touch with current data and thinking on the topic. The wiki for "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" contains some helpful citations. Sub-Saharan African test score means tell us almost nothing owing to bad test methodology plus reliance on tests developed in western societies to measure skills whose use we teach and incentivize, in some cases, to a greater extent than done in those societies. Most scholars agree at least that intelligent behavior is culturally-specific. Meanwhile, assigning IQ means to entire groups (e.g., American Blacks) without consideration of time, place, cohort, etc. is practically a non-starter owing to the complexities of defining groups as well as the granularity of the data.
I realize it's a lot more satisfying to sit back and say that such-and-such a group is (or isn't) a certain way, but data doesn't always translate well into sound bites.
If you don't like IQ tests, you can use PISA scores, which tell basically the same story. Same with inter-US results: you can look at the SAT, which is taken by a pretty wide group of students and includes a racial self-ID question.
National development tends to mean increasingly western economic systems and educational models, so you'd expect development level, IQ scores, and PISA scores to be related. Crudely, they're all indicators of how much a country is "like us". As for the SAT, I'm not biased against acknowledging racial differences in scores. I just struggle with big central tendency statements (e.g., differences in group means) given what the distributions look like and given the way the tests operationalize intelligence. I have no quarrels with your optimism in the original post if we define intelligence as the cognitive aspect of what's crucial to material success in a first-world country.
What evidence could exist that would convince you of significant differences in intelligence across nations/groups?
Great question. IQ tests are intended to tap into fairly culturally-independent abilities to learn, process information, etc. Cross-national comparisons in IQ could only be trusted under the assumption that the tests tap into those "pure" abilities and aren't culturally biased in some positive or negative way. There's good evidence that the tests are biased.
Since the individuals we interact with on a daily basis seem to differ in intelligence, it feels reasonable to average the IQ scores of everyone in a country and draw conclusions about national IQ. But the fact that it feels reasonable doesn't make it reasonable.
Scott mentioned the PISA tests in his original reply to me. Cross-national comparisons on those tests (especially science and math) do make sense, because they allow us to rank countries on how much their 15-year-olds know. You can't be sure how much each country's score is attributable to quality of education vs. differences in IQ, but you can at least equate higher scores with greater content-area knowledge. IQ is (mostly) not content-area knowledge.
Sorry, but you didn't answer my question.
Sorry, I meant to say this: Given the way IQ is measured, no evidence would convince me, because I would not consider any evidence to be valid.
I'm not opposed in principle to saying that one nation or large group is superior to another one, on average, in some respect. The fact that we can't speak of national superiority in IQ is a matter of statistics, not my particular views on nationality or race or anything else.
I know that I'm being a huge party pooper here, but from the mere fact that researchers quantify things, it doesn't follow that every quantification is valid or meaningful.
It feels courageous when people like Scott attempt to discuss the national IQ data impartially, at the risk of being accused of racism. It's courageous too, in a different kind of way, to admit that these data don't allow us to conclude anything.
They basically tell the same story because they correlate on the point of being standardized written tests.
It's circular logic to claim that they validate each other. They both, to a considerable degree, measure familiarity with and ability to exceed in standardized tests.
I have a decent amount of experience with the intellectually disabled, and saying "cognitive issues are only responsible for a small part of the [communication] deficit" is so wrong that it makes me question everything else in this essay. Trust me, even making allowances for poor hearing or difficulty forming words, the cognitive issues are responsible for 90% of the deficit. An IQ of 60 is really low and it's a significant handicap.
Hmm, I'm curious what you think of https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/ustat/ustat0301-01.htm . It describes the characteristics of people in the 50 - 70 range and they sound dumb but pretty communicative. For example, there are constant debates about whether to execute criminals in this range, and everyone involved has enough skills to live on their own, work a job, buy a gun, get in a fight with someone, murder them, and offer some kind of (verbal) defense of their actions.
Here's another description from that page:
>> "As one psychiatrist testified about a capital defendant with an I.Q. of between 35 to 45: "[People with mental retardation try] to go along with people that they suspect are in authority. For example, I asked [the defendant] where we were when I saw him, and he obviously didn't know, so I asked him if we were in Atlanta and he said `Yes, we are in Atlanta.' In fact, we were in Birmingham, Alabama. I could have said New York and he would have said `Sure, New York'..."
This person obviously isn't well, but even with IQ 35 - 45 they can still communicate and make themselves understood!
I thought the lesson of Williams syndrome (also, toddlers and ELIZA and LLM hallucinations) is that verbal fluency and IQ are just not by necessity all that tightly coupled.
Saying *meaningful* things with verbal fluency requires IQ, but just knowing words and stringing them into grammatical sentences does not.
A maddening part of raising a toddler is they're able to identify authority figures, parse their leading questions, and answer "yes" to them, like the retarded guy in your example. But, like the retarded guy who doesn't know he's in Birmingham, they don't actually understand any of the concepts. So you have to be really careful with a toddler to always ask open-ended questions, because otherwise you have no idea how to interpret the answer. And even with open-ended questions, they may have rote-memorized an answer ("how did you sleep?" "good!")
I appreciate you highlighting my comment. I know it's a cliche to say IQ is complex, but in my experience the minds of people with intellectual disabilities are just different from the minds of "normal" people, even unintelligent normal people, in a way that doesn't translate to IQ. For example, a close family member with a severe intellectual disability can do certain tasks very well, and care of himself reasonably well, but has zero curiosity, ability to logically deduce things, or adaptability. Whereas I've run into "normal" folks who seem to lack the ability to do even the simplest tasks and even have trouble caring for themselves (ie, they rarely bathe, their living space is alarmingly dirty, etc), but they usually have at least some degree of curiosity and ability to adapt (sometimes even surprisingly so). It's almost like the difference between someone with a degenerative bone disease and someone born without legs--both have similar mobility issues, but in completely different ways.
Didn’t the increase in measured Irish IQ (or PISA results) put some doubt on Lynn’s early data. Was he matching GDP to IQ and not the opposite?
Or was it a delayed Flynn effect?
See Scott's comment here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to/comment/86319000, and this thread: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1843747999547052435 showing that the measured IQ of the Irish has been relatively consistent.
"The 'racist' position is that all IQ differences between groups are genetic. The 'anti-racist' position is that they’re a product of environment - things like nutrition, health care, and education."
This is such a remarkably facile framing, promoted so invariably by modern, genteel academic racists, that I'm frankly very surprised you use it. IQ is complex, the measurement of it is very complex, there are obviously both genetic and environmental factors at play in both its development and its measurement, and our understanding of it continues to evolve over time. The issue of whether "g" is a valid construct or a statistical artifact has never been settled, and the answer is very likely, a bit of both.
My strong objection to the notorious Saletan series was that the issues are sufficiently complex, and the social implications of the debate so fraught, that having this debate in the general public sphere is counterproductive.
Topics in my most personal conversations lately have centered around congruence, integrity and credibility, which are themselves deeply interrelated concepts. Integrity in my mind is the degree to which someone is able to maintain fidelity to core imperatives, and their relative weighting, simultaneously; a dynamic and never perfectly-achievable pursuit. I could argue "g" is a major factor in this, to the degree to which I'm able to activate relevant concepts and their associations, dampen irrelevant concepts and their associations, and process all those comparisons simultaneously (with or without metacognition strategies to improve efficiency) in working memory.
What impact does predilection for self-deception, or habitual employment of heuristic biases, impact all of that? How much of that is related to the social environment? The prefrontal capacities of my parents? The number of concussions I incurred playing football, soccer, or getting beat up?
How are all those factors going to vary from culture to culture? Within each culture? Am I controlling for nutrition? There relative advantages/disadvantages within that environment for exercising or displaying integrity?
If I'm a scientist studying the topic, is my application of scientific methods (formulation, consideration of plausible competing hypotheses, research methodology, analysis, generalization of results) congruent with my demonstration of the same in other areas of interest? My overall capacity should impact my credibility. How about my congruence?
If you're going to write about this, please don't adopt the simplistic framing of people promoting an obviously biased agenda. You demonstrate some notable capacity and sophistication in your application of your analysis of complex problem. This is a complex problem. The framing of IQ as exclusively environment or genetic is peurile, and inherently biased.
That intelligent people continue to do so is a demonstration of how integrity and congruity are to some degree independent of "g".
Well put
"A normal person with 60 IQ will seem . . . normal. If you try to engage in difficult conversation, they won’t be able to follow, but most of them can do simple low-IQ jobs like manual labor, basic retail, or writing for the New York Times."
There is hope for me yet, so! Even if Lynn is correct, I still may find a niche in the NYT! 😀
"...but most of them can do simple low-IQ jobs like manual labor, basic retail, or writing for the New York Times."
I literally lol'd at work.
Interesting analysis. Given the caveat you have about IQ vs g, I think I probably agree. You make some good points here about expectations.
I am curious about a "normal" person with 60 IQ. I realize that I don't actually have an intuitive mental model for how this person would look and speak and behave; all the examples of low-IQ adults I've met were intellectually disabled. Does anyone have any example that makes it look normal? Some video of a 60-IQ person talking and doing tasks, or texts written by a 60-IQ person, or an example of a public figure who is such?
I had a psychotherapy patient whom I thought of as having average intelligence, and I was quite startled when I discovered he did not. He was a young guy who had a bad anxiety problem, and was kind of adrift in life. He good social skills, and was pleasant and entertaining to talk with. When he talked about his read of various people in his life, he seemed OK at recognizing when people were , for ex., saying something they would not really carry through on, or making unfair demands on a friend. He worked delivering for Uber Eats. He had figured out ways to make more per hour by mostly working at times & places where Uber was giving bonuses. Knew enough about tech to set up an account where he publicly commented online about live sports events. His commentary was in fact fairly entertaining (though not enough to get him followers). So all that seemed consistent with at least average intelligence.
So one day he decided to apply for a job as a clerk in a store. It was a well-known company with stores all over the country. Their application included a sort of mini IQ test, one where all the items were quite easy. It was stuff like, If you gas tank holds 10 gallons, and you get 30 mpg, how far can you get on half a tank of gas? Which of the following is the correct definition of "sarcasm"? Which of the following would be an example of indecision? And he could hardly answer *any* of them. I thought maybe he was anxious and having trouble focusing, so I tried just kind of talking him through some of them. It didn't help at all. He wasn't anxious or unfocused, he just did not know the answers to some of them, and could not warp his head around others. For instance, I am confident he knew what indecision is. But being asked to do a multiple choice item where he selected examples of things, and choosing the one that was a good example of indecision, somehow threw him.
I don't know what his IQ score would have been on a test, but def. quite a bit below 100.
That changes my perspective a lot, thank you
Emil's post isn't correct, however.
We know from the recent Reich lab paper on long-run genetic selection that there was strong selection for IQ in the neolithic revolution, which implies agriculture strongly selects for IQ and ability to plan.
Malawians are 60-80% subsistence farmers.
Even a "normal" low-IQ person cannot do the implied math and long-term planning involved in this kind of farming. And in fact, economists routinely find that African small-plot subsistence agriculture is actually highly optimized; farmers make very precise choices about where to plant which seeds, which fertilizer to use, etc. Key point is basically: it really isn't true that an IQ 60 person can run a farm functionally.
Moreover, mean IQ of 60 implies large shares even lower, at ranges that are uniformly nonverbal even without specific disability. And this is why in the actual record-level NIQ database, they truncate estimates below 60, because even the database managers realize these estimates are crazy.
See my post here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-154757665
According to the Reich paper, pre-farming European genetic IQ was ~60 (I don't know how this correlates with Neolithic European IQ after you add in poverty/health/etc, but plausibly the latter was lower). But there are plenty of signs that pre-farming Europeans had an interesting culture, including the cave paintings, trade networks, early stone circles, and the fact that they eventually invented farming.
Likewise, modern hunter-gatherer peoples who haven't undergone that selection can do amazing things with hunting, tool-making, and complicated cultural systems; I don't know enough about Malawian farming to know if it's exactly as amazing, but probably pretty close.
So I think I stick to the claim in this post - that our estimates for what a very low IQ means are poorly-grounded, and that people with low IQs can do some pretty impressive things, especially if they're concrete and part of a cultural transmission package. Maybe this is the Joseph Henrich "Secret Of Our Success" thing. We know that Malawians get poor test scores in school, so it seems like there's some disconnect between do-well-on-tests intelligence and run-a-subsistence-farm intelligence, and the abstract/concrete and novel/cultural distinctions are the best explanation that I can think of.
You say that "the phenotype that arises from a given tested IQ in America is clearly vastly worse than the phenotype arising from the same tested IQ in Africa", which I basically agree with. I think part of it is the syndromes issue raised above, and part of it is that maybe Malawians have zero contact with the culture of abstraction that IQ tests come out of whereas even very uneducated Westerners have some contact with it, and maybe another part of it is that whatever health/nutrition issues the Malawians have preferentially harm faculties responsible for more abstract tasks rather than more concrete ones.
For an opposite data point, when I was in Haiti, my boss told me (secondhand, no personal experience) of extreme difficulties working with Haitians, like that they couldn't alphabetize files even when that was explained to them. Many Haitains are also successfuly subsistence farmers, so I think this also supports some kind of heavy abstract/concrete distinction.
I don't think we're really disagreeing, just agreeing on something like the correlations that make up IQ being less valid outside the normal range. Or if that's not what you mean, can you explain your position better?
Also, what is your source for people with IQ 50 usually being nonverbal?
Are you essentially suggesting that IQ (even measured by culturally appropriate tools) can be a poor measure of general intelligence, if we definite the latter as the ability to cognitively adapt, learn, react, and problem solve? So in "our" (abstraction heavy) culture it can be (when culturally/linguistically adapted) a very good proxy for "manifest intelligence" but might be much worse a proxy in different contexts?
Huh? No, pre-farming IQ was not 60. It was like... 90. They show I think like 2 SD deviation in PGS for IQ, and that predicts like 2-10 points difference in IQ.
Also keep in mind: if you believe that Malawian IQ is low due to genetics AND environment, you have to ask "What environment?" The answer is obviously pathogenic load, stunting, nutritional stress, maybe violence-- but this stuff doesn't create low familial IQ as Emil suggests! Cerebral malaria doesn't subtly drop your IQ; it leaves you functionally altered and disabled.
If you think low measured African IQ is ~50%-ish environment, then you're arguing Africans should have high rates of actual cognitive disability. Only a ~100% heredity argument yields a situation where African IQ is "low but not nonfunctional." If IQ is low due to widespread neurological damage from environment, then you're talking about widespread cognitive disability.
As a note: the most recent datapoint in the NIQ database for Haiti is an IQ measurement of 100!! I show that in the post! I'm not sure what to make of that either way.
My point, broadly, is derived from the argument over dysgenics. Emil thinks that high fertility in low IQ countries threatens to leave humanity less functionally able to operate as it currently does. I think this is wrong for many reasons, not least of which is Kenyans seem to have no particular trouble having shopping malls and cell phones and movie production studios, and changes in IQ have no correlation with changes in GDP, etc. The reality is that we know IQ isn't fully heritable, we know Africans are not experiencing the massive loads of functional disability they should be if widespread brain damage were causing those low IQs, and we know the national IQ data is weird samples with nonstandard measurements and tons of volatility. The simplest explanation is just that the national IQ data is super unreliable.
According to Flynn US IQ in 1900 was 67, how do you come up with 90 for 10,000 years ago?
Akbari (2024) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.14.613021v1.full.pdf
Shows that about 10,000 years ago Europeans had 2 SDs lower PGS for IQ, 1 SD lower for EA or income, and 1.5 lower SD for walking pace. These PGS scores are all mappable to genetically implied IQs from the underlying papers which first calculated them. They imply Europeans pre-Neolithic had "genetic hardware" about 2-10 IQ points lower than ours.
Negative environmental effects could certainly have pushed the value lower. But I'm skeptical that humans figured out farming at an IQ measuring at 60 when their genetic potential at that time was 90-100, since that would imply 30-40 IQ points lost due to environmental effects, especially childhood diseases doing brain damage. Hard to imagine figuring out the stuff they did at those IQ levels!
Doesn't basically every study show a 30 point pre to post industrialized flynn effect for IQ gains? Do you think there was a large post agricultural drop or that the flynn effect isn't real?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886911001437
Thank you, I think I misunderstood the Reich paper as meaning 2-3 SD in IQ rather than 2-3 SD in PGS; that makes it much more comprehensible.
I'm not sure why you think that environmental effects on IQ need to involve dramatic disability. One of the most important environmental effects is education. Ritchie estimates something like +1 IQ point for each extra year of schooling; if the average Malawian has five to ten years less schooling than the average American, that explains 5-10 points of the gap right there. The health component I expect to look more like mild parasite stress than cerebral malaria.
Again, I agree with you that there's something weird going on with the data. It doesn't seem to be that the data is trivially flawed, because it seems to correlate with PISA scores etc in the expected way. I think it's a combination of:
1. We're not very well calibrated about what low IQ looks like.
2. The concept of IQ eventually breaks down at the tails into more of an "understand abstractions" component and a "have a normal daily life" component, IQ tests only measure the former, and populations with extremely low education do disproportionately better at the latter (you also need something like this to understand the Flynn Effect in the West, which implies that populations hundreds of years ago had IQs in the 70s).
In other words, insofar as you're forced to give a number, Lynn's is accurate, but the numbers no longer mean everything you expect.
I'll start by saying I think we are sort of agreeing but in a way that sounds like disagreement. You are saying "the number doesn't mean what we expect" and "something weird is going on." But you think this means we are poorly calibrated in understanding what a 60-70 IQ means. But I don't see a reason to trust stats that are obviously unreliable over all the contrary evidence. We seem to agree that IQ clearly isn't generating a stable and predictable phenotype-- you want to salvage international IQ comparison, but I think that's unwise. Correlating with PISA is a low bar-- every developmental indicator correlates with PISA scores. Rather, it should be really compelling to us that countries with 20 point IQ gains in Lynn's data, over time, have no meaningful gain in GDP per capita. If IQ is driving economic complexity, that shouldn't be the case! Likewise, many countries with rapid GDP per capita growth have stable or falling IQ measures! And since Lynn's data estimates many countries simply by taking the averages of spatial neighbors (since no data exists for many countries), the data literally has baked in autocorrelations. Spatial neighbors tend to have similar GDP, and Lynn assumes they will have similar IQ. I could go on, but the putative correlations are in many cases fabricated by imputation.
On schooling, this is complicated-- Ritchie actually estimates at least +1 IQ for each extra year; the actual range is 1-5 extra IQ points per year. Which is pretty crazy! The idea that going to school for one more year raises IQ by 1/3 of an SD is clearly nuts.
I think a better read of this is that Ritchie finds that increased schooling years has a large effect on test performance, which may not entirely be a change in cognitive ability outside the schooling context. The idea that a country can add to the actual cognitive ability of its people via having its own people, of the same cognitive abilities on average, set up schools, is a bit mind-bending. Cremieux has a nice piece pointing out reasons to be skeptical of Ritchie's findings about education causing higher IQ. https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/why-do-we-keep-getting-this-wrong
Plus, typical school quality in poor countries is quite low.
So I don't think it can seriously be argued that the most important environmental effect here is schooling. It's definitely going to be something biophysical. Brain size strongly correlates with IQ, stunting alters body size and brain size absolutely and relatively, maybe that's it. Maybe it's parasites, maybe it's childhood febrile episodes, who knows. But I think we should be skeptical of the idea it's just schooling. I mean, consider Nigeria. Lynn's database clocks in Nigeria at 79 in 1974, and 77 in 2012, a 2 point decline. But if you look at Nigerians who are around 18 in 2010 or so, they averaged 9-10 years of schooling, whereas Nigerians who were 18 or so in the early 1970s averaged 5-6. That's 3-5 more years of schooling and zero IQ gain. Nigeria is one of the only countries Lynn's dataset has multiple spaced years of data for, hence why I picked it.
At the meta level, my arguments on this are informed by working on a similar project related to fertility preferences. Even where I have literally 4x as many psychometric estimates around the world for a much, much simpler indicator and in much, much more representative samples and larger survey sizes, it's very very hard to squeeze this stuff all together. I mean to be honest, the NIQ database should really be using LCA, not averages; they should be assuming that all of these score estimates are noisy measures of an underlying trait, not components of a trait, but that would make the estimates less credible. I think that we should not regard the NIQ data as very credible. Changes in them don't predict changes in social phenotypes or predicted changes due to selection, the data is extremely noisy, the measures are scattershot across tons of different kinds of IQ proxies, and as this discussion reveals, "IQ of 68" is barely a semantically meaningful concept: it includes people who in daily life you'd barely notice are different, and also includes people who need to be institutionalized for cognitive disability! It's like saying Nigeria has a GPA of 2.8-- that's just a really weird way to talk about populations in general!
I don't understand why you don't think it's schooling. Yes, I agree that schooling gains are shallow and won't necessarily affect things too distant from test performance. But IQ is measured in test performance. So it seems pretty plausible to me that a big chunk of the Malawi/US IQ difference is that Americans have had enough schooling to get good test performance (including on IQ tests) and Malawians haven't. This would also explain your claim that Malawians are better at farming than their IQ would predict - it's because IQ is a measure of school quality and farming isn't.
(the reason I'm not just glossing this as "the tests are biased and don't really measure IQ" is that I think "test performance" is being a little too glib - I think this would apply to any sort of academic/intellectual pursuit similar to the ones taught at school, and that's kind of what IQ means. That's why I'm saying "abstract/intellectual/symbolic reasoning" instead of "test performance" exactly.)
In terms of your change-over-time numbers, I find them really interesting and will have to look at them more. My preliminary thought without having considered them that long is that IQ-when-you-first-start-measuring is linked to something real, and IQ-after-changes is closer to the test-taking/symbolic-reasoning axis which has a less profound effect on GDP (though I don't really understand why that would be - in order to start the next Microsoft, a country needs people with specifically academic skills; maybe all of these countries are too poor to be in that race, and their GDPs mostly differ on things like how good they are at subsistence farming?)
Re: Nigerian changes - good point. I think it's possible that Nigerian schools aren't good enough that 3-4 years of extra schooling has much effect. But I could also see "education" being less about the existence of schools per se, and more about a literate and technological culture where people are forced to engage with symbolic reasoning all the time. I realize this is getting kind of tenuous and god-of-the-gaps-y, but otherwise I don't have a good explanation of the Flynn Effect (and the Malawi effect, which seems related) that explains why it *feels* fake (in the sense that past people, and Malawians, both seem smarter than their extremely low IQs would suggest). Any IQ gains from having less cerebral malaria should be 100% real, whereas IQ gains from schooling could affect different skills differently.
I don't think it's that helpful to attack the Malawi numbers in particular without also attacking the Flynn Effect, because they seem like two different facets of the same problem. And since the Flynn Effect is on pretty strong ground, I think it makes more sense to face the problem head on than to try to come up with ways it might not exist.
I think we're sort of angling into a convergence here.
I'm comfortable agreeing that "doing better on a test" probably is not ONLY doing better on a test: probably those gains generalize to some other test-like circumstances. I bet the frequency of errors in any kind of paperwork declines when people have more experience completing tests! When I run surveys on survey platforms with compensated survey-takers, I never hear from anybody saying things like "I got stuck on question 5, it wouldn't advance" or "Question 23 just doesn't work." But when I run surveys of my religious denomination which has many old people, I'm inundated by that. I don't think the olds are dumb. I think most tasks improve with practice, and school practices you in a bunch of paperworky type tasks, and that's a real skill. But it's not g. And that's Cremieux's point in the article I link. Schooling seems to improve some of the less-g-loaded abilities.
On the Flynn effect, FWIW, when I specify a panel model with country fixed effects and decadal coefficients, the IQ coefficients are estimated as 0 in the 1960s, -1.5 points in the 1970s, -4 in the 1980s, 0.1 in the 1990s, 1.9 in the 2000s, and 4.4 in the 2010s. But standard errors are 3-5, so none of it is significant. IOW: the Lynn database does not evince a Flynn effect. To be honest, I've gotta say, the Lynn database is weirdly small. I assumed it had a ton of datapoints in it, but it really doesn't. I wish the post-Lynn hereditarian crowd would massively expand it with stuff interpolated from like PISA and things like that.
But I think this is another reason to be skeptical of the Lynn data! The Flynn effect is really strongly demonstrated in the most high quality sources, yet doesn't seem to have meaningful support in Lynn's data! That should be a ding against trusting this data!
Ultimately, I think we have a pretty long laundry list of reasons to think that the Lynn data is not revealing very many useful facts about societies. We should not be saying "Actually it's pretty good, it basically describes reality!" Instead we should be saying, "Okay, that was a good effort for a first try, but seriously guys, you can do better than this, this has huge flaws, please go back and try again and get way more and way better data."
At this point doesn't IQ just stop being a useful metric altogether? If 60 IQ can mean anything from "able to engage in multi year planning and risk analysis for survival" and "incapable of daily tasks".
I think you're assuming these decisions need to be decided individually, when they're often discussed with neighboring farmers. Often they take advice from smarter, wealthier and more successful farmers. You can be an unintelligent farmer who's successful by taking advice from smarter people.
Yields in Malawi are substantially lower than in more developed countries, so it might be possible that these decisions are not actually highly optimized and are worse decisions than those taken by farmers in other countries.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-yield
Speaking of the Flynn effect... You had a post about how the Flynn effect is receding in developed countries – independent of any dysgenics effects. Is there more information on what the mechanism behind Flynn is/was, besides sufficient calories which shouldn't be a problem in developed countries? Especially for new parents this seems like an interesting question.
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/a-requiem-for-nutrition
Interestingly, there are studies showing that the IQ differences between groups of black and white students in the U.K. is smaller than the differences in the US, despite most black British and black Americans being of West African descent on average. This means it’s a more valid example of a similar genetic group being affected by environmental factors differently in different countries. That data has generally been interpreted as the U.K. education system being more similar from one school to the next, compared to bigger differences in schools in the US - I.e. inner city schools in deprived areas who primarily have black pupils attending them. Again, this shows a larger effect of environmental factors
This is possible, but I would also look into selection effects for immigrants to different countries. Blacks who immigrated to the US post-slavery tend to do better than those who were taken as slaves because immigration selects for high IQ both directly (lots of Nigerians come to America as doctors and nurses) and indirectly (easier to get through immigration process). If the UK blacks are more like recent US immigrant blacks then that might explain the difference.
U.K. black people are mostly of Afro-Caribbean origin and mostly from Jamaica, so mostly West African genetically and the same history of slavery that US black peoples ancestors suffered. I’m not aware of comparisons between more recent black immigrants to the U.K. and people who are second or third generation Jamaican-British black people living here. Lots of people immigrated to the U.K. from Jamaica in the 1950s to fill a post war labour shortage.
This recent paper still shows the discrepancy in the U.K. but the effect size is much smaller (Black ~96-97 vs White 100). It’s not clear how much this could be a Flynn effect disproportionately benefitting younger black British children who started from a lower baseline. Their parents are also less poor than their grandparents or great grandparents who were mostly Jamaican immigrants in the 1950s. We do have more recent Somali and Nigerian people immigrating recently though
I forgot to link the paper :
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351935350_Recent_Studies_of_Ethnic_Differences_in_the_Cognitive_Ability_of_Adolescents_in_the_United_Kingdom
In the U.K. the worst performers at school are white working class males who get a food allowance (very rare these days). Black females are way ahead in testing.
Good allowance as in a lot of pocket money? Or is there another meaning here?
Ack. Food allowance.
"You do realise that person's skin/hair/eye color does not allow for any inferences about person's psychology, physiology or social behavior? "
This is so obviously false that I have a hard time believing that you believe this. You think someone with white skin is just as likely to speak an Asian language as someone with white skin ("social behavior")? That black people are just as likely to get sunburnt as white people ("physiology")?
Cringe...did you even read what I wrote? If you did, you clearly did not understand a thing about what I wrote, which btw speaks volumes about your own IQ.
Now ask yourself: a) how can skin color (physiology) be differentiated in an objective and statistically meaningful way? b) How can social construct like language be correlated with physiological traits (like skin color) in an objective and statistically meaningful way? c) How do you differentiate people with "Asian" skin color from people with "white" skin color in an objective and statistically meaningful way? d) How do you differentiate "white" or "black" people from one another in an objective and statistically meaningful way?
Take all the time you need, I'll wait...
Ok I'll just save you from further embarrassment and give you a hint: YOU CAN'T. While certain aspects of skin pigmentation can be measured, using these measurements to categorize people into racial groups or correlate them with cultural traits is neither scientifically valid nor ethically sound.
Your argument proves too much lol. How can colors themselves be differentiated in an objective and statistically meaningful way? They fall along a continuous variable. So I guess there's no such thing as red or blue or green!
Now apply this to every scientific concept and you'll see quickly that nothing exists at all except various quantum field interactions, which according to you cannot be differentiated in an objective and statistically meaningful way.
We can work out ancestry well enough I suppose, ie from Europe, Africa or Asia.
That said info find the American use of racial characteristics in census forms to be suspect, and indeed all the DEI stuff, based as it is on dubious categories. Unfortunately that stuff is being exported across the world. France is resisting. We should all be like France.
"I believe we can all, at least those of us who are serious data scientists, agree that self-reported identification is not objective data and thus statistically meaningless."
This is not even remotely true. Self-identity and cultural background are critical elements of an individual's personality. Speaking as a psychologist, self-report data is both reliable and valid for a wide variety of applications, from mental health diagnosis to sensory perception to voting and purchasing behavior. The vast majority of professional social scientists accept this--it isn't considered controversial in any way.
I say all this as someone who understands and accepts that race has no inherent biological meaning. Its an arbitrary social and cultural category, but one of the more powerful ones at that.
1. You would accept DNA results? As in https://www.razibkhan.com/p/getting-a-sense-of-the-russian-soul or short that graph in it: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fca62aabb-c65f-4455-9abe-326cbad49b96_891x304.png
2. You did notice that - in the US, at least -results for many social outcomes (school, prison, income, ... oh and IQ results) do indeed differ significantly between those persons that put their "x" on "black/Afro-American" and those persons that put their "x" on "white/Caucasian" (also x on "Latino" vs. x on "East-Asian")? Do you expect the result between group "persons taking an IQ test and an observer marks them as white/black/Asian/hispanic/dunno by just looking" and group "persons taking an IQ test and marking those respective boxes on their own" would also differ that much?
3. You are aware that the word "black" is used nowadays less for "being of extremely dark complexion"? Kamal H. - or even Obama?
There are studies based on admixture where race is treated as a continuum rather than a binary, they have similar results.
Banned for this comment.
Like every nature/nurture debate, it’s obvious that the answer is both have a clear impact. To dispel this data is not pointing at a politically fraught conclusion is naive, to say it’s actually a case for the safer political opinion is fanciful. Normalizing across health and income still results in racial deltas in IQ (like height), the real debate should be around whether we should place the primary value of person as much in their IQ as we collectively do.
Intriguing that Botswana's IQ is higher than other parts of Sub Saharan Africa.
The people in Botswana have substantial Hottentot admixture which means that their genetic potential for IQ is probably one of the lowest on Earth. That means that their higher IQ relative to surrounding countries is a product of a good environment.
An encouraging sign for development in Africa.
Botswana, I understand, is a functioning democracy, one of the few in that region. I'm sure that has a lot to do with it, both ways.
You’re totally wrong. Botswana is a fake democracy, and that’s part of the secret of their success.
The first president of Botswana was their hereditary king. He appointed a successor, who appointed another successor, who appointed another successor, etc.
So far, not a single president has taken power in an election. As an opponent of democracy, I think it’s a great system.
How about Duma Boko? It seems he became president a couple of months ago when the party that had ruled since independence lost its first election.
I had not heard about that. This is terrible news. I hope that Botswana will be ok.
That was true up to 2019.
In any case, the president is appointed by the parliament, and election for that seem real even if the party situation is not very competitive.
But I do believe all those elections were relatively fair?
Bernards Shaw actually wrote a short play about this problem, where the king of Britain threatens to abdicate and run for office. All his ministers immediately understands that he would probably win a fair election. The same would is probably trye for many constitutional democracies.
The royal house of Botswana just had to actually do this, due to some political game I never quite understood.
Yes. $20k gdp per capita and a relatively low crime rate. It’s doing well.
Also, I understand, Botswana is actually the only real nation-state in Sub Saharan Africa, with 95 percent Tswanas. Interesting if this could be the reason for their better system
Another explanation is of course money from diamonds. But we are about to see which it was soon, when lab grown diamonds will drive the prices down.
I think Thomas Sowell should comment on the efficacy of pouring more money into "charitable" work in Africa. How much of it gets to the people who need it?
Plenty! See for example GiveDirectly, which simply gives the money to people and does lots of studies to confirm that they got the money properly.
So is this a prelude to a bigger piece or were you just in the mood to drop a bomb and goose engagement?
Ooo, is it an experiment in manipulating your subscription numbers?!
Why should it be a prelude to a bigger piece any more than any of my other posts are?
I've been missing the spicy SSC days.
"We shouldn’t conflate advocacy with science"
The most ubiquitous current conflation of advocacy with science is the common insistence that biology "proves" people's "real" gender.
Moderation warning for irrelevant politically-charged comment. Not everything has to be turned into being about transgender, aren't national IQ differences edgy enough for you?
These debates invariably focus on Africans and American blacks. I'm curious about the broad swath of supposedly ~85 IQ people stretching from the Middle East to South Asia.
Let's do some math, assuming Gaussians with s.d.=15 for everyone. The total number of people with the equivalent of 145 IQ (+3 sigma) under white norms would be ~50k in India (mean 85) and ~5 million in China (mean 105), despite both having 1.4 billion people. So 145 IQ Chinese outnumber 145 IQ Indians by a factor of 100 (!).
IQ 145 corresponds to a pretty good researcher in a mathematical field. Looking at the demographics of faculty/PhD students at top universities/research labs, it doesn't seem like the Chinese/Indian ratio is 100:1. I'm not sure if it's even 2:1. I don't think even the Middle Easterners are that rare relative to Chinese.
Sure, there could be differences in propensity to immigrate, preferences in field of study, etc. etc., but we still don't see anything approaching the wild ratios suggested by national IQ differences. This makes me suspicious of the estimates in general.
Faculty quality at universities varies a tremendous amount. Likewise, the amount of PhD graduate student positions and faculty positions varies as well. Further the desire of different people and groups to hold certain jobs varies. We therefor shouldn’t expect the representation of an ethnic or racial group in faculty positions to match their rates of IQ, outside perhaps certain threshold effects.
My choice of technical faculty/researchers was just an illustrative example. Sub in any category of high-performers in high-complexity fields.
The point is that the implied distributions have a right tail too and we should be seeing consequences. But even if you allow an absurdly generous 10x multiple for random confounders favoring the 85 IQ groups’ overrepresentation, you still have another 10x disparity to explain.
These are crazy numbers that can’t be handwaved away. And if additive genetic models and their Gaussians don’t work for these subpopulations, why should anyone believe the rest of Lynn’s data and methodology?
Your error still stands. Let me approach this from a different angle. Imagine the world of 1700. How many high performers in high complexity fields were there? Probably fewer per capita for the entire world than there is in the USA alone today. Why? Because there were not a lot of high complexity field positions to be in, at least by our standards. How many Chinese universities and research labels are there per capita? Why so few? China is still a very poor country per capita by US standards. They have fewer high complexity field positions per capita than we have, no matter the field. Who knows how many high IQ Chinese are running factories or programming or some government job?
Are you only talking about people in the west? I've heard that the smartest Indians like to go west, while in China top students prefer their own top schools. Chinese institutions dominate the Nature Index for example.
As for international comparisons ones I thought to compare:
China 5 times India in hard science Nobel prizes:
https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_nobelhierarchy_percapita.htm
Chinese performance 15 times India in Nature Index:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_Index#Top_countries
China 6 times as many math Olympiad golds as India in recent years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_medal_count_at_International_Mathematical_Olympiad
China 50 times as many patent applications as India:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/patent-applications-per-million
I actually counted 10 ethnic Chinese versus 5 ethnic Indians for (non-fake) Nobels, but otherwise this is solid data. These indices started taking off in China in the last 15 years, so they could just as well be an argument for capitalism as latent +20 IQ. Since 15 years is the approximate time lag of Indian free market reforms, we’d expect Indian indices to go up substantially in the next two decades unless the country has an IQ problem.
This will be a pretty good test of the Lynn hypothesis, which basically posits IQ->GDP instead of the reverse.
We do not see many Middle Easterners at the Nobel Prices, do we? - Or at chess-championships. - That said, Chinese numbers may be inflated by most tests done in the big cities, no among rural population. Also, extra-smart Chinese in Communist China might be kinda held back by the system, when it comes to extraordinary achievements. Or by "confucian culture". Taiwan is where they build the very best computer chips. Not India. Not Iran. Not Communist China. - See also: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/
India is very weird IQ-wise because of extreme diversity, extreme inequality, and inbreeding from the caste system. Since we're looking at the tails, variance matters more than average, and since India has many different populations, that pushes variance up. If we replace it with Iraq or Thailand or something, I think we would get more of the expected results.
I also think IQ 145 is high for a good math researcher. Average professor is 120, Feynman was supposedly 126, average Nobelist is somewhere between 145 - 150.
>Feynman was supposedly 126
Physicist Steve Hsu on Feynman's alleged 125 IQ score:
"Feynman was universally regarded as one of the fastest thinking and most creative theorists in his generation. Yet it has been reported-including by Feynman himself-that he only obtained a score of 125 on a school IQ test. I suspect that this test emphasized verbal, as opposed to mathematical, ability. Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test. He also reportedly had the highest scores on record on the math/physics graduate admission exams at Princeton. It seems quite possible to me that Feynman's cognitive abilities might have been a bit lopsided-his vocabulary and verbal ability were well above average, but perhaps not as great as his mathematical abilities. I recall looking at excerpts from a notebook Feynman kept while an undergraduate. While the notes covered very advanced topics for an undergraduate-including general relativity and the Dirac equation-it also contained a number of misspellings and grammatical errors. I doubt Feynman cared very much about such things."
A single data point, but a fascinating one:
https://businesselitesafrica.com/meet-the-worlds-smartest-family-how-is-every-member-a-genius/
One of my friends married into a family like this. The person who came up with the phrase "there are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make" had obviously never met Nigerians.
This kinda reminds me of Polgár sisters, three female chess grandmasters in one family. Their parents weren't chess grandmasters though.
I wonder what is the contribution of genetics and upbringing, and how difficult it is for genius parents to spend enough time making their children geniuses. I mean, it is easier to give enough time and attention to your children if the mother stays at home -- but then you don't have a family where *every* member is a recognized genius.
"I trust that readers of this excellent Substack understand IQ measures as the average of a distribution, not an absolute measure for an entire group. Unfortunately, many with limited statistical knowledge misinterpret these figures, assuming they apply universally. While the average IQ of Black individuals is lower than that of White individuals, there are countless Black individuals with IQs above the average for Whites. This underscores an essential point: when meeting someone, you cannot infer their intelligence without knowing their position on the distribution. This clarification is vital when discussing group IQ differences to a broad audience"
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
And by their SAT when it comes to college admission.
Didn't Lynn once use a school for the handicapped to estimate Equatorial Guinea's IQ?
> Lynn and Vanhanen (2002) cite a study by Fernandez-Ballesteros, de Juan-Espinosa, Colom and Calerò (1997) as demonstrating that the 'national IQ' of Equatorial Guinea is 59. Lynn and Vanhanen write (p. 203): 'Around 1984, data for 48 10-to 14-year-olds were collected on the WISC-R... Their IQ was 63. Because of the 12-year interval between the two data collections, this needs to be reduced to 59.'...
> In fact, Fernandez-Ballesteros et al. (1997), attempting to see whether a cognitive training programme could increase SPM scores (it did), described two experiments. IQs in each were assessed by the WISC. They describe (p. 253) a 'second experiment with forty-eight subjects, 10- to 14-year olds, attending a school for handicapped children (63.025 IQ Mean)'. Half of the 48 subjects had been clinically diagnosed as 'organically impaired'; the other half were described as 'culturally deprived'. Lynn and Vanhanen took the mean IQ at a school for the handicapped and brain damaged as a measure of an African country's national IQ!
From https://sci-hub.se/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/008124630603600101
Yes, his data is mind-blowingly flawed. If a black person tried to publish data on white people based on developmentally-disabled people, people would mock him incessantly, yet this guy gets published and quoted for decades.
Even the variables of whether you’ve recently eaten or you’re thirsty affect cognitive performance on written tests. No doubt the fact that your dad just reamed you for not taking out the trash, or you were up late working, or your parents were fighting, or there’s a bully waiting for you at lunch, or there’s a pretty girl sitting near you, or a war raging nearby will impact your score.
It seems fairly intuitive that there are many other factors to consider besides genetics when explaining discrepancies in all academic test scores, including IQ.
In modern America if one wishes to "beef" with a person or institution, it's traditional to rap about them
I look forward to the imminent dropping of Scott's diss track on the NYT
Can someone briefly lay out a non racist reason why anyone should be especially interested in this?
When I see these kinds of posts, and look at the comments where I find esoteric discussions about genetic admixtures, migration patterns of historical populations, and intelligence testing methodologies, I know I’m missing some implicit consensus about why this is considered a valid area of study, as opposed to a hobby horse of people looking for the holy grail of rationalizing racial prejudice.
Are all your intellectual interests instrumental, then? I agree that fueling racism might make the area of study not worth pursuing, but I will admit that I am personally curious.
One possible instrumental defense is that to the extent that IQ is a good measure of something worth pursuing, and is partially or wholly determined by environmental factors, then the first step towards eliminating inequalities is to describe them.
Scientific reason: learning more about the world and about humanity is Good.
Practical reason: sectioning off some relatively small portion of knowledge as HERE BE DRAGONS, DO NOT LOOK BEHIND THIS DOOR is just *begging* for someone- probably the worst person you can imagine- to throw the door open. It should be approached sensitively and cautiously. Denial is not stable, healthy, or liberal.
Somewhat cynical addendum to the practical reason: other social dynamics, like one population group being the only one not allowed to have affinity groups, increase the bitterness and vehemence with which they will approach the dragon door. Having sane, healthy people approach the problem cautiously helps defang the edgelord temptation and the backlash.
Is this Lynn guy one of the “sane healthy” people approaching it cautiously?
One would think the best way to destigmatize something is to dissociate it with the things/people it’s association with created the stigma in the first place.
Ergo, a good faith researcher of group intelligence should want to stay as far away from racists as possible, and repudiate them at every turn.
Is that what we see?
A good faith researcher may find similar results. Is she in your book then a racist, too? The Aporia article puts it this way: "The latest example is Sarah Gust and colleagues’ measure of “student achievement”, introduced at the end of 2022. These economists combined data from various student assessment studies (such as PISA and TIMSS) to calculate average test scores for 159 countries. The figure for Sub-Saharan Africa was 303. The figure for the UK, which is often used as a benchmark, was 503. Since the standard deviation is 100, this means that Sub-Saharan Africa scored two standard deviations below the UK. Two standard deviations is 30 IQ points. So if the UK’s average IQ is 100, Sub-Saharan Africa’s is 70.
Incidentally, the UK was by no means the highest-scoring country. That accolade goes to Singapore, which achieved an average of 560. At the other end of the scoreboard, we have Niger with an average of just 207. That’s three and a half standard deviations (or 53 IQ points) lower. Clearly, very large differences in test scores between countries are possible even when none of the data come from Richard Lynn. So far as I’m aware, no one has accused Sarah Gust and her colleagues of having a racist agenda." -end of quote
Now, Aporia may be a "racist" publication. But "are they lying"?
If we stipulate that there's some generic Truth value to studying this topic (no more or less valid than the sex lives of salamanders), then what remains are the reasons and motives for why we might want to study it and the implications of what we find—the political stuff.
My comments on identifying good-faith truth-seeking vs. Trojan horse racism concern the second part. A good-faith actor would take great pains to ensure that their work was not tainted by association with known racists and would do their best to destigmatize the research itself, a social endeavor that requires explicit dissociation and repudiation of racist ideology!
The generic Truth value to studying IQ (and spreading the truth about heritable differences) is to avoid misleading the naive and optimistic while the intelligent and opportunistic select for the very traits they are saying don't matter.
For example, it is technically unacceptable to use IQ tests in hiring, if its not relevant to the work. Yet most tech companies will include in their interviews complex problems, puzzles, or situations relating to the job that basically function as an IQ test, essentially having the same result as an actual IQ test, with similarly resulting disparate impacts. There are also "cognitive" tests that supposedly test for your ability to do work, but for all purposes, are an IQ test.
Likewise, wealthy or intelligent people are currently able to perform embryo selection for healthy and intelligent babies (+6 IQ and no birth defects!), even while publicly saying that IQ doesn't matter and everyone is equal. It took thousands of years of selection pressure to raise the Chinese average national IQ to 105, but the selection pressure our elites are about to perform on themselves will be many times stronger, and improving as the technology progresses.
Ultimately there is truth to the nature of human intelligence and competence, and it can't be ignored. I haven't mentioned race until now but if it needs to be spelled out: censoring or avoiding IQ research out of worry that it will increase racism against black folks, is pulling the wool over the eyes of the very same black folks who need this information the most.
The best way for EVERYONE to have a shot at the genetic lottery, is for everyone to be aware that IQ heritability is real. And that if you want your descendants to succeed, you will need to join the race.
Great - the world in which everyone is forced to accept uncomfortable truths about heritability of intelligence winds up becoming Gattaca.
That was dystopian, not utopian btw.
Lynn was a racist - clearly observable via his work, his history, and his own admission. Equally important - his work is simply invalid because his data was effectively made up to support an ideological conclusion. If valid research comes to the same conclusion then present that research on its own. If you use that research to defend Lynn its hard to argue a motive beyond your own racism. No amount of further observation can make fabricated data correct.
The post is not about denying Lynn or anybody was a racist. Neither is my comment. Might have been. Now, he is dead. - The post and my comment care about whether the numbers are mostly in the right ballpark - and if so: how come and maybe what to do. See also the new follow-up post: "Highlights about the comments."
Not to defend Lynn, but the data: He took results of cognitive tests done by other scientists. No making up. He re-calculated the numbers to translate them into IQ numbers. The formulas are in his works. No one here claimed yet to have found a miscalculation. Lynn did not regard all studies to be representative and discarded some. He gives reason in his work. Some he considered too low to be believable, some too high (usu. those done in kinda elite-schools). Problematic: sure. Not sure, who is "making stuff up" here? Again: Newer and better studies come to results very similar to Lynn. So who is in denial?
Where did I suggest he was?
You asked for a non-racist explanation; I gave some. I didn't say that was the case with Lynn. I know little about Lynn or who he associates with.
>Ergo, a good faith researcher of group intelligence should want to stay as far away from racists as possible, and repudiate them at every turn.
I think that as a researcher, it is quite difficult to control what other people do with your work. The level of throat-clearing necessary for this would be extreme, though perhaps necessary.
If only all researchers repudiated racist idiots using their work! Alas, such demands tend to be isolated, just like questions of who is or isn't acting in good faith.
Nope. Good faith researchers of group intelligence should want to get their research and data right. They should absolutely not repudiate work of others if it happened to get the data right. They should correct mistakes and deficits in the research work of others. (And they will, one of the best ways to make a career in science!) - If they are truly heroic, they might call out when the public is uninformed about significant facts or dished out half-truths. Good faith biographers of dead people should be open if they find out important facts. If Lynn was a racist, say so - considering the topic of his work, that is surely interesting! Relevant it would be, if it had changed the results. I am not really much interested in most dead people's hobbies nor their opinions about "race".
Why should anyone be interested? It’s important for society and policy. For example, if different groups have different mean innate IQs, then you would not expect the number of group members admitted to medical school or elite universities to match their fraction of the population. If society cares about that sort of discrepancy (and it does seem to) then it becomes important to understand the different possible explanations.
So in response to concerns that inequality is the result of bigotry and discrimination, the rejoinder is no, it’s because those groups are inferior at some objective measure of competence, and therefore the resulting social order is not something that can or should be fixed.
Seems pretty convenient the same exact groups are disadvantaged under regimes of social oppression or a neutral meritocracy. What a coincidence!!
It’s not a coincidence. Just suppose two groups differed in mean intrinsic capability; which group would be more capable of oppressing the other (and hence more likely to have been the historical oppressor)?
I appreciate the logical consistency. Obviously, there are examples of groups that were actively oppressed at one time and began to thrive and prosper once the oppression was lifted, even compared to their former oppressors. So, we know that an identity-neutral meritocracy can reveal latent potential that was being artificially suppressed.
But a lack of overt oppression is only one factor among many necessary for communal improvement. Oppression is not binary; it can exist in gradations. Even aftereffects of oppression no longer being actively enforced, if not compensated for, can still impact people in ways that make them less competitive at the margins, failing to meet arbitrary standards set by groups that aren't similarly encumbered.
It's very plausible that historical oppression can create collective path dependences that require extraordinary direct intervention to disrupt and reverse. That's the whole premise of Social Justice.
I don't know what it would take to prove that intrinsic capabilities explain most or all current disparities when so many other plausible mechanisms exist. You'd need to be very ideologically motivated to believe IQ survey data could resolve the question conclusively.
Absolutely nobody is suggesting that IQ is the sole factor that explains everything. The suggestion is that it is one factor that could be important in the mix. If it is, then wouldn’t you agree that it would be good to know that?
First, because this determines a lot about what we should try in development economics and charity. If IQ is artificially depressed by health/nutrition/education, that's a very different picture in the consequences of providing health/nutrition/education than if IQ is immutable (and also, it matters a lot which of health/nutrition/education it is, and the exact pattern of skill change).
(and even if IQ is completely genetic, that just opens up even more avenues for improving it - eg embro selection - and the exact pattern and way that it's genetic makes a big difference)
Second, because the pattern of human IQ distribution is one of the few things we can use to think about AI. I think I was able to accept the scaling hypothesis a lot faster than most people because we know that humans evolved from much dumber hominids within a few tens of thousands of years, and there's no way evolution can do much in that time except scale. But statements like that require a lot of knowledge of exactly how the evolution of intelligence works. Another thing in this category is Garrett Jones' thesis (reviewed at https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/08/book-review-hive-mind/) that more intelligent people are naturally more cooperative - big implications for superintelligence if true!
Third, because something like a third of the world's population is stuck in miserable poverty, a lot of the explanations have something to do with cognitive skills, and if you ban anyone from thinking about this in order to make yourself feel better, you've made it much harder to understand them and help them.
Fourth, some people study the mating habits of snails. Are we to say that any research that can't immediately justify itself to you must be sinister and shut down? Could the early people researching electricity, nuclear physics, or computers have survived that challenge? How do we know that all biologists aren't only doing biology in order to devalue the sacredness of the human spirit? How do we know that all economists aren't just doing economics because they're neoliberal shills trying to justify their own privilege? Once you start thinking in these terms, you become paranoid and anti-intellectual and start hating curiosity for its own sake. I think "I find myself curious about this" should be an ironclad defense about any field of study (except maybe viral gain-of-function - and even then you should at least be able to *think* about it).
Fifth, because a lot of people have loudly been saying that Lynn can't possibly be right, and if it's worth their time to spread a bad and wrong opinion, it's worth my time to correct them.
Sixth, https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/
Pretty interesting that you think it's "bad and wrong" to claim that Lynn's incredibly flawed data (in which he used disabled people to represent the average of a country and then estimated surrounding countries based on it) can't possibly be right. I think it's a lazy interpretation of a complex, subjective issue.
I appreciate the comprehensive response.
I suppose you're well past the point where you feel the need for obligatory throat-clearing before wading into this discourse, which is fair enough.
The essence of my question pertains to your fourth point. You seem conflicted between your genuine affection and respect for the romantic pursuit of curiosity at all costs and your acknowledgment of the necessity of Kolmogorov's pragmatism and compromise.
I say this as a tremendous fan of your work and a grateful beneficiary of the community you helped cultivate.
It's unfortunate how little social distance there often is between those curiosity-driven and truth-seeking souls you righty champion and people with specific agendas who are incidentally and selectively attracted to certain truths insofar as it helps their odious ideological projects.
Maybe I'm wrong to have this impulse, but it angers and scares me when I see friendly banter where there ought to be repulsion and exclusion. Not in defense of some sclerotic orthodoxy but as a sign that there is also a moral sense accompanying the curiosity drive - that it's not entirely single-minded and oblivious to the larger context it operates within.
Given the implications and moral principles at stake surrounding race and IQ, I expect a good-faith Truth Seeker would want to avoid having their work tainted by association with known bastards. It's a matter of simple hygiene: If you want to destigmatize something from its connection with something terrible, it helps to explicitly repudiate the terrible thing while providing an alternative framing, as you've done here.
I'm not indicting any particular person; rather a style of high-decoupling that, in its total dismissal of social approval as a guidepost, allows itself to become a carrier of cynical and harmful parasites.
You once wrote about how creating a place without witch burnings would result in a few libertarians and a million witches. Not great!
I hope enough people engaged in shaping this and other public discussions about genes and intelligence—for all the urgent reasons you outlined—also want to prevent it from becoming Witch Island.
>expect a good-faith Truth Seeker would want to avoid having their work tainted by association with known bastards
Care to name any untainted good faith truth-seekers?
>in its total dismissal of social approval as a guidepost, allows itself to become a carrier of cynical and harmful parasites.
Adherence to social approval is no great defense of cynical and harmful parasites. If anything, social approval for a cause makes it much, much easier for parasites to glom onto a cause and leech away the benefits, at quite great cost to society.
I might similarly ask you: why it is that anti-racists find this topic such an important one to obfuscate, censor, and attempt to refute? Is it a hobby horse of people looking to rationalize anti-racism?
Why should we expect health care, education, etc, to have a linear relationship with intelligence? Isn't it possible that the difference between middle and lower class US is important, but the difference between lower class US and Malawi not so much?
Also, aren't there other negative factors which might plausibly affect the average African American more strongly than a Malawian? Institutional distrust, teachers making them feel stupid, family instability?
Possibly, not plausibly. Been to Malawi? (I always wanted to, but ... well, I taught in East-Europe and in Arab countries. The TIMMS results fit my observations.)
When I see the scale, one of the weird thoughts that comes up is a question...is Trump some kind of African?
The other part may be of ignorance as well ... IQ is a Western concept (yes, no?)
So why do so many silly phone games taunt your value is related to the puzzle and your IQ? Is there some fascination in Asia about the IQ assessment?
a) Trump ancestors are mostly from Germany. Not that I am proud of it.
b) Even non-western human cultures have concepts of smart and slow. And, surprise, those considered "smarties" do better on "western" cognitive test than the "slowies". Oh, most human cultures seem to value the smarties slightly more. Outside the US, at least.
b2) Many of those cognitive tests given to people who never went to any school are very, very basic. Think kindergarten. Still, results vary.
c) IQ 90 to 110 are most people in East Asia and Europe. Not that smart - "only humans" - and a considerable number of those normies is relatively easily fooled into silly fake "IQ tests" on their phones. Also candy crush or farming. Some of the smarter guys, too. But they don't matter for the business model.
> I think the strongest emotions here come from two deeper worries people have about the data:
> First, isn’t it horribly racist to say that people in sub-Saharan African countries have IQs that would qualify as an intellectual disability anywhere else?
> Second, isn’t it preposterous and against common sense to compare sub-Saharan Africans to the intellectually disabled?
Having talked about IQ with plenty of graduate-educated American liberal/progressives or read their takes online, I think this is just a wrong analysis of where the 'strong emotions' people have about this data come from.
They usually focus on one of a few topics: a) eugenics happened and IQ discourse leads to eugenics b) IQ tests are culturally biased, c) there are multiple types of intelligence, or d) IQ tests don't correlate with anything meaningful, like income. Only the last point is easy to convincingly refute with 10 seconds on Google, and I won't comment on the other points here.
But the deeper issue is that to them, IQ research and discourse appears to be poisoned with illiberalism, racism and edgelords who enjoy the toxicity without really caring about the racism per se. Given that, how could you hope to recover accurate information from the cesspool?
Best to ignore it if it's not decision-relevant. And fortunately, it's not! Liberals and progressives generally are strong supporters of foreign aid and development (modulo environmentalism). There are plenty of other reasons to think "charitable nutrition/health/education interventions" work without national IQ data.
Given the assumption the conversation's poisoned and irrelevant, then bringing it up must be for other reasons, most likely that the one bringing it up is a racist and/or an edgelord. Which is reason for strong emotion, because it's very annoying and anxiety-inducing to talk to or be around such people, especially about their racist beliefs or toxic proclivities, especially when they're actively working to persuade other people to share and spread their views!
Not in so many words, but I think that this isn't just my idiosyncratic view of why liberals and progressives tend to reject IQ discourse -- it's the standard account. Your alternative account ("isn't it racist to say X/niche point about diagnosed ID vs. national IQ") isn't anything I've ever heard a liberal or progressive say as their argument against IQ.
If you want to respectability-wash this topic, which it seems to me is your primary agenda (since I'm almost certain you could have made the preceding argument yourself, but chose not to), then I think you need to take a different tack. First, show that you really understand the other side's point of view -- pass the intellectual Turing test.
Then, either convincingly explain why national IQ research is genuinely decision-relevant to a respectable topic, or give a convincing personal account of why you happen for non-racist reasons to find the topic intrinsically interesting.
I count this article as a failed attempt at respectability-washing (at least for me), and failed attempts do harm to the author's reputation, the same way successful attempts do good.
I think you state the objection correctly, and I am personally sensitive to it. One defense of IQ research as decision relevant is that it’s possible that cases such as most Bangladeshi kids being lead poisoned by tumeric would have been discovered sooner if population level IQ monitoring was in place. (I don’t know much about this case, I am just baffled that it took as long as it did to discover). More generally, if a group has lower IQ than another, that might warrant a closer look to see if there are environmental factors in play which can be eliminated to that group’s benefit.
Not impossible, but realistically, is lack of 'population level IQ monitoring' a key causal determinant of the lack of lead monitoring, or any other specific global health issue?
I don't think so. National IQ metrics correlate with numerous other global health statistics that also raise concern about harmful environmental factors. Factors that likely harm IQ metrics, ranging from lead to intestinal parasites to famine, also have strong negative impacts on more conventional global health metrics.
For lead specifically, everyone knows* it's intensely harmful and, if present in food, water, air, or soil, helps explain a variety of poor outcomes and should be cleaned up and future inputs minimized. We know lead exposures happen, we know we need to test for it, and we know that doesn't always happen due to competing priorities and lack of resources, as well as corruption and government inefficiency. How would national IQ monitoring help increase resources or reduce corruption? I don't think it would, therefore I don't think it would help avoid lead exposure.
A case for the utility of national IQ monitoring would depend on identifying at least one specific harmful environmental factor where national IQ statistics make a uniquely big difference in helping to identify it relative to more conventional global health statistics. I very much doubt any such factor exists, but am open to being proven wrong.
*https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra2402527
I mostly agree, but I don't think it's right to say IQ measurements are completely irrelevant for real world decisions. They are part of the picture like many other things and may or may not help to illuminate inequalities and population health issues.
Wrt the lead example - I used to think that was the case too, but turns out there was at least one example of really low hanging fruits where people just hadn't got the memo on lead's harmful effects and once it was discovered the Bangladeshi government apparently acted swiftly and effectively. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/9/20/23881981/bangladesh-tumeric-lead-poisoning-contamination-public-health
Maybe lead's effect on IQ was influential on the Bangladeshi government, but ctrl+F doesn't find "IQ" anywhere in the article except in the middle of the word ubiquitous. It leads with "premature deaths" as a motivating health consequence for taking lead seriously.
So again, decision-relevance isn't about showing that X (i.e. lead) impacts IQ. It's about showing that impact on IQ has unique advantages in terms of being diagnostic for X. I don't see that here.
I would be persuaded on the decision-relevance of national IQ monitoring if the case for its unique advantage as a diagnostic can be made for even one environmental factor impacting a conventional global health metric of concern.
Here is an example of an argument forms I'd find persuasive:
Harm H can be caused by an enormous number possible environmental factors, and for most of them there's no good test to rule them in or out. One exception is factor X, which is uncommon and very expensive to fix. But when it's the cause, fixing it helps a lot with H. As it turns out, national IQ monitoring is the only good way to detect X, and it's remarkably cost-effective relative to other global health priorities.
Here is an example I do not find persuasive:
Harm H can be caused by numerous environmental factors, and there are many convenient tests to zero on which ones are operating in a specific situation. Some of these factors also impact IQ, which probably mediates some but not all of their impacts on H. So one option that might inconclusively suggest a subset of these factors is particularly important in driving H in some context is to test for IQ. However, there are also other much more conclusive and inexpensive ways to test for these factors.
I think your lead example is an example of the lattern form.
I think you’re oversimplifying. Diagnoses are rarely based on a single factor even in individuals, let alone populations. It’s fine to say you don’t think it’s worth it to research group level IQ differences, but to deny entirely that the information is useful when looking for environmental causes of inequality seems unreasonable.
Plus I’d say that cognitive function itself is an important (if maybe not conventional) health metric of concern, and it seems like IQ is a decent proxy for this.
That being said I don’t actually know that the Bangladesh story is an example where more comparative IQ research would actually have been useful, just one that got me thinking.
> Diagnoses are rarely based on a single factor even in individuals, let alone populations... Plus I’d say that cognitive function itself is an important (if maybe not conventional) health metric of concern, and it seems like IQ is a decent proxy for this.
This is a reasonable hypothesis, but I have to continue emphasizing that it's not enough to justify IQ monitoring on the basis of "it's diagnostic of a harmful effect". In my opinion, it needs to be uniquely diagnostic of a specific upstream *cause* of that effect.
For example, let's say a population has low cognitive function because of a famine. We could test them for IQ to discover that their cognitive function was low. But that would be completely unnecessary, because we'd see on inspection that they're starving, the famine causes numerous other health impacts, the impairment to cognitive function will be about as apparent as the loss of weight, and the famine can be solved by feeding them or figuring out what's causing food to be absent and solving that. Fix the famine, and you also fix its impacts on cognitive function. No need to test for IQ.
It's really hard for me to imagine a real global health issue in which including national IQ as a factor in analysis makes a substantial difference in our ability to hone in on a fixable upstream cause of the issue at hand. It's just too correlated with other much more obvious, urgent and important health and economic metrics to contribute much.
>But the deeper issue is that to them, IQ research and discourse appears to be poisoned with illiberalism, racism
More specifically, they care about *anti-black* racism and illiberalism derived from that. Other forms of racism are much less "poisonous," sometimes wildly popular, and illiberalism that's not anti-black gets encouragement instead.
Edit: Otherwise, yes, I agree this is not a good, well-thought post.
This seems like a good analysis on how to cost-effectively improve education in low and middle-income countries. It finds providing information on the benefits, costs, and quality of education, supporting teachers with structured pedagogy, and targeting teaching instruction by learning level, not grade are great buys. Other ideas include reducing travel times to school with free bicycles, merit based scholarships to disadvantaged children, and mass deworming.
https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/231d98251cf326922518be0cbe306fdc-0200022023/related/GEEAP-Report-Smart-Buys-2023-final.pdf
You use the American Black vs. sub-Saharan African discrepancy to argue that IQ can't be 100% genetic. Fine. But doesn't the United States / China discrepancy point in the opposite direction? China is still much poorer per capita, with worse living conditions and health care, and yet the average IQ is higher. You can't just sweep that under the rug, there's something else going on...
Just because something isn't 100% genetic doesn't mean it can't be genetic at all. Maybe the China/US discrepancy is genetic. China spent a long time giving out important positions through standardized tests, I can imagine that making a difference over the course of millennia. But also, China is widely suspected of gaming its international education test results.
>A normal person with 60 IQ will seem . . . normal. If you try to engage in difficult conversation, they won’t be able to follow, but most of them can do simple low-IQ jobs like manual labor, basic retail, or writing for the New York Times. A country centered around people at this level may not win any space races, but it can certainly continue to exist.
Surely there’s a problem with defining ”normal” here tautologically? In the DSM someone with an IQ bellow 70 is diagnosed with intellectual disability iff they have ”deficits in adaptive functioning”. If they don’t there’s no reason to diagnose them.
In other words we end up with saying something like: ”the people with IQ below 70 that are able to function normally are actually able to function normally!”
I think this framing risks underestimating the actual impact of low cognitive ability by controlling for it.
But even so, in my experience there’s a subset of patients that don’t quite fulfill criteria for ID (deficits in adaptive functioning usually have pretty severe cut-offs), patients with no other developmental disorders, it’s also pretty clear that their low cognitive ability makes life very challenging for them. At face value it seems extremely unlikely that somewhere like Ghana would have this as the Average level.
I don't think I'm being tautological.
I think there are two kinds of variation. One is the bell curve, made up of a thousand tiny genes of small effect each. The other is really big things, like an extra chromosome (Down's) or traumatic brain injury.
I'm trying to argue that a "normal" low-IQ person (one who is simply at the low end of the normal bell curve) has fewer deficits than a person with a specific medical problem like Down's.
I think the two kinds of variation idea makes sense. No issue there. But I don’t share the impression that what people find highly implausible about a functioning nation state with an average IQ below 70 comes from them basing their idea of ID on exemplars like Down’s syndrome, adding associated medical issues to the mix. Some people are maybe imagining someone non-verbal, but I think most people would picture some kid in the special ed class in middle school.
Are you trolling us with that headline, Scott? The trouble with Lynn's National IQ *estimates* is they're bad science. Worse yet, they're bad science in aid of Lynn's bizarre racial agenda (scroll down to see some Lynn quotes below the bad science examples).
Bad science examples first...
Sear, et al looked at the original Lynn and Vanhanen World IQ data sets and found lots of problems. A lot of the data is pretty sketchy. Quoting Sears: "The primary data are grossly inadequate...the sampling is sketchy at best and ludicrously insufficient at worst.” For instance: "The figure for Ethiopia is derived from a sample of 250, 15-year-old immigrants to Israel. The figure for Nigeria is from a sample of 86 adult men & one of 375, 6–13-year olds. The figure for Sierra Leone from a sample of 22, 23-year-old skilled workers and one of 60 adults." Lynn and Becker updated the datasets a few years ago, but the old sketchy data is still there, plus new sketchy data!
From the Sear paper (link below)...
"...37% of all samples are under 1000 individuals, which are very small samples for calculating averages for national population, which may have many millions of citizens. Some samples are exceedingly small: a closer inspection of the dataset reveals that six countries have IQs estimated from <100 individuals (Angola’s IQ is estimated from 19
individuals; Dominican Republic from 34; Greenland 40, Uzbekistan 51, Republic of Congo 88, “Netherlands Antilles” 96, and a further 14 with samples of <200 (Namibia, Barbados, Sierra Leone, Ecuador, Ukraine, Botswana, Laos, Latvia, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Malta, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Haiti and Eritrea). A significant proportion of countries – 30% – also have IQs estimated from a single sample, which is particularly problematic when so many samples are small and unrepresentative, including only children."
https://psyarxiv.com/26vfb/download?format=pdf
Lynn's racist agenda (cribbed from Wikipedia)...
> In 1995, Lynn was quoted by the media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) saying: "What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the population of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of the 'phasing out' of such peoples ... Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality."
> In a 2011 interview with then far-right artist Alex Kurtagić, Lynn stated: "I am deeply pessimistic about the future of the European peoples because mass immigration of third world peoples will lead to these becoming majorities in the United States and westernmost Europe during the present century. I think this will mean the destruction of European civilization in these countries."
Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved 7 February 2016 quotes Lynn's interview in a British political magazine Right NOW!...
> I think the only solution lies in the breakup of the United States. Blacks and Hispanics are concentrated in the Southwest, the Southeast and the East, but the Northwest and the far Northeast, Maine, Vermont and upstate New York have a large predominance of whites. I believe these predominantly white states should declare independence and secede from the Union. They would then enforce strict border controls and provide minimum welfare, which would be limited to citizens. If this were done, white civilisation would survive within this handful of states.
This is why I conclude Lynn was a crackpot who promoted crackpot pseudoscience.
Look, just because they're a neo-Nazi doesn't mean they can't do science. Everyone else has their own biases as well, and yet we take their work seriously for the most part. Why should it be any different for white supremacists?
If they're a neo-Nazi they need to be held to a higher standard. Sloppy work, bad thinking, and crappy data just undermine their philosophy even further.
I consider the standards of serious scientific work to be high and to apply to everyone. How can one be held to "higher standards" than other scientists? - Could even end up with the "racists" or "parapsychos" be considered even better science when they somehow pass those "higher standards". Remember Scott "The control group is out of control". https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/
Results of some ethnic groups in cognitive test do differ from results of other ethnic groups in such extreme ways, those differences are highly unlikely to disappear under much "higher" test-standards. See Japanese. See Igbo. See Aboriginal Australians. See Ashkenazi. And if it really is just "black culture" holding so many Afro-Americans back in school and IQ-testing - just more reason to work on it. MLK cherished a different culture.
Your general point clearly seems correct, but the example of the Igbo seems under-supported (https://www.cremieux.xyz/i/140558598/igbo-brilliance).
I am certainly willing to accept he was a crackpot. The larger question though is why nobody else has done the proper studies which settle the question. The failure of this dog to bark pretty much speaks for itself.
Have you bothered to look? Another criticism by Sear showed that there were more recent IQ studies that were done with more rigor that Lynn and Becker ignored. Sasha Gusev pointed out that these sketchy studies are promoted by individuals with dubious academic credentials with axes to grind.
> Two other recent papers [Panofsky et al. (2024) and Bird & Carlson (2024)] have gone further to tackle the question of how the field should actually deal with genomic racism. Both papers demonstrate that the underlying research itself is largely conducted by coordinated groups of hobbyists, with no credible academic affiliations, typically publishing in journals that they themselves have founded and review. The underlying studies, to the extent they are conducted, are low quality and highly repetitive because the primary goal is to generate memes for political blogs and forums.
https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/on-abhorrent-science-and-the-weaponization?
It's as if Gresham's Law applies to scientific knowledge as well as money — where bad science drives out good. Worse yet, otherwise rational people who should know better get taken in by this sort of bullshit.
>”It’s as if Gresham's Law applies to scientific knowledge as well as money — where bad science drives out good.”
Would the same law apply anywhere else in science? Because this seems like a total cop-out for why nobody has done the basic scientific work that would literally disprove racism. It is absurd to me that after years, if not decades, of social science organizations being dedicated to the elimination of racism or whatever, that no one has proposed, “Hey, you know all those flawed and wrong intelligence studies that racists always cite? Why don’t we use actual science instead of pseudoscience to get the *real* numbers. Then their arguments will be proven to be wrong.”
> Because this seems like a total cop-out for why nobody has done the basic scientific work that would literally disprove racism.
There's a huge amount of scientific data and studies data out there that disprove that the "scientific" underpinnings of racism aren't valid. You probably just weren't interested in considering any data that contradicted your worldview.
Okay. What’s that data? I am interested in seeing it.
Pay attention. There'll be a quiz.
1. Start with the genetic differences between individuals of the same "race" can be greater than differences between individuals of different "races." Most genetic variation, around 85-90% depending on the population, exists within so-called "racial" groups, not between them. (Subsaharan African populations are the most genetically diverse.)
> Lewontin, R. C. (1972). The apportionment of human diversity. Evolutionary Biology, 6, 381–398.
> Yudell, et al., Taking race out of human genetics: Engaging a century-long debate about the role of race in science
> https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aac4951
> Duello,et al., Race and genetics versus ‘race’ in genetics:A systematic review of the use of African ancestry in genetic studies
> https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8604262/
2. Genetic studies find no evidence linking race to differences in intelligence.
> Richardson & Norgate (2015). The equal environments assumption of the classical twin method: A critical analysis. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 322.
> Burt, C., Heritability Studies: Methodological Flaws, Invalidated Dogmas, and Changing Paradigms.
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Callie-Burt/publication/272179794_Heritability_Studies_Methodological_Flaws_Invalidated_Dogmas_and_Changing_Paradigms/links/5554ea4508ae6fd2d821b9fe/
> Fraser, S. (Ed.). (1995). The bell curve wars: Race, intelligence, and the future of America. Basic Books.
3. The Flynn effect contradicts the idea that genetics determines IQ. For instance, IQ tests have been given to Americans for the past ~105 years. The median IQ of Americans has increased by 3 points per decade. The Median IQ of Americans in 1920 was what Lynn claims the median IQ of Nigeria is today (on scanty data). I find it hard to believe that back in 1920 when the median IQ of Americans was around 70, half of the American population would have been considered developmentally disabled and unable to do things like simple counting and unable to tie their shoes. The Flynn Effect has been observed in all societies across all continents (presumably as education, health, and diet have improved). Also, Flynn found the highest gains in the culturally reduced tests. The lowest gains were in verbal tests. Intermediate gains were seen in mixed tests such as the Wechsler and Binet, and in these tests, the performance side had the higher gains.
> Flynn, J. R. (1987). Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: What IQ tests really measure. Psychological Bulletin, 101(2), 171–191.
> Trahan, et al. The Flynn Effect: A Meta-analysis
> https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4152423/
> Lots of interesting data up on the IQ comparison site...
> https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Locations.aspx?utm_source=chatgpt.com
4. Several open threads back, we discussed whether there were any studies on the relationship between IQ and Nobel laureates. The IQ Comparison site has a link to a study that indicated there's a nonsignificant correlation between IQ rank and Nobel Prizes per capita rank: Spearman rank correlation of 0.259 with a p of 0.245 with a 95% CI.
> https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Nobels.aspx
I, for one, would love to see more of Lynn's critics switch from just sniping at his work to collecting empirical data.
It's eminently feasible for men of the left to do important empirical work in this area, such as the late James Flynn and now Dalton Conley.
Why can't you do it yourself instead of continually quoting a guy who used a group of mentally retarded kids to represent the average of a country?
See my response Daniel above. Please read all the links I posted, and then we can talk about the problems you have with those studies in detail.
The way actually IQ test work does not allow to be done between different linguistic groups. Even Colombia and Mexico have different versions of the WAIS IV.
By any chance, are you the Steve Sailer who authored the book _America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and Inheritance”_?
Richard Lynn's critics produced quite a bit of empirical work of their own. For instance, see http://iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/wicherts2010b.pdf which finds an average African IQ significantly higher than Lynn, if still below Western norms. If you check the abstract of that link you'll see them arguing for environmental causes, though they're not really producing a map that looks qualitatively different from Lynn.
But honestly the real thing I want to tell you is "Don't be so hard on them." I'm on the left, at least from an American perspective, and even being neutral on this issue gives me so much flak I've learned not to talk about it (and the same goes for the Israel-Palestine debate). The need to affirm one's political allegience has been encouraging petty sniping since our ancestors first learned to talk. It's disappointing, but it's also very human.
Steve is familiar with Wicherts and references it here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to/comment/86482950 and at greater length here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-lynn/comment/86494035, and elsewhere.
Indeed, the Aporia piece that Scott references begins with a discussion of Wicherts, and it's discussed by Cremieux, as well in his response article: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/national-iqs-are-valid.
If Lynn haters spent a fraction of time they spent complaining about Lynn dataset making their own dataset, they might have done this dozen times, but they did not.
This, exactly.
Right. If you embrace bad and manufactured data and erroneous conclusions, you might also be interested in defending Creation Science, Terrain Theory, detox diets, and homeopathy (among others). ;-)
Lynn science is a poor quality science. Which nobody cares fixing about, because result would be similar.
IQ denialism is pseudo-science like the ones you listed. It focuses not about getting proper knowledge about world but about telling people how to behave.
But please explain how Lynn's poor statistical methods, bad data and/or made-up data is good science. Then I'll take your arguments seriously.
Why would I? You are only interested in sneering and saying how righteous you are.
If you're a Less-Wrong rationalist, you should be all about discarding faulty priors. But instead of engaging in the science, you accuse me of being a meanie because I called into question your favorite priors. And, of course, it follows that I'm being self-righteous for trying to identify bad data and/or pseudoscience.
This is fallacious logic. Lynn's data should be roundly dismissed because it's bad in its own right.
"What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the population of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of the 'phasing out' of such peoples ... Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality."
Yeah. This isn’t racist. It’s just good sense.
It’s weird how we all recognize that brutal selection is what vaulted humankind to the top and that, looking back, we’d never wanted anything else to happen, but now we have to pretend selection from here on out is just terrible. Ultimate status quo bias.
Hmmm. How do you know you're qualified to reproduce? If I were on the eugenics board, I'd be selecting against individuals who display the phenotypes for credulity towards pseudoscience.
He's not talking about eugenics, he's talking about phasing out entire populations. Societies are basically superorganisms, and these inferior societies will die out on their own if we simply stop giving them aid. All he's suggesting is that we stop interfering with the process.
You may have a point.
Nazis and fascists, in general, suffered a major selective sweep called WWII which proved them to be genetically unfit. Hitler, with his moronic fixation on racial purity, caused some of his smartest and ablest scientists to flee his regime — giving the US the atomic bomb and some other key technologies. Hitler even admitted that Germans had proved themselves racially inferior to the Slavs, Anglo-Saxons, and mongrel Americans in a conversation with his followers in his final days in the bunker (witnessed by Traudl Junge).
Also, Republican-run red states had higher mortality rates due to COVID-19 than blue states. Suggesting that their ignoramus health beliefs interfered with effecting sound policies to combat the pandemic. Natural selection working the way it should.
Yes, and? You're falsely assuming I have any attachments to any of these ideologies. The only thing that matters is who comes out on top.
So I'm sure that if and when liberal democracy hits its expiration date, you'll gracefully accept nature taking its due. You won't, of course, because you're obviously just being facetious. Ultimately, all of those utopian ideals aren't worth a damn without the strength and resolve to protect them. The left has only itself to blame for its failure.
Did I accuse you of having an attachment to these ideologies? I was giving examples that agreed with your point that natural selection is naturally selecting against stupid people.
Lynn and Vanhanen's book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" came out 23 years ago. Since then, a number of other people have taken a crack at this question, both from IQ tests and from school achievement tests (e.g., the World Bank's Harmonized Learning Outcome database). Mostly Lynn has held up in the big picture.
However, regarding Africa, one team of researchers came up with average scores much closer to 80 than to 70 (while others have vindicated Lynn's finding). I have not delved into the issue enough to have an opinion on who is right.
I would prefer the 70 figure to be true for humanitarian reasons: raising sub-Saharan IQ from 70 to 80 sounds a lot easier than raising it from 80 to 90. South Koreans, for example, are now taller than Japanese on average, but it seems unlikely they'll eventually catch up with the people of the Dinaric Alps and become multiple NBA superstars (leaving aside genetic engineering for now).
Here's the Sear's link again. I suggest you read it before you suggest that Lynn thesis stands up to rigorous analysis.
https://psyarxiv.com/26vfb/download?format=pdf
>We know that in the US, where we do give people good IQ tests, whites average IQ 100 and blacks average IQ 85.
> The “racist” position is that all IQ differences between groups are genetic. The “anti-racist” position is that they’re a product of environment - things like nutrition, health care, and education.
No, I'm pretty sure that the actual anti-racist position (at least among people who aren't of the LessWrong variety) is that any differences between whites and blacks arise as a result of IQ tests being less accurate than fortune cookies.
I do think IQ tests are a lot more accurate than fortune cookies; my point is that what you present as "the anti-racist position" is most likely held by a small number of academics and LWers. If you share this post on Twitter, I'm willing to bet that the majority of responses will tell you that any differences in IQ aren't real (or that IQ itself isn't real), *NOT* that the differences are real but don't depend on genetics.
+1
“So under the environmental hypothesis of IQ, we should expect Malawians to be more than 15 IQ points behind black Americans.”
This is one of the reasons why we should doubt Lynn’s estimates for Sub-Saharan Africa. The 1944-45 famine in the Netherlands had no measurable prenatal effect on the IQ of young adults 19 years later. https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.178.4062.708
The other reason is the poor quality of the African IQ data. This is the opinion of Heiner Rindermann, who nonetheless believes that cognitive ability varies among human populations:
“Given the quality of the data, it is not possible to come to a really precise result. … There are further arguments indicating overestimation (student assessment studies not corrected for older age) or underestimation (less test-wiseness). The usual phrase ‘‘further research is needed’’ is very appropriate here: We need representative samples of the ages 10–70; samples representative of the full range of school education, including the share without or with only little education; the use of fluid (school-distant) and crystallized (school-near) cognitive ability tests; and up-to-date norms from Great Britain. Furthermore, as African samples have less cognitive task experience, the estimates could be increased by a short test training or a more general cognitive training.”
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2012.06.022
I am skeptical of claim 2 because
1. If you have an IQ below 70 in the US, you get social security for your disability. No further deficits required. So apparently the people who spend a lot of time and tax money on this question have concluded that an IQ at that level makes you pretty non-functional even without specific other syndromes such as Downs.
2.Normal distribution is a bitch. Even if a 60 IQ person is functional, that mean implies 16% of your population has an IQ below 45. At some point, you have a large fraction of the population that can't wipe their own ass.
Good point on the normal distribution. Be interesting if Scott replies.
It is because in developed countries there is a strong correlation between having a low IQ and all the other effects of mental disability. Actually it is the latter that is the largest problem, but you can scan for this with an IQ test, since there will be relatively few people having only a low IQ and no other symptoms.
In a different group this will not hold.
Think of dwarfism. Dwarfism is correlated with a lot of adverse physical effects, therefore it makes sense to give anyone below a certain height disability benefits. This would not work if you just went to a country with a lower median height. Pygmy people does not have nearly as many back and neck problems as you would expect from their height.
This is untrue. An IQ of less than 70 still requires evidence of extreme or marked deficits in areas of life functioning. Trust me, as a disability lawyer, I wish I could just get my client approved after an IQ test.
Source: practice this a lot, based on listing 12.05 of SSA’s standards of disability in case you want to double check me.
Very first link is broken.
Some other ways to further validate/invalidate the environmental theory:
Does the environmental<>IQ relationship continue up the ladder to the countries listed as higher IQ on Lynn's list? E.g. Does Singapore have a somewhat higher level of education/nutrition/health? It does seem to be true for GDP per capita - 84k there vs 81k in the US.
Do countries with similar IQ levels on Lynn's list, but with pretty different genetic backgrounds, have similar environmental factors? Looks like Kazakhstan and Venezuela and Papa New Guinea seems to be similarly colored in the map above. 13.1k vs. 8.4k vs. 3k... seems like counter-evidence? Note that there may be a causation/correlation wrinkle here.
Do countries that have seen improvements in education/nutrition/health over time also see improvements in country-level IQ over time? Singapore was around 50% of US GDP in 1990, and is now that slight bit higher (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=SG-US). Did their IQ also improve? Not sure if we have reliable historic data on IQ.
Perhaps someone with more time & research skills than me can do a better job here, including doing better than GDP as a proxy for all the actual environmental effects...
Lynn wrote a paper on South Korea reporting huge increases in both height and raw IQ test scores since 1960. (If only these taller, smarter South Koreans would have some children ...)
Something similar was seen in Japan a generation earlier.
In forming his national IQ estimates, Richard Lynn deliberately selected results for Africa that showed low IQ and ignored results that showed higher IQs. Does Scott Alexander see fit to mention this, and the many other problems with Lynn's methodology, in his article? Of course not!
'Wicherts and colleagues found that the only consistent feature in Lynn’s decision-making process in whether to include a study in his African national IQ dataset was the average IQ reported by the study itself. The lower the IQ score, the more likely it was that Lynn chose to include it. In fact, Lynn did not use a single one of the many studies available that reported an average IQ above 85 in an African sample. The Wicherts study concluded “it is hard to avoid the impression that [Lynn’s] assessment of representativeness [of African IQ] was a function of the average IQ in the sample.”'
https://www.statnews.com/2024/06/20/richard-lynn-racist-research-articles-journals-retractions/
I've checked out a reasonable sampling of the papers that Lynn et al included in the NIQ dataset, and a suprising number come from African researchers who don't seem to come up with dramatically better numbers.
The best his critics have been able to argue is that if you cherry-pick results in the other direction then SSA's IQ could be as high as 80 instead of 70... ...which as Scott has pointed out, would actually be stronger evidence for the hereditarian position, not weaker.
Has this research been published?
You can look up their references for every country here.
https://www.ulsterinstitute.org/ebook/THE%20INTELLIGENCE%20OF%20NATIONS%20-%20Richard%20Lynn,%20David%20Becker.pdf
I’ll take that as a no. If you have something to say, you should write an article about it and even submit it to scholarly journals.
...You're personally asking me if I broke down all of the NIQ dataset's sources by surname, did a statistical analysis for racial bias in estimates, and then published this in Nature, or something, before you'll even look at the source/s?
Yeah, why should I do all the work? We’ve all got lots of stuff to do.
I take it as a yes. The country-by-country part in this (the last comprehensive publication before Lynn died) is a fairly easy read (skip the math part). I checked some Asian countries, in Nepal the raw numbers indicated an IQ of 60 or even 40 (few studies, mostly villagers). Lynn doubted this and suggested to assume an IQ similar to neighboring India (ie IQ 80). While in Africa, he eg. doubted data from expensive private schools (therefore highly exclusive) to be representative for the given country. Sounds reasonable. But sure, better data would be better! For some countries in those regions there is better data, from PISA, TIMMS et al.. Does not change the picture, sadly. - Citizens, journalists and scientists claiming all this to be "unfairly biased" are welcome to demand funds for IQ tests with representative samples of the population. To surely debunk evil Lynn once and for all! (lol)
Better data would be better! No one can argue with that.
Peer reviewed scholarly journals have published all this data. What the clique of Science Denialists within Wikipedia are doing is declaring that "Intelligence," the leading journal in Intelligence research for decades, is not reliable because it publishes studies showing racial gaps. But there are virtually no papers published in peer reviewed science journals showing no racial gaps.
Yes.
It's all out there.
I think you missed Scott’s point, which I took to be that even if you take Lynn‘s results as accurate, you can’t use them to support the heredity hypothesis.
See https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289609001275 . But also, I don't think this old debate is that interesting - lots of World Bank stuff and standardized testing numbers have come out which correlate with IQ and seem to confirm something like Lynn's view. I'll stick some of them on a Highlights From The Comments post.
Feels like one of those blog posts that's not about what it's about.
The real story here is Scott Alexander declaring "iq differs by race" is now within the Overton window, at least within his social club. Sure, you could talk about racial differences at SSC meetups before, and Scott would occasionally hint at racial IQ being real in a "there's this well researched forum called Human Varieties" kind of way. And yeah, we're still not at the point where Scott can say "IQ differences between race are less than 100% environmental". But a large, non-anonymous blogger can now say that IQ differences, regardless of what causes them, are real. And that's huge.
It's so interesting to see how everyone seems to unconsciously understand that the world is changing. Just look at how fast big tech kneeled before the new administration, even the ones that resisted last time!
I've been writing posts approximately this IQ-pilled regularly for the past ten years. This one isn't even spicy, it doesn't even argue anything is genetic.
a) Yes, happened on SSC (and well appreciated), much less on ACX (wisely). Mentioning at times Emil Kirkegaard was enough, and enough to make me worried.
b) Yes, this one is very much watered down. Hardly "argues anything is genetic". But that is ... not exactly honest, is it? As ACX readers are expected to be aware that intelligence IS genetic to a large extent. If not for my genes, I might be a tree, a cat or Jeremy Siskind! And a difference of 15 IQ point inside the US is hardly just "nurture". So why pretend?! - I would love to see HBD written about by EK/Aporia/RKhan/GregC. And see Scott writing about all the other surprising and true insights of this universe. As in: Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning
Your 'sociological' take about this being some sort of Overton window flex is wrong. There are posts from years ago closer to endorsing less than 0 heritability of the group gap than 'actually, if you trust these numbers, the anti-hereditarian case is stronger'
Every country that has industrialized has gained 30+ IQ points via the Flynn effect. Each year of education adds 2-3 IQ points. Within group differences in IQ are genetic, but like height, obesity, and criminality large differences between groups are 85%+ environmental. (US blacks today have higher IQ's than US jews in 1900, US Hispanics have lower crime rates than 1800's Japanese).
Definitely not correct, though claims like these are often made. There are plenty of critiques out there to read, but as a sniff test, I’ll point out that if pre-industrial societies had an actual 30 point IQ gap, it would be virtually impossible for people like Gauss, Euler, or Newton to have existed. These; and many others like them, would inarguably score at the very upper end of IQ tests today. If they were two more standard deviations above the mean for their time, that would imply a population in the trillions.
This. We know the Flynn Effect can't be entirely an artifact of testing, or by implication things like polio and vitamin deficiency would have no effect on brain development, but it also can't be entirely real, or we'd all be solving math problems like Von Neumann.
I certainly can’t believe that the early 20C had people with an IQ of, what, 70? My bias would be to think they were smarter.
I can't recall the source offhand, but I remember reading that most Flynn Effect gains were concentrated in the bottom half of the IQ distribution, which is what you'd expect given pre-industrial class differences in nutrition and educational access and so on.
If so, Flynn didn't say this in his original paper. But Ravens tests showed the highest gain, and verbal IQ tests showed the lowest gain.
I like his summary, though...
> The current generation has made massive gains on all kinds of IQ tests. These gains persist to maturity and, therefore, cross-sectional data are suspect as a measure of the effects of aging on IQ. These gains suggest that IQ tests do not measure intelligence but rather a correlate with a weak causal link to intelligence.Therefore, between-groups IQ differences cannot, at present, be equated with intelligence differences. Environmental factors with a large impact on IQ have not been identified. The hypothesis that Wechsler-Binet IQ gains may not represent intelligence gains shows how they can be reconciled with the SAT score decline.
http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/flynn1987.pdf
Yes, Flynn Effect gains vary enormously depending on the type of test you look at, and for some measures (such as reaction time and vocabulary) we've actually seen declines since the mid-19th century. FE gains are inversely correlated with the g-loading and heritability of the test, which is what you'd expect if they were primarily a function of environmental factors.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289622000241
I think the reference paper for lower-half-gains in IQ was here, although I've seen the pattern crop up in other places:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289604000807?via%3Dihub
Most studies agree with a 30 point flynn effect between industrialized and non industrialized populations within the same society.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886911001437
Well, those studies must suck then because there definitely weren’t trillions of people on earth when Archimedes was around.
One thing Scott's discussion highlights is just how much of the reaction to Lynn is driven by the sentiment "You're not allow to talk about that, and you're certainly not allow to express that conclusion." There is little desire to reason about reality or make specific counter-claims, just "You're wrong and shut up."
No one seems to be silencing Lynn. And that is the real problem here. Google Scholar reports more than 230K citations for Lynn's work, with 17.5K of them coming after 2021. Lynn's papers are being posthumously published in fringe journals like Mankind Quarterly. And despite decades of criticism about the poor quality and practices of his work, only a few journals have taken any action to retract his papers or even acknowledge the criticism. Worse yet, many researchers innocently cite the National IQ dataset as being an accurate resource, assuming Lynn’s interpretations are uncontroversial. Unintentionally or deliberately his white supremacist ideology is being laundered behind the facade of legitimate scientific inquiry.
Scott, your optimistic note reminded me of your post Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/
Is the synthesis that culture/society *and* genetics are hard to change, but nutrition/environmental biology is relatively easy?
We may be approaching a point where genetic interventions could potentially be cost-competitive with environmental interventions, especially in countries where the latter have hit diminishing returns.
Admittedly, the biotech sector hasn't precisely covered itself in glory post-COVID and other scandals related to depression and alzheimer's research, so... who knows if people will trust it.
I don't see anything in that linked post that indicates culture is *hard* to change. It just presents a list of cases where culture was successfully changed and yet nothing improved, which might be evidence that changing culture is *pointless* (at least for the particular problems discussed), but is not evidence that it's hard.
Warning for a long URL, but this is Ciarán Benson's critique of Lynn's work on Irish IQ, and I would like to refer you all to the beeyootiful illustrative figures, such as Lynn's breakdown of regional IQ within Great Britain (see pages 5 and 6 here for geographical diagram and table of results):
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ciaran-Benson/publication/232468496_Ireland's_Low_IQ_A_Critique_of_the_Myth/links/5cb4669f92851c8d22ec5233/Irelands-Low-IQ-A-Critique-of-the-Myth.pdf
Stunningly, the smartest people are in the North-East/East/South-East. Hmm, by pure coincidence, what was it that Lynn said again about his family heritage?
"HN: Let us begin with your roots. Where are they?
RL: They are all from the east of England. My father’s family are Viking stock from North Yorkshire and were small trade people until my father obtained a scholarship to King’s College, London. My mother’s family are from the southeast and are Saxon stock from the North plain of Germany."
Lynn scored the Republic of Ireland national IQ at 96 (the lowest in the regions) and London/South-East at 102 (the highest).
Benson gives this slap at his methodology:
"Lynn derives the Republic of Ireland’s mean IQ from data provided by Gill and Byrt (1973). In their standardisation of Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices on Irish children, they reported an overall mean difference of 3 points between the performance of Irish children and that of the British standardization samples. On that basis, and noting that the Irish children were approximately two months older than the British children, Lynn arrived at 96 as his ‘working estimate of mean IQ in the Republic of Ireland’ (Lynn, 1979, p.5).
In effect, Lynn compared a ‘corrected’ mean score on a test of one type of non-verbal ability given to a sample of 6- to 13-year old Irish children in 1972 with a wrongly calculated index score derived from unrepresentative samples of young men during the Second World War whose scores on a variety of different types of tests were aggregated with those of boys and girls who took two unspecified tests in the 1950s and 1960s. On such a foundation rests Lynn’s finding of a difference of 6 IQ points between the Republic of Ireland and London and South Eastern England which Eysenck claims to be ‘highly significant from a practical as well as statistical point of view’ (Eysenck, 1981, p.78).
Such being the ‘facts’ on which the low Irish IQ myth is based, there is really no need to pursue this critique any further."
I'm not claiming we're a nation of unrecognised geniuses, but I am claiming Lynn was sloppy and motivated by a certain amount of bias and wishful thinking (e.g. the superior genes of the pure Angelfolc blood as shewn by the high IQ).
Yeah, I'd guess that Lynn's Protestant prejudice against Irish Catholics played a role.
In general, Lynn's mistakes tended to be random and thus his overall findings have held up well. But his aversion toward Irish Catholics probably played a role in this case.
Russell Warne looked into old data and concluded that Ireland was always pretty close to England in IQ.
But, I dunno ... I could also imagine that the agriculture-oriented culture promoted by the Irish Free State tended to hold down IQ scores a little in the 20th Century.
Perhaps it's kind of like how Israel doesn't have quite the test scores you'd expect. But that's partly by design. The Zionist founders wanted to socially construct a more "normal" culture for Jews where they would be farmers and soldiers rather than urban financiers and intellectuals. My impression is that they pretty much got what they wanted, which could be why Israeli Ashkenazis seem less intellectually-inclined than American Ashkenazis.
are there anyone willing to make models of flinn-ish effects and back test of iq test results using such data?
But wait! Richard hasn't just solved national divergences in IQ, he has also solved the problem of "who smarter, hims or hers?"
Sorry ladies, we have to accept that Harry Enfield was right, and that our small (literally, Lynn says men have bigger brains and bigger of course means more smarter) brains get filled up and confused at a low level of education compared to men:
http://eugenik.dk/static/pdf/2011/Nyborg2011-2.pdf
"HN: You have also worked on sex differences in intelligence. How did this come about?
RL: In all fields of scholarship we have to take a lot on trust. If all previous scholars are agreed on something, we take it for granted that they must be right. All the experts from at least World War 1 had stated that there is no sex difference in intelligence. In the following years numerous scholars whom I respected repeated this assertion. For instance, Herrnstein and Murray wrote in The Bell Curve that ‘‘The consistent story has been that men and women have nearly identical IQs’’.
I had no reason to doubt this consensus, but in 1992 I was shaken when Dave Ankney and Phil Rushton independently published papers showing that men have larger brains than women, even when these are controlled for body size and weight. It was evident that these results presented a problem. It is well established that brain size is positively related to intelligence at a correlation of about 0.4. As men have larger brains than women, men should have a higher average IQ than women. Yet all the experts were agreed that males and females have the same intelligence.
I grappled with this problem for about six months. I went through dozens of studies and the experts seemed to be right that males and females have the same intelligence. Then at last I found the solution. When I looked at the studies in relation to the age of the samples being tested, I found that males and females do have the same intelligence up to the age of 15 years, as everyone had said. But I found that from the age of 16 years onwards, males begin to show higher IQs than females and that by adulthood, the male advantage reaches about 5 IQ points, entirely consistent with their larger average brain size. I published this solution to what I called the Ankney-Rushton anomaly in 1994."
Women, Know Your Limits!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnFAOEZboq4
I trust Scott will have no problem informing his missus that naturally, as the (big) head of the house, he is considerably smarter than she is by a whole 5 points of IQ? 😁
Uh, yes? Were you under the impression that professional chess players are all men because of misogyny?
That could be explained by greater variation in male IQ and not just higher average male IQ.
Even if that were the case, that still means that in practice, once the lowrolls are dealt with, the remaining men are still more intelligent than women on average.
Okay, but how often do the low-rolls get 'dealt with', these days? (I'm not sure low IQ, by itself, warrants the death penalty by the way.)
You don't need to kill them. You just need to keep throwing them in prison, or let them rot in ghettos and encampments. Either way, they're mostly separated from the rest of the rest of the population. Though, admittedly, it would be more effective and cheaper to just kill them... And if we had a higher birth rate, we could afford to be a lot more picky about our population.
Being low-IQ doesn't automatically make you a criminal either. There's a non-zero correlation, sure, but it not all *that* strong.
Sorry, me only poor small brain female not understand big word
You know that you don't have to take statistical distributions personally, right?
Or you can assume the pseudoscience that created those statistical distributions is crap.
Deeply unhappy about this text. Context: I read the mentioned Aporia-article before - (got it in my email on 01.01.). And used it to defend Lynn in a quora-answer. 1. I am unhappy when I see Scott venturing out to publish posts that are ... risky ... . IQ of sub-saharan Africans (aka "Blacks"), is a topic one mentions to get stigmatized on wikipedia. Aporia does it, Emil Kirkegaard does it, Greg Cochran did it (he seems very unwell), Razib Khan lost his NYT contract because he might consider mentioning it (more below) ... Better not touch this topic unless ready to openly embrace HBD aka as having the NYT shout: "See! A racist! We told you he is wacky and dangerous!". I am aware, Scott is a truth-seeker, but what he wrote about his "naive friends" in excellent https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/ applies to him, this time around; short quote: "Every couple of weeks, I have friends ask me “Hey, do you know if I could get in trouble for saying [THING THAT THEY WILL DEFINITELY GET IN TROUBLE FOR SAYING]?” When I stare at them open-mouthed, they follow with “Well, what if I start by specifying that I’m not a bad person and I just honestly think it might be true?” I am half-tempted to hire babysitters for these people to make sure they’re not sending disapproving letters to Stalin in their spare time." end-of-quote
2. Even worse: I believe Scott gets central parts of the data *wrong*. IF West-Africans with lousy educational background etc. indicate an IQ of 80, while in the USofA those Afro-Americans whose ancestors came from there - still do not manage better than IQ 85 ... that indicates that genes may count a lot more than generally assumed, and living in the US vs. living in a "shithole-country" may matter much, much less (IQ-wise) than generally assumed! As the Aporia article put it: "We already have abundant evidence that black Americans score about 85 on IQ tests, as compared to 100 for whites. If the average IQ in Sub-Saharan Africa is 80, this would mean the massive difference in environment between Sub-Saharan Africa and the US reduces IQ by only 5 points, yet the comparatively small difference in environment between black and white Americans somehow reduces it by 15 points. The point has been made a number of times, including by Lynn himself, but environmentalists still don’t seem to get it."
3. Just to add about Razib Khan: Checked his wikipedia (for his formal degree), found a link to the letter that made the NYT drop him: "New Times Op-Ed Writer Has a Colorful Past With Racist Publications". Guilt by association! . There were links to those"racist" texts. Great stuff! My favorite (not by Khan): “I’m Not a Racist, Sexist, or a Homophobe, You Nigger Slut Faggot” https://www.takimag.com/article/im_not_a_racist_sexist_or_a_homophobe_you_nigger_slut_faggot/
There's a vibe shift going on, so more smart people might come out of the closet on IQ.
But it could still be risky. If Trump screws up badly, the Great Awokening cancel culture could come roaring back.
How many "normal" white people with 60 IQs have you interacted with?
How would you know?
I think that IQ tests just aren't very well calibrated at the low end, anyway.
Probably more than most ACX commenters I suspect, because he's a psychiatrist. I'm reminded of e.g. the anecdotes in https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/
I just skimmed the top level comments of the 368 comments, and not one of them asks the question that is at the crux of the matter, how is Lynn's IQ map actually useful? Is there any decision you can make off this map that there isn't a better indicator elsewhere?
It does aid in answering the question "Which countries should you accept refugees from?"
By the very definition that they're refugee's, no. You accept refugees out of humanitarian reasons, not based on their IQ.
You can absolutely accept refugees for pratical reasons. For example, I'm sure the people that fled Russia and Ukraine to avoid the war are decently valuable as far as immigrants go. But you don't need to mindlessly welcome in every group of refugees that wants to live in your country. And, according to that graph, well... we should probably have a policy of preventing climate refugees from entering the country at any cost.
According to Lynn's map Ukraine has an IQ around 95. Syria is around 85. Afghanistan is around 80... but never mind that. And nevermind that if you're accepting refugee's in for other reasons, it doesn't matter that they were refugees anyway. The point you seem to be making is that you can take a population level study and use it to judge individual cases as if they are the same, which you cannot. All of those places had doctors and the like after all. A simple test, especially a job specific test would tell you more about someone's usefulness than Lynn's map, even if it wasn't biased.
Edit: forgot to add, refugee's are accepted based on the fact that they are being persecuted. Natural disasters such as ones caused by climate change would not make them elegable under the current system.
That's why I said refugees, not immigrants. You can't pick and choose from a single group of refugees, that would piss off even the people that did get selected.
I'm sure there'll be a bunch of people that argue we should accept climate refugees because their homeland is becoming literally uninhabitable and that they'll die if we don't give them shelter. And this research shows us that we should ignore those people.
Ok, I can see why you picked refugees now, but that's still quite a take.
So would this be an accurate summary of your position? You believe we shouldn't be humanitarian to some countries because they might have low IQ. What the sin of being low IQ is is unclear though, but especially given your other comment where you try to make yourself out as an edgelord l I'm willing to bet it's go something to do with impurity of the bloodlines or something.
I'll be honest with you, when I asked the question about the benefit of this map, my implication was that there there was no benefit unless you're looking for an excuse to be racist, and this study is not nearly high enough quality to justify that. Thank you for making my point for me.
No I don't. Otherwise my tiny country would have to accept billions of refugees.
Investing.
For example, which giant country has more long term economic potential: China or India? If you look just at Indian-Americans and Chinese-Americans, they both seem like pretty sharp cookies on average, so both countries would seem likely to have similar potentials. But if you look test score data, India looks like it has bigger problems.
Wouldn't looking at their economic indicators and their industries be more meaningful data to make decisions by?
I think the idea is that if a country has high IQ and low development, that means there's an opportunity to make a lot of money by investing in their development. China is an obvious example, but unfortunately it seems all of these opportunities are already taken by now.
I'm pretty sure that the causation flows the other way, investment in skilled jobs leads to higher IQ scores in the country, which leads to more investment. Although that's rather simplistic, as for example in China it was also the combination of sufficient political stability and low wages compared to the other options.
Bear in mind that if you're going to go off such little information as an IQ map, you mustn't be doing very significant investment otherwise you'd be doing much more research anyway.
Vietnam took the PISA test for the first time recently and got a quite good score, but there were complaints that only 56% of the designated students took the test.
Argentina does really bad, but they argue that at least they round up 80% of their 15 year olds, unlike higher-scoring Mexico.
The last I checked, the honest Dutch had 101% of their designated number of students take the PISA. Finland was around 96% and the US around 91%.
It helps you answer the question of "How should you feel about the fact that some countries are much poorer than other countries?"
It doesn't answer the question for you, but it helps narrow down the range of possibilities.
Poor countries, amiright?
I haven't read every single one or anything, but the comments in this thread are remarkably rational and reasonable. Kudos, ACT commentariat. Given the inflammatory subject, things could have easily gone otherwise.
I guess any further analysis on my part have to wait for better data, preferably more detailed and is at least on province/state level (and genetic ethnicity level). But this article is good enough to prove that even if it's true, it's not an excuse to be racist.
> simple low-IQ jobs like manual labor, basic retail, or writing for the New York Times
Nicely played.
>Practically nobody ever claimed it was 100%
'I never said *all* Jews kill babies to drink their blood, so I don't know why you're trying to stop me from condemning the ones who do'.
Listen, the Supreme Court just killed Affirmative Action, and half the country is saying that DEI is why LA is on fire.
You can point out as much as you want that discrepancies in tested ability seem to align with deprivation and therefore we should proudly embrace those discrepancies as evidence of problems to be fixed.
But the entire right and half of the left, including many of the people you cite in this post, have drunk the Meritocracy Kool-Aid. They assume in their rhetoric that test discrepancies reflect innate abilities and that we should stop trying to help populations that test poorly because it's destroying the country.
This is just one of these cases where people are using the same term to mean different things, and talking past each other thereby.
When you say IQ, you mean 'a strictly delineated, tested metric which is the result of complex interactions between innate and environmental factors'.
But when people say IQ in the sphere of politics or race relations, they mean 'a broad measure of innate and immutable ability to function in and contribute to society'
So when you look at people talking about IQ in the context of politics and race relations, and notice that the things they say are all nonsense based on your definition of the term... you're not correcting their misconceptions, you're misunderstanding what they are trying to say.
And when you try to come into those realms and tell them the 'truth' about IQ, using your own definition, they will hear you to be saying something very different than what you mean to say, because they will be hearing their own definition.
Which is not to say that there's no point in the conversation - obviously people in those realms are not using the science properly and it would be great to correct them. But when you just look at them talking in ways that don't make sense under your own definition of IQ and assume they must be confused and can be easily corrected, you're just going to end up wrong about what they are saying and wrong about how to correct them and wrong about why everyone suddenly seems so mad at you.
No one is mad at you for saying the thing that you understand yourself to be saying inside your own head. They are mad at what *they* understand you to be saying, based on their own internal definitions of the words you're using and their personal knowledge of the shape of the debate.
Ultimately it's on the speaker to be understood, even when that's incredibly frustrating.
Wait, why do you think Scott isn't using the second definition? He wouldn't be constantly talking about IQ if he thought it wasn't a useful heuristic. I think you're the one that's misunderstanding him.
IQ is a useful metric whether or not it varies solely due to nature, solely due to nurture, or (most likely) both.
The US military, for example, gives a cognitive test to all applicants to enlist. It's banned by law from enlisting the bottom 10% and it usually tries not to take the bottom 30%. (During the Great Recession, you'd have to score in the top 50% to enlist in the Air Force or Navy.)
"writing for the New York Times", have you taken a random sample of WSJ 'articles' lately?
The Caribbean makes a good comparison zone. I'm thinking Barbados versus Haiti for example.
Hmm, Barbados was part of the British empire, and Haiti of the French, with a period of US control as well, then various dictators and coups. I'm wondering how one would one divide through for all those cultural and historical factors?
That's the whole point: there are somewhat similar genetics on the islands but a whole host of other different factors. This tests whether genetics are a major factor, it doesn't necessarily tell you what exactly mostly drives IQ if it isn't genetics though.
It would seem to me a better idea than comparing African Americans and Africans.
"The large difference between sub-Saharan Africans in developed countries (eg the US) and in sub-Saharan Africa demonstrates that the latter aren’t performing at their genetic peak, and that developmental interventions - again, nutrition, health care, and education - are likely to work."
Where "work" is defined as raising Sub-Saharan Africans to the level of Black Americans. That's not nothing, but it's not the defense liberals would generally want.
1. This entire article fails to acknowledge the absurd, and apparently intentional methodological shortcomings in Lynn's work that amount to academic fraud. What the work implies or don't imply (the entire point of your article) is irrelevant.
2. What is the scientific basis for your belief that IQ is a linear combination of racial admixtures? This requires rather a lot of assumptions and leaps of logic.
1st and second generation African immigrants in the United States and elsewhere have better educational attainment (a proxy for IQ) than black Americans, so perhaps we should assume the African component of their IQ is higher when raised in a similar environment and the white admixture drags it down?
>A normal person with 60 IQ ... can do simple low-IQ jobs like manual labor, basic retail
I don't think that's true. The example here is McNamara's Morons, otherwise known as Project 100,000, which was the Army's attempt to draft people with sub-83 IQ's during Vietnam. It failed miserably. If you consider the military to require the same range of skills that civilian life does then you'd have to conclude that a 60 IQ person would not be able to work in simple low-IQ jobs.
There's an interview on YouTube somewhere where Jordan Peterson talks about working clinically with an 80 IQ person. He said it was basically impossible to find a job that he could do.
I have a coworker that I think falls into this category.
Being a combat infantryman is not a simple job, it’s complex and done under difficult circumstances. Maybe it was simpler in the days of close order drill and volley fire, but I’m not so sure about that. In my military experience the dumb guys tended to get themselves in trouble unless they had a functional unit and a sergeant to keep them on the right path.
As I'm sure you know, most jobs in the military are non-combat. There are cooks, drivers, laundry workers, police, etc. Project 100,000 found that low-IQ people couldn't even do those. They even gave them extra, specialized training under the theory that modern education methods can overcome low IQ. Turns out they can't.
I think the article was the real IQ test.
Scott Alexander isn't stupid, and he's a pretty upstanding guy overall. He may be wrong, but calling people's intelligence into question because they disagree with you is weak.
Banned for this comment.
"If IQ was 100% genetic, we should expect blacks everywhere to have an IQ of 85, since they all have the same genes. "
Okay, mandatory disclaimer here: "Blackness" is, in many ways, a social construct and not a scientific term, though it maps loosely to some notions of heredity and genetics. We could compare American blacks to their mostly sub-Saharan Nigerian forebears (with a fair bit of genetic mixing.) But "blackness" on a global scale doesn't map well to being Nigerian. Ghanaians and Australian Aborigines would be considered 'Black' by American cultural standards, but would be very different from sub-Saharan Nigerians.
But to bolster the environmental and cultural argument using better data: Nigerian immigrants in the UK seem to academically outperform the average person in the UK.
https://ippr-org.files.svdcdn.com/production/Downloads/back-to-basics-integration_Mar2013_10525.pdf
I haven't carefully gone through how this data was calculated (no time right now) and I assume it's selective in some ways, either in terms of which immigrants can reach the UK from Nigeria or in terms of which immigrants are being tested. So I'd welcome methodological criticism. But at least this seems much more encouraging for the environmental and cultural hypothesis than 'people slowly working their way back to average and not quite getting there.'
The stark difference between Nigerians and Somalis in the UK is intriguing, but I don't have time to dive into the reason for the difference. If anything, though, it underscores the importance of not lumping all people with dark skin and African origin into the monolithic category of 'Black.'
Cremieux discusses Nigerian success in the US and UK in this post: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-myth-of-nigerian-excellence most of which is paywalled.
He discusses African academic performance in the UK in this (also paywalled) post: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/explaining-anomalous-gcse-results, summarized in this tweet: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1812585554611253513 and later ones in that thread.
I hate to break it to you but Cremieux is a racist with an agenda. I have countless evidence that I'm happy to share, but you also have to ask yourself why his posts always end up with the conclusion that "blacks bad"
For the specific example, look at native UK blacks performance in GCSE vs native white Brit's/irish.
Native blacks beat Irish whites and trend very closely to white Brits.
Native black here refers to blacks who aren't recent educational migrants from Africa, many of whom exist
Yeah, we get it. Anything that produces evidence that favors black people is "biased." Anything that produces evidence that disfavors black people is "fair and balanced" including the Lynn estimates which uses the IQs of a group of developmentally disabled kids to represent one of the African countries in his dataset. Transparent and laughable.
What are the countless examples of racism? /genuine question
The first Cremieux article cuts off when he starts discussing Nigerians in Brittain, which is what I was trying to address (since race seems like less of an issue in the UK.) He does have data from Canada with Nigerians and Somalis both under-performing, which may serve a similar purpose if Canada is presumed to be less racist than the US.
The second article seems to argue that academic achievement as measured by the GCSEs is a bad predictor and weakly correlated with general intelligence.
"Similarly, when GCSE results are included alongside IQ tests, the result is evidence of bias in favor of girls relative to boys and Black Africans relative to White Britons. We know there’s bias when these variables are used to indicate intelligence, but we don’t have explicit knowledge of why. All we know is that there’s bias, and in both of these cases, it results in certain groups scoring better than they should for their smarts."
After this, it cuts out to a paywall effectively saying "if you want to know the support for my assertions give me money." So his argument is not made. Publicly, anyways. Why the GCSE's are less predictive of performance than IQ he does not say. He just asserts. He argues we have to control for conscientiousness. But IQ is already a mix of different mental abilities. If conscientiousness improves performance then perhaps a metric which factors it in rather than controlling for it would be superior as a predictor.
He does seem to make the argument that IQs for Nigerians aren't significantly better in the UK than in the US. Which is interesting. Though they are significantly better than for native Nigerians.
Banned for this comment.
The reason for the difference is simple: the Nigerians are primarily economic migrants, i.e. middle class aspirants that came to find jobs and education. The Somalis are more disproportionately refugees, i.e. the most vulnerable ppl fleeing war and hardship. The people that came to pursue jobs and education succeed in school and employment more than the people that were dragged over by a random and traumatizing calamity of fate.
The fact that you don't even question Lynn's hilariously-flawed data is pretty embarrassing.
It doesn't make it any better that your excuse is basically "well I'm not racist because I don't think black people are stupider than us due to genetic inferiority, it's simply because they're poor!"
This is the neoliberal argument. It's reductive and doesn't address the unique issues that might be behind underdevelopment of the respective nations.
It also does everyone a disservice because when charity is pumped and nothing happens, the next conclusion would be "I guess they're just genetically inferior then."
Unfortunately a lazy take based on an extremely flawed premise.
You should read about how many of Lynn's African data points were basically made up and wildly extrapolated.
Not only the best comment about this deeply flawed - and pretty silly - article, but one of the very few that made any sense. Thank you.
You've got to be kidding.
"The authors report IQ numbers for 185 countries but 104 of those numbers (more than half) are based on zero data collected from people from that country. They are guesstimates based on their numbers for surrounding countries."
"The IQ estimate for Equatorial Guinea was based on kids in a home for developmentally disabled kids living in Spain. Not even their own home country. Spain."
"The estimate for Somalia was based on a single sample of refugees living in refugee camp in Kenya."
"The estimate for Botswana is based on 104 kids living in South Africa who were tested in English even though English wasn't their native language"
"The Haitian estimate is mostly based on 133 rural 6 year olds."
"The estimate for St. Vincent and the Grenadines was based on a single sample of 174 rural children."
Lynn was a white nationalist who wanted predominantly white states to secede from the Union.
These studies obviously also fail to capture the varying relationships that different cultures have with standardized test taking and how that would likely skew the distribution over large numbers.
An Asian kid, for example, is likely to be highly exposed to and experienced with standardized test taking at a young age, and likely would take it more seriously than another kid from Africa with the same intellectual capacity.
Is that enough for you, or do you need more? Because I've got more.
The fact that these "intellectual" racists are trying to push us back to a world of race science and IQ averages and Scott is happy to validate them is embarrassing.
They continually discount data based on economic migrants and call that data skewed, but they are happy to use data based on averages from developmentally disabled kids. It's almost as if there is an agenda there.
It's embarrassing to watch Scott build a false premise off of this and try to legitimize it.
None of what you cite substantively refutes the points made
For African-Americans you also have the complication that, while the majority are descended from slaves (mostly from the USA, Haiti or the Anglophone Caribbean) with all the generational disadvantage that entails, the post-decolonization immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa to the USA and their descendants have disproportionately wealthier/more educated backgrounds (wealthy relative to their countries of origin; more educated even compared to the average American). So with e.g. Nigerian-Americans you have a population who are on average highly educated (29% have a postgraduate degree!), with predominately middle-class upbringing, but liable be treated by the American majority (everyone from anti-Black bigots to aficionados of critical race theory) as if they come from a very deprived/out-group background. I wonder how this plays out in practice?
Banned.
I'd have thought that the IQs of North Koreans and South Koreans would be similar (and relatively high), allowing for impacts of food shortage and general hardship on the former, but the difference in GDP seems out of all proportion (attached is a 2023 summary, showing SK's nominal GDP being 60 times that of NK). Can GDP really be considered as a proxy marker for IQ, when GDP is likely to have been effectively depressed in dysfunctional states? Not being very smart, I have probably got something wrong here, but I've wondered about this for a while.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1035390/south-korea-gdp-comparison-with-north-korea/
“If there were some group that got even worse nutrition, health care, and education than US blacks, we should expect them (under the environmentalist hypothesis) to have an IQ even lower than 85”
There is a small flaw in the argument here because the poor choices made by some group in terms of education/nutrition also have a major genetic origin. It is hard to separate “pure” environmental causes from genetic causes as there is a confounding effect.
Charles Murray discusses it in Human diversity.
Side issue - the current time is irrelevant to the discussion, and I should have said “not *that* smart”. My point was : many, many factors went into who joined the priesthood - and it is my intuition that the dysgenic effect there could be easily exaggerated. That is a better statement.
The main effect was probably, in the main, to reduce the number of grandchildren of people who had a certain social status (particularly in the Americas, where, in many countries, mestizo common folk rarely bothered to formally marry) and had an inheritance to leave. It was a profession for third-born sons, to avoid splitting the inheritance. Of course there was some room for vocation (and hence selection) in that there was also the option of joining an army, say.
Source: hearsay and random reading, so you are very welcome to tear this apart with sources.
It was particular orders (e.g. Jesuits, late entrants to the game) that had a reputation for intellectuality. Don’t get me wrong - in the Middle Ages, priests were a large percentage of those literate - but it’s not as if the illiterate majority had not had the innate capability to learn to read or even learn some Latin.
It's not like priests and religious were only children, either. As you point out, for rich/nobe families, the clergy was a career option for younger sons. If you were poor and smart, joining the clergy was a way to social mobility and career success (see Cardinal Wolsey for one example). But it's not necessarily that the *smartest* of your twelve kids became a celibate religious, it could be the most religious/devout one - see St. Catherine of Siena, the twenty-fourth child of twenty-five.
Or, if we go by 19th century norms, for middle-class and upper families, a way of steering that third son into something respectable so he can make a living, but doesn't mean that he's particularly smart *or* devout, like the figure from Trollope's "Barchester Towers" of Dr. Stanhope and his family:
"The Bishop, or rather Mr Slope under the direction of Mrs Proudie, also orders the return of the prebendary Dr Vesey Stanhope from Italy. Stanhope has been in Italy recovering from a sore throat for 12 years and has spent his time catching butterflies. With him to the Cathedral Close come his wife and their three adult children. The younger of Dr Stanhope's two daughters causes consternation in the Palace and threatens the plans of Mr Slope. Signora Madeline Vesey Neroni is a disabled flirt with a young daughter and a mysterious Italian husband, whom she has left. Mrs Proudie is appalled and considers her an unsafe influence on her daughters, servants and Mr Slope. Mr Slope is drawn like a moth to a flame, and cannot keep away from the Signora. Dr Stanhope's artistic son Bertie is skilled at spending money, but not at making it; his sisters think marriage to rich Eleanor Bold will help."
*Exactly*
I am not able to understand the figures here, someone please explain to me the effects of skin reflectance on IQ/educational attainment (does this mean it's good or it's bad?)
file:///C:/Users/rmdal/Downloads/Lynnetal.JBS.pdf
"Among the variables other than IQ and school achievement, gross domestic product (GDP, average 1975–2005) was obtained from the World Development Indicators of the World Bank. … Data on the combined school enrolment ratio for primary, secondary and tertiary schools (proportion of children of eligible age enrolled in school), youth literacy, public expenditure for education (as % of GDP), life expectancy and the Gini index of income inequality were from the Human Development Report of the United Nations. … Scores for political freedom on a 0-to-6 scale (1988–2005 average, reversed score) were averaged from data about political rights and civil liberties published by Freedom House … Corruption scores on a 0-to-9 scale (1999–2005 average, reversed score) were from Transparency International … Skin reflectance data were from Jablonski & Chaplin (2000), with missing data points extrapolated from neighbouring countries. Scores for religiosity and subjective well-being were formed from the results of the 2000 wave of the World Values Survey."
I do like in the tables presented, his original guesstimate for Irish IQ back in the 70s or 80s was 92, but by 2003 the PISA scoring equivalent rose to 98.6. A whole 6.6 points of more IQ! Where did the infusion of superior genes come from, given that Lynn very damn strongly believes it's all about the genes? EDIT: I must correct that, he doesn't believe it's *all* about the genes, he does think environment (including social attitudes to things like learning science/maths, is being happy more important than success in life, etc.) is also important. But the genes really do matter a lot. If you have the genes for light skin, you're going to be smarter, because light skin correlates with high IQ - see below for "skin reflectance".
Also, Lynn norms everything so that Britain is 100. That makes it easy to 'prove' the Brits are the new normal, yes? What would happen to British scores if, say, the USA or Spain or Japan were normed as 100?
"However, to study the causes of discrepancies between school achievement and IQ, the trend-adjusted, averaged school achievement scores were converted directly from a mean of 500 and a standard deviation of 100 to a mean score of 100 for Britain and a standard deviation of 15. The latter method was required to investigate the reasons for systematic differences between the standard deviations of IQ and school achievement."
And if you're using "skin reflectance" as one of your criteria, then you damn well will look like an old-fashioned racist, not a new scientific racist. That's saying the quiet part out loud, Richard!
"Table 3 shows that correlations with IQ and school achievement are indeed similar for most criterion variables. Life expectancy is about equally related to IQ/school achievement and logGDP. Some others (school enrolment ratio, political freedom, corruption, subjective well-being, public expenditure for education) are related more closely to logGDP, and others again (skin reflectance, youth literacy, Gini index, religiosity) are more closely related to IQ and school achievement.
… For example, Templer & Arikawa (2006) reported a correlation of 0·92 between IQ and skin colour, and Meisenberg (2004) reported a correlation of 0·89. The reason for the lower correlation of 0·69 in Table 3 is that the TIMSS and PISA assessments are heavily biased toward economically advanced countries with high school achievement, high IQ, high GDP and light skin colour."
Though I have to admit, at least he finally admitted some of his early data (which is *still* being quoted all over the place) might have been crap:
"The school assessments have greater reliability than the IQ tests, presumably because they were performed within a narrow time range (1995–2003), and the samples were selected to be representative of the whole school-age population in the country. The IQs, by contrast, were collected over more than half a century, in different age groups and with different tests, and in some cases with samples whose representativeness is open to doubt."
Mirabile dictu, there may be some genuinely useful information here! Yes, schooling *does* make a difference:
"If school achievement were determined only by the children’s IQ, we would expect that between-country differences in school achievement, relative to within-country differences, would be as great as those for IQ. Actually, however, between-country differences in school achievement scores are greater than between-country differences in IQ. When the school achievement scores are converted into the IQ metric directly rather than by linear regression, the between-country standard deviation is 0·53 within-country standard deviations for IQ, and 0·70 within-country standard deviations for school achievement, counting only those 57 countries for which both measured IQ and a school achievement score are available.
Therefore school achievement is not simply an expression of the children’s intelligence, but children in high-IQ countries tend to over-perform in school relative to their IQ, whereas children in low-IQ countries tend to under-perform. This result is expected if school systems are more efficient in high-IQ countries than in low-IQ countries.
To identify the country-level factors that are responsible for over- or underachievement in mathematics and science, the difference score was formed between school achievement scores (directly converted into the IQ metric) and IQ. Then each variable in Table 3 was used in turn to identify those that predict over- or underachievement in the school assessments relative to IQ."
I suspect that this whole article was a covert way to take a jab at the NYT writers (or A writer). If it is the case, tip of the hat to you, sir!
"American and African blacks have similar genes. This isn’t exactly right - US blacks have some intermixing with whites, and only some of Africa’s staggering diversity reached the US - but it’s close enough."
No, it's NOT "close enough."
You can't just wave your hands and make a magic incantation and think that it is so.
The average African DNA of the American "black" population is likely less than 25%. That's much more intermixing than "some."
Increasing white DNA in "blacks" changes their characteristics, including intelligence, greatly. This was recognized previously, in American locales like New Orleans, by finely gradated scales of racial categories: mulatto, quadroon, octaroon, etc. These gradations of portion of white blood were recognized because the results were much more than skin deep.
American "black" culture has always recognized these gradations also. They have various terms for varying shades of skin color: from "High Yalla" on down to pure black. And these gradations are recognized as significant, because they are.
So, back to your "close enough" in comparing American blacks with actual Africans: You need to adjust the estimate of non-African DNA much higher. Which would result in the measured increase from 60 IQ for pure African DNA to 85 for the High Yalla DNA in the USA.
If you read the comments on this very thread you will see the best estimate for admixture in the USA is around 18% white. (Higher for self-selected sub-populations like 23andme users). You will also see that skin colour and IQ are not highly correlated so in admixed people their pigmentation is not very strongly linked with their IQ and all the things that IQ predicts (educational attainment, criminality, health, family status, longevity, income). You will also see that genomic studies now clearly show that the higher the amount of caucasian DNA (not pigment), the higher the IQ and educational attainment. This information is freely available on the internet. The "high yella" is a very crude approximation and not very helpful. Pure African DNA is probably around 80 IQ. Admixtures will increase or decrease IQ depending on the admixed race. These are probability distributions and not deterministic predictions.
Thanks, Delia.
Seems to make sense.
Except for: "skin colour and IQ are not highly correlated", but then you also say, "genomic studies now clearly show that the higher the amount of caucasian DNA (not pigment), the higher the IQ and educational attainment."
Those two claims seem to be directly contradictory.
So, higher white DNA means higher IQ. Ok, that's pretty much what I said above.
Higher white DNA MUST also lead to more white pigment. Maybe not on a one-to-one ratio, but in general.
Thus, it seems logical that less black color is associated with higher IQ.
Evidence of this abounds. Search for images of "black scientists." 9 out of 10 of these would have "passed" for white in days past.
https://www.famousafricanamericans.org/images/scientists/james-west.jpg
Yes, on average Africans with more Caucasian admixture will be lighter skinned. But the SNPs for skin pigment and IQ do not appear to be linked. So if a white person had kids with a black person, the kids would vary in intelligence and also in skin colour. But there would be no or little correlation between lighter skin and higher intelligence. The brightest kid could have the darkest skin or vice versa. Skin colour is a noisy proxy for the amount of Caucasian DNA and we have better measures. DNA tests clearly show greater Caucasian admixture leads to higher IQ.
Great case study in the news the last couple weeks.
"Black" mayor of LA worshipping at the African altar in Ghana. She ignored her city burning so she could commune with her "brethren."
See this picture of the "black" American next to an actual black African. This is why Africans laugh at "black" Americans for their claims to Africanness.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7a745b0e-631e-4b99-9150-258c48dca47f_1938x1244.heic
She is a typical American High Yalla--with virtually no black pigment. And while she ain't exactly the sharpest knife in the rack, it's quite likely that her IQ is closer to 100 than it is to 60. More white DNA = higher IQ = whiter skin.
QED.
I’m not sure this research is good enough quality to justify all the discussion around it. The methodology seems terribly flawed and I couldn’t find any replications— why is it even worth talking about?
If this were a study I’d say stereotype threat or priming effects Scott would rightly be mocking it as a waste of grant money, but here he’s treating it as the data. Maybe there should be a higher bar for such a contentious issue?
Are there regions that don't seem to have changed a lot genetically but sometimes show improvements in intelligence/IQ which can't be explained environmentally?
Could the same thing that explains the Lynn effect also explain the Flynn effect? As nutrition and education and living standards in the US / Western world get better on average, IQ increases?
That's been discussed for a long time, and the short answer is "yes," given the correlation between IQ and living standards. Whether the Flynn effect *is* the cause hasn't been proven, but it's regularly pointed out. (I don't know how interested you are in raw studies, but search out a comment I made earlier on this thread and you'll find an article I linked that says essentially that.)
If we shouldn't worry because, for anyone really intelligent, it doesn't matter if it's 85 or 100—they're both stupid. What's sad is intelligent people have to live in this intellectual desert.
I know how you feel.
However, studies don't show unambiguously that there's any point at which more IQ translates into less subjective well-being. This is something I still think about a lot, but for the past year or so I've been coming to suspect that the real problem is being very smart, and *also* having a strongly intellectual bent. Being very high in both intelligence and also intellect/openness to ideas means you really want to play with abstruse concepts, and you're really good at it, and and it's your favorite thing to do, but then whenever other people try to play, they keep goofing up or cheating without meaning to.
Like imagine being incredibly talented at basketball, and absolutely loving basketball, only most people can't grasp what you're even doing, and when the more talented among them try to play with you, they keep running out of bounds and scoring points in the wrong hoop. Meanwhile, someone who is extremely talented in basketball but *doesn't* absolutely love it will just... go around being athletic and do OK.
the key is the rough correspondence of IQs of many races across different developmental scenarios (at least the rank order). i don't pay much attn to these 3rd world numbers because of all the reasons given. the question is what happens in first world countries.
second, the issue of DS vs. just low IQ is pathogenic/mendelian/etc. trait vs. IQ in the "normal range." the tails of the distribution exist, but that's just the product of the law of large numbers. then there is the totally different class that is due to a big mutation (or chromosomal anueploidy like with DS). the exact same applies to height or many quantitative traits (there may be something similar happening with autism, a very heritable trait where some ppl have huge effect mutations and other people do not).
third, the net-nazis laughing "hahaha ppl in malawi are retarded" are not doing anyone a favor if you want to have an open mind to both env&genetic factors. they are, in fact, showing that they are retarded.
Oh Jesus Christ I wish the net-nazis would just go away. I think the actual prevalence of racially motivated individuals in this day and age is much lower than most people on the left insist, and definitely accounts for much less of the opposition to the egalitarian thesis than they think. But the fact that the right tail of ethnocentrism is so visible makes it impossible to actually convince them that there are people like, say, Scott Alexander who take Lynn seriously without being secretly racist. They don't even care about the existence of people like you; you're probably duped or something!
To the extent that it's even possible to talk about this seriously, I'm not sure "the rough correspondence of IQs of many races across different developmental scenarios (at least the rank order)" is the key. It's a good argument for your position, because yes, controlling for culture & wealth is a good idea, so in principle it does help to just consider, for example, the US, and see what the gaps look like there. The problem is that looking only within countries doesn't fully control for culture & wealth, because there are obvious differences in culture and wealth within any given country; moreover, when we partially control for culture and wealth like this, the IQ differences are also partially attenuated - that's exactly what happens in the US. This may not be what's going on, but there is at least an intellectually honest case to be made based on that problem.
Two things of note:
1. The idea that the 25 points from 60 IQ to 85 IQ is “more” or even reasonably comparable than the 15 points from 85 IQ to 100 IQ is fundamentally flawed. IQ is based on percentiles of human performance, not actual raw ability. The difference between a lifter at the bottom 5% and bottom 20% in pull-ups is 4 pull-ups, the difference between top 20% and top 5% is 12 pull-ups despite both being a 15% difference. These types of percentile scores are not homogeneously spaced and so cannot be compared in this way.
2. Emil is doing a bit of a Motte and Bailey here because while he defends the point his HBD theories from criticism about IQs of mentally ill with 60 IQ seeming far less capable than people from poor countries with 60 I, he makes no such distinction when correlating IQ stats and crime. He wants to both defend his position from the obvious counter argument while also getting to tar the impulse control and violent outburst tendencies of not mentally ill people who test having lower IQs
IQ tests are also Western European constructs. Some of the questions are culturally biased. Why is there no questioning here of the instruments used to test IQ?
There was a *lot* of interest in cultural bias for a while. I'm assuming most of the posters around here know enough about this by now because it was pretty well researched about thirty years ago, but that can obviously be frustrating to someone like you who asks the obvious question and gets no answer!
The fairest response I can give probably comes from the APA task force report from 1996; this is a great document to read up on if you're interested in the political minefield that is IQ:
https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/IntUnknown.pdf
"It has been suggested that various aspects of the way tests are formulated and administered may put African Americans at a disadvantage. The language of testing is a standard form of English with which some Blacks may not be familiar; specific vocabulary items are often unfamiliar to Black children; the tests are often given by White examiners rather than by more familiar Black teachers; African Americans may not be motivated to work hard on tests that so clearly reflect White values; the time demands of some tests may be alien to Black culture. (Similar suggestions have been made in connection with the test performance of Hispanic Americans, e.g., Rodriguez, 1992.) Many of these suggestions are plausible, and such mechanisms may play a role in particular cases. Controlled studies have shown, however, that none of them contributes substantially to the Black/White differential under discussion here (Jensen, 1980; Reynolds & Brown, 1984; for a different view see Helms, 1992). Moreover, efforts to devise reliable and valid tests that would minimize disadvantages of this kind have been unsuccessful."
China is reckoned to have a mean IQ of about 105.
But China's wealth exploded only in the last 45 years. 70 years ago most Chinese worked on the land and were poor. Is there historic IQ data for China? This might be helpful in estimating the influence of a changing environment, and the scope for future improvements in countries like Malawi.
See here: https://www.cremieux.xyz/i/146562912/terrible-times-make-for-powerful-studies which looked at IQ results from 2010-2018, by birth cohort, that found that measured IQ rose among later cohorts, but that after adjusting for measurement non-invariance, estimated intelligence remained quite constant.
Interestingly, as he points out, the increase in raw scores was fairly linear for cohorts born over a 45 year period. His main point is that the Great Famine didn't cause a drop even in raw scores, but it could similarly be noted (as he remarks later) that the final two birth cohorts who were born during or after the death of Mao (after which China began rapidly developing) don't show a spike even in raw scores, relative to trend. Nor do the previous two cohorts who would have been children of various ages during the the death of Mao.
The linear increase in raw scores suggests that something about exposure to the modern world increases raw scores, but it doesn't require economic development, per se, as the earlier cohorts increased, even while China remained economically stagnant.
Accordingly, future Flynn effect gains in sub-Saharan Africa may be more modest than the gains in China.
But even if they were to be significant, as he implies there, and discusses at greater length elsewhere, e.g. https://www.cremieux.xyz/i/153828779/the-flynn-effect-means-national-iqs-are-liable-to-change:
>The Flynn effect is not about differences in intelligence, instead, it primarily concerns test bias. The existence of the Flynn effect also doesn’t imply there will be convergence between countries, ... and the Flynn effect is explicitly adjusted for in national IQ computation. It just doesn’t have any relevance to the discussion because the evidence for larger Flynn effects during catch-up economic growth is extraordinarily poor.
Thanks!
My pleasure!
So is the HBD idea that low IQ means one is more likely to commit crimes because one is too stupid to obey rules or are they not understanding that there are rules, or what? I don't understand why a low IQ means higher crime rates.
That is just one of the problems I have accepting that this type of research into comparative IQs has any value. I have read that the people who want to do it believe that they are helping the 'stupids' but I cant believe that.
Its clear to me that telling people you have proved they are stupid is a good way of making them stupid.
You say there is interest in the IQ differences betwen east Asians and whites, Is there a similar attempt to link the higher east Asian IQ to more intelligent aspects of their culture and achievements.
Perhaps not using gunpowder to make guns was a good decision and we whites went the wrong way. Or hey, they aren't really smarter at all, those Chinese, the difference is just an artefact of their language.
Anyway, maybe somebody will be outraged by the cancelling of this 'research'. I'm not.
https://retractionwatch.com/2020/12/29/psychology-journal-retracts-two-articles-for-being-unethical-scientifically-flawed-and-based-on-racist-ideas-and-agenda/
> I don't understand why a low IQ means higher crime rates.
It doesn't very much; it's true that the correlation between IQ and criminality is negative, but it's also fairly small. There's obviously something else going on with crime besides IQ, since men aren't less intelligent than women, and still commit *far* more crime. I think HBDers just insist on talking about this because hey, when you have a hammer, it's fun to use it to hit as many nails as you can!
> Its clear to me that telling people you have proved they are stupid is a good way of making them stupid.
There's been a lot of discussion of this idea, and it hasn't panned out well. Stereotype threat was probably the strongest research paradigm investigating this claim, with initial findings that making a person's ethnicity or gender more salient caused them to score in more stereotyped ways. Now, however, stereotype threat is the example Wikipedia gives for its article on publication bias:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias#Evidence
It's really not a plausible explanation for ability score differences anymore.
This is so good of people to answer my questions. Thanks.
That’s interesting about the lack of correlation between being told one is stupid and being stupid. I didn’t mean that it actually does make people stupid, more that it could affect one’s motivation to try hard and induce learned helplessness.
I did consider that as a possible reson to explain the results because I have seen it happen in individuals who are lacking that critical self-esteem and self-efficacy that goes with being intelligent in the way that western culture values. I’ve heard an old Aboriginal man with deep depression say his was a “rubbish culture'“ and it broke my heart.
It also seems to me that lots of Australian Indigenous people are ‘on the spectrum’. Does anyone think that the new knowledge about autism will have any effect on the direction of HBD research? Is anyone interested in comparing rates of autism genes in the various ‘races’. That would be interesting.
And where is all detail behind the division of humans into races. It doesn’t seem like groups deliberately isolated themselves and evolved culturally without any outsider input. The Australian Aborigines are the only group to have managed that it seems?
The cold weather hypothesis is really not very convincing. Humans are creative and spare time, such as hunter gatherers had in a warm and nurturing climate is a prefect environment for creative intelligence to grow and flourish a tes people tell stories about themselves and their relationship to the land, that inspire deep thinking rather than being miserable in a cold climate, having to work hard to survive.
And does anyone know how mixing of genes, between black and so called white (which are a mixture of many cultures anyway) happens. Does the intelligence gene come from the mother or the father? Is it dominant or recessive?
So in Australia, the half-castes as they were called once, now it’s ‘white Aborigines’ are said to be unfairly taking all the govt money for themselves because they are smart having white genes, and the full-bloods who don’t have any white genes are the ones who need the help.
Isn’t there a problem knowing how much white genetics blacks in the US have since there has been so much interbreeding? How do researchers determine who is black and who is not black enough to be a real black? Is there some sort of determination of how much admixture there is or just self-identification of ones race.
These HBD people really need to do some useful research instead of stuff like this if they want credibility.
“Rushton has supported his theory by documenting that the three races differ in brain size, intelligence, length of gestation, rate of maturation in infancy and childhood, and a number of other variables including penis length and diameter.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886912000852
Oh, you're from *Australia?* That's very interesting. You came across as being quite different; ACX is centered in the San Francisco Bay Area, and you actually sounded like a Blue Tribe activist!
Now I *have* at least been to Sydney, so I can say that Australia is a very different place. Most people in this thread are Americans quoting American research where African Americans are the most controversial minority. Even you quoted Rushton, but his "three races" are all old world African/Asian/Caucasian, and while Indigenous Australians are distantly related to Asians, they're really their own thing. While I'm actually learning about the cultures of Indigenous Australia right now (ironically because their antiquity suggests to me that they are most definitely not rubbish), the Aboriginal story differs markedly from that of African Americans and even Amerindians.
Being born and raised in a US context I'm on much firmer ground when talking about general findings regarding IQ: The heritable component is polygenic, just like height. This means that there are innumerable alleles which promote its development, and these come from mother and father in apparently equal measure. In contrast, the environmental component to IQ relates to education, nutrition, and test practice (you can literally practice yourself "smart," although the gains will really just be on your score, rather than your underlying ability). This kind of information can be found in places like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
I can also say with confidence that ancestry percentages are very easy to measure in Americans using commonly available options like 23&me; for example, here's a typical result for an African American: https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/African-American-Example1.jpg But you can see "Oceanian" is an undifferentiated yellow color - it's not well researched. If not enough people participate in the ancestry project, then it will be harder to accurately detect markers for Indigenous ancestry vs white Australian ancestry, and there may not be enough Australians involved. The general paucity of information regarding Indigenous Australians is pretty disappointing - you can see the IQ map Scott Alexander is discussing here just shows Australia as a whole, and the average IQ of Aboriginal Australians (and Torres Straight Islanders) isn't very well known.
TL;DR sorry I can't give you more information! In my defense, most Americans barely realize New Zealand or Tasmania exist https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/kids-turn-out-to-be-who-they-are
Yes Australian lol. There are not that many of us but we do get around. Who are these blue people you refer to. They sound interesting.
Thanks for replying. I can see you know a lot about the HBD stuff. I don't know much and I find it so interesting but don't like the racist applications.
In the 90s I did a few psych degrees at Aus Unis (which are well regarded or were, things may have changed) and the received wisdom then was that there was not enough evidence to show that IQ tests actually measured intelligence, and that black people were not less intelligent than whites.
So I wasn't citing Rushdon. Rushdon was one of the evil racists that we woke uni students castigated. The paper of his that I cited was a ridiculous one in which Rushdon decides that the middle size penis is the best. It was a big joke back in the day at my uni.
And basically HBD seems to be saying the same thing still with better research that definitely proves a difference but doesn't tell us anything useful about the state of things in the world.
And they the HBDers are still pretty much ignoring the story about why whites score lower on the tests than east Asians. Maybe its the Denisovan genes?
Sorry if I am inappropriate. No social skills, as well as being Australian. But you've been here to Australia? I've not been to the US but your politics is bigly in our lives here at this time.
Research into Aboriginal IQ is totally not done. The indigenous are too intelligent to give us whites any more weapons to use against them.
I think racist Australians take the US black vs white IQ data as evidence that our blacks are not as intelligent as we whites who settled their land and it seems obvious on the surface that the indigenous were stupid and lazy, since they didnt develop a recognisable civilization or much technology that was obviously intelligent but their social organisation gets more and more complex the more we listen to their memories about the long gone traditional life and how it worked.
The Australian Aborigines have Denisovan genes too it seems but not Neanderthal genes.
Whether IQ measures intelligence is really a philosophical question - you define what you think intelligence is, and IQ either matches your definition or not. It's all the same to me.
But HBDers are *definitely* interested in high Asian (and Ashkenazi Jewish) IQ. Just search it up; for example, here's Pumpkin Person: https://pumpkinperson.com/2024/10/21/cold-winters-farming-the-2-main-selection-pressures-for-iq/
Really thinking about it, while there is racism in HBD, it's more incidental than foundational, if that makes sense. Genuine American racists in my experience are less interested in IQ and much more interested in conservative ideology. In fact aren't they the same in Australia? Pauline Hanson doesn't strike me as very HBD, much more a garden variety racist.
And as for who the Blue Tribe are, well, here you go: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anything-Except-The-Outgroup
Lol So true..poor Pauline. I used to walk past her fish n chip shop back in the 70's, which she sold when she was elected, but guess what? It was bought by an Asian family which is quite funny to me anyway.
It was racism against Asians that got her a platform that of course our conservatives ( faux conservatives or neoconservatives) helped her spread. It reslly tapped into our fears about being 'swamped' and losing our culture.
The neoliberal conservatives though, they do like the Asian entrepreneurial spirit and their money, so this anti-Asian beat-up died down and the terrorist Muslims became her focus. The racist tropes about Aborigines that have existed since settlement/invasion, bubbled along nicely flaring up anytime a particular incident focused our attention on some example of ourtageously bad behaviour.
It's youth crime now and aboriginal kids are of course over represented in the numbers of young men who think masculine energy means they have to drive a very fast stolen car at incredible speeds through a city, film it and put it on social media.
My state, Queensland, is a long way from Tasmania, and we are the most conservative state in the country. Our new conservative state govt has enacted 'adult crime, adult time' laws to allow police to lock up these criminals and very young children, 10 years old, in overcrowded watchhouses with adult criminals and sentence them as adults.
The racism against first nations people (that's the correct or best word to use now so the sensitive kind don't feel slighted). It's not the best word imo because what they were was not nations, but I don't have a problem changing my language if it contributes to the conversation about how aborigines and settlers can work together and respect each other as equally valuable humans.
Pauline seems very much like my mother I think from what I read and I watch her face as she speaks. My mother thought she was positively NOT racist, she would carefully explain that she just didn't like them because they were dirty and didn't keep their yards tidy.
If it was pointed out to her that 'they' aren't all like that, she just denied that was of any importance or meant she was wrong. She would say, its commonsense, most of them are like that and most of us are better, so they are the ones who just need to stop being stupid and lazy and work hard like I did.
She wasn't a stupid woman but born in 1924, in rural Australia she only went to school until she was 10 and then had to work at home to keep the farm going. Also raised as a Jehovahs Witness so not much encouragement in her life to be able to question her beliefs and to understand logic.
Ok such a blabber mouth am I. I am retired have lots of time to do what I like and it's quite wonderful to find people like you to talk to, or at. I never really know which.
So well off topic I am now, on this thread. And I thank you for your link. Some really thought provoking insights there.
But, just in case you are interested in this other controversy that is happening here in Australia, I'll link this about the idea of white aborigines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eatock_v_Bolt#:~:text=Eatock%20alleged%20that%20the%20two,are%20available%20to%20Aboriginal%20people.
Using gunpowder to make guns was obviously a good idea, since no serious military today would be without guns. The fact that China didn’t adopt guns widely had more to do with 300 years Manchurian rule.
The Manchus, just like Mongols, derived their military advantage from cavalry archers, which allowed them to rule a population 100x their size. Muskets favor infantry over cavalry, and the Manchu elites knew that if muskets were widely adopted, their cavalry would not survive, and neither would their regime
Yes of course if you want to have wars and win them you need killing weapons'. And the Mongols must have had a very high IQ to understand this but no matter how hard I try I just can’t think that being more efficient at killing others is an intelligent decision and fireworks are a much better use of gunpowder. Killing versus beautiful.
I did enjoy this movie though in which fireworks are used in a very unusual way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Firecracker,_Green_Firecracker
I was wanting to know if there is there any speculation from HBDers that explains how a higher east Asian IQ didn’t result in the east Asians dominating the world with their culture, but the Caucasians with a lower IQ seem to have won or are the Chinese just biding their time to use their higher IQ to impose their culture on us?
Apparently though there are differences in IQ between conservatives and progressives. Definitely HBDers need to do more work on understanding this difference. Are HBDers conservative or progressives?
I like the lower rate of death from guns, that we have here in Australia where lol some Americans say we are socialists and have no freedom because of our universal free health care and the banning of guns.
We have the same divisions but not as deep or wide I think. We are lazier here. I was talking to the son of a friend who had come home after several years in the US and he very much noticed how we Australians are not as energetic in getting ahead as people are in the US where he said everyone has to hustle all the time. Is that what IQ does, impels people to hustle and climb the ladder to the stars or Mars.
In the case of South Africa, is it racist to suggest that if you (even for the good reason of ending apartheid) shift the leadership of a country from a group with an average IQ of 100 to one with an average IQ of 85 you might expect a degradation in your electrical, criminal justice and transportation systems leading inevitably to chaos? Just asking.
Intelligence shouldn't be equated with one distinctive cognitive style. Mind-blind "IQ" tests exclude any measure of the social cognition, perspective-taking prowess and co-operative problem-solving skills that helped drive human evolution. Instead, crudely, autistic "IQ" tests measure a Caucasian male Asperger's conception of intelligence. There are poorly understood tradeoffs. But unsurprisingly, populations with a high burden of Neanderthal "nerd" alleles score highly, whereas populations with a low prevalence of ASD tend to record lower "IQ" scores too. Sub-Saharan African "IQ" scores are further depressed by sub-optimal nutrition - and the role of bad diet in transgenerational epigenetic inheritance complicates the story further. Yet (IMO) general intelligence is a function of one's entire mind and the world-simulation it runs. We'd do well to develop richer measures of full-spectrum intelligence to replace simple minded notions of "IQ".
The whole point of a bell curve, or norm referenced test is to compare the test taker to a group of like people. Using a standard score on a group of people who aren't represented in the normed sample, of course you would see big differences. It's like the person who decided to test this theory forgot to research psychometrics.
The bi directional premise behind IQ <-> Development is a interesting hypothesis. But what is the take on brain development during human evolution as a result of eating meat ? I think the premise is actually compounding better nutrition -> better brain development-> better ideas for farming and nutritional supplements-> better brain development-> ect…
In my mind there are two important qualifications to whether these estimates are significant.
One is simply that people overestimate the importance of IQ, leading it to become a football in the culture wars. As an example of this, a story has recently been passed around the bloggers that someone estimated that Roman silver smelting put so much lead into the air that it reduced the average IQ of people in the Roman empire by 3 points. Whether or not this is true as a fact, I have no idea, but it's clear that it's not *significant* historically. Nonetheless, it really attracts eyeballs.
The other is that it's easy to assemble an argument that the observed national IQ differences are due to "environmental" factors. The biggest factor is the Flynn effect -- which is known to be real -- and amounts to a difference of some 30 points between modern people in advanced societies and people in the same societies maybe 150 years ago. A second factor is inbreeding. Cousin marriage is common in clannish agrarian societies, which includes most of the non-advanced peoples of today. I've seen estimates that the level of inbreeding in Pakistan reduces average IQ by 15 points or more. A third factor is malnutrition and persistent parasitic infection during childhood, both of which are notorious for stunting growth, which almost certainly includes brain development. So let me guess that can cost a population 15 points.
Adding these together, I get 60 points, a full 4 standard deviations. So we can explain away dramatic differences in population IQ averages by "environmental" factors which can likely be eliminated by development.
As a footnote, let me not that inbreeding is a peculiar factor, which is why I put "environmental" in quotes above. In regard to an *individual*, it is genetic -- how inbred you are is fixed when you were conceived. But in regard to *society*, it is cultural -- how inbred people are is determined by the cultural attitudes toward consanguineous marriage. And I will note that for some of the industrialized cultures, it is historically known when and why the culture turned from favoring cousin marriage to disfavoring it. In Western Europe, the western Christian church banned it in order to break up the competing power structures of clannish society. In Japan, there was an outright government propaganda campaign, IIRC in the early 1900s.