Race and IQ

[Oil exporting People]

Well known, and utterly unsupported by evidence.

Which is an odd claim to make as a supposed Mathematician, given what the American Mathematical Society say on the matter:

Counting, rhythm, scales, intervals, patterns, symbols, harmonies, time signatures, overtones, tone, pitch. The notations of composers and sounds made by musicians are connected to mathematics. The next time you hear or play classical, rock, folk, religious, ceremonial, jazz, opera, pop, or contemporary types of music, think of what mathematics and music have in common and how mathematics is used to create the music you enjoy.

Actually, you can, though mostly in childhood and adolescence.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/gu ... potential/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2948283/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40064008
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1417644

And here's an interesting paper discussing the large effect of SES on IQ in children. Also take a look at this review of the black-white IQ gap, which, while assuming that races do exist in the first place and describing that a gap in average IQ scores does exist between various "races," does note that the heritability of IQ in Africa is quite low due to the impoverished conditions many families live in there.

You misunderstand, as SES takes you to your maximum potential but cannot change the base level; this was my point.

[Salandriagado]

Well known, and utterly unsupported by evidence.

Which is an odd claim to make as a supposed Mathematician, given what the American Mathematical Society say on the matter:

Counting, rhythm, scales, intervals, patterns, symbols, harmonies, time signatures, overtones, tone, pitch. The notations of composers and sounds made by musicians are connected to mathematics. The next time you hear or play classical, rock, folk, religious, ceremonial, jazz, opera, pop, or contemporary types of music, think of what mathematics and music have in common and how mathematics is used to create the music you enjoy.

The AMS, along with every other mathematical organisation in the world, has a strong tendency to wax lyrical about how maths is fundamental to everything, because they like getting research funding. You can tell me that maths and music are similar when musicians start publishing proofs.

Actually, you can, though mostly in childhood and adolescence.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/gu ... potential/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2948283/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40064008
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1417644

And here's an interesting paper discussing the large effect of SES on IQ in children. Also take a look at this review of the black-white IQ gap, which, while assuming that races do exist in the first place and describing that a gap in average IQ scores does exist between various "races," does note that the heritability of IQ in Africa is quite low due to the impoverished conditions many families live in there.

You misunderstand, as SES takes you to your maximum potential but cannot change the base level; this was my point.

This is meaningless, because this "base level" is not what IQ tests can ever actually test.

[Oil exporting People]

The AMS, along with every other mathematical organisation in the world, has a strong tendency to wax lyrical about how maths is fundamental to everything, because they like getting research funding. You can tell me that maths and music are similar when musicians start publishing proofs.

You're basically proclaiming personal incredulity as the basis of your argument and attempting to shift the burden of proof; the onerous for this is on you.

This is meaningless, because this "base level" is not what IQ tests can ever actually test.

Indeed IQ tests don't measure that, but that's not what I was trying to say. The previously cited article from Live Science states it rather well:

Jack Naglieri, research professor at University of Virginia:

The answer to this question, like many others, depends on a number of factors. If you look at the research where they've made people smarter (i.e. improved their IQs), what they're really doing is to make people function better.

I've been able to teach children to be better in mathematics without teaching them mathematics. You can teach a child to better utilize their ability to plan, and that improves their academic performance not only in math, but in reading comprehension. So, what I would say, is we didn't make the children smarter, but we taught them how to use what they have more efficiently, and better.

Understanding changes in IQ also requires carefully considering how intelligence is being measured. People confuse ability with knowledge. We all can study and improve our vocabulary. But I would argue that doesn't make us any smarter.

The best way to measure intelligence is to measure those abilities that underlie the acquisition of knowledge, separately from the knowledge we have.

[Salandriagado]

The AMS, along with every other mathematical organisation in the world, has a strong tendency to wax lyrical about how maths is fundamental to everything, because they like getting research funding. You can tell me that maths and music are similar when musicians start publishing proofs.

You're basically proclaiming personal incredulity as the basis of your argument and attempting to shift the burden of proof; the onerous for this is on you.

No, I've given the defining feature of what mathematics is, and noted that music lacks it.

[Oil exporting People]

No, I've given the defining feature of what mathematics is, and noted that music lacks it.

You gave a personal opinion that asserted it was a desire for funding which explains why the American Mathematical Society disagrees with your assessment; this is the definition of anecdotal evidence and verges on the point of logical fallacy by its use of personal incredulity.

[Salandriagado]

No, I've given the defining feature of what mathematics is, and noted that music lacks it.

You gave a personal opinion that asserted it was a desire for funding which explains why the American Mathematical Society disagrees with your assessment; this is the definition of anecdotal evidence and verges on the point of logical fallacy by its use of personal incredulity.

They don't disagree with my assessment. That's generic marketing bumpf.

[Oil exporting People]

They don't disagree with my assessment. That's generic marketing bumpf.

You're claiming this while continuously offering no proof to that effect. At this point, either post it or concede.

[Salandriagado]

They don't disagree with my assessment. That's generic marketing bumpf.

You're claiming this while continuously offering no proof to that effect. At this point, either post it or concede.

That's transparently generic marketing bumpf with no other features. This is blatantly obvious to anybody reading with even the faintest shred of intellectual honesty.

[HMS Barham]

Yes maybe, so buy access and take a look at the numbers and see if it is all wrong. It really just isn't a "gotcha", it's a minor inconsistency.

That's not how burden of proof works. You posted the graph. You're responsible for it.

Except it very much is. If I write a paper, I do not have to include every paper I cite as an appendix. In fact, it would illegal for me to post their proprietary data on this public forum for you to read for free.

Your objection was first that there were no numbers of a y axis that was clearly in fact labelled (essentially, "US population units"), which I guess you realised was pretty meaningless so you dropped it.

I did not drop it. When you ignored my comments on it, I assumed you had no reply. Remember when you said that the areas on the graph corresponded to the [sic] "total population" of the US? Then I asked how you knew that and you conveniently ignored me?

The question doesn't make any sense. That is what is written on the graph. You complained that the axis wasn't labelled but it was. I knew by reading the graph.

Then your next killer argument was that 1980-1990 data had apparently been taken from a 1979-1992 survey which cannot possibly be anything but massive data mining. I accept this is not totally impossible but it's hardly a strong case and pretty obviously falls apart in the face of many other sources for the IQ gap that can easily be found on e.g. wikipedia. Now I have invited you to extend the discussion to include the many much more powerful arguments you must surely have and what I see is the rough equivalent of "no u".

You still don't understand what scope is. I only responded to the graph.

Initially, you responded to the graph. Then, in a later post, you made a general argument against scientific racism, to which I responded.

I have no interest in the IQ gap because IQ is not a measure of intelligence.

OK, now you are back in the land of the claims that, although still wrong, aren't flatly contradicted by wikipedia articles. Totally new argument from you, though.

At best it can somewhat measure education with a heavy focus on math. I still don't understand why you're so enamored with IQ.

IQ tests do not measure education levels.

[HMS Barham]

The AMS, along with every other mathematical organisation in the world, has a strong tendency to wax lyrical about how maths is fundamental to everything, because they like getting research funding. You can tell me that maths and music are similar when musicians start publishing proofs.

How many proofs do engineers publish?

[The Widening Gyre]

Rubbish. Intelligence is the ability to manipulate the physical world to our advantage. When we say that Einstein is more intelligent than a street sweeper we are not making a mystical unprovable statement but a statement about their ability to perform physical tasks.

Well see there's the rub in itself - there are many different definitions of intelligence. Binet, the inventor of intelligence testing, defined it as being more along the lines of 'common sense' - the ability to take into account external stimuli and modify one's own cognitive processes and adapt to them. Others have different formal definitions. This all evolved because or assessment of 'intelligence' came before any formal definitions, and before we really understood the brain or genetics at all.

To not be one contiguous population there would have to be separate branches that never shared a common ancestor, which isn't true as far as we know. Seemingly you are saying that there is some time gap at which two family streams become "as good as" separate. OK. Someone else can think that that age is 1,000 years.

Genetic contiguity refers to populations that have reproductively-driven gene flow between them.

Again, you are just wrong on this point. There is a clear and obvious geographical barrier between the negroids of Sub-Sahara and the europids to its north. Yes, it's not impregnable. That doesn't mean it has had no effect on evolution to its north and south. You are trying to impose absolutes on processes that are inherently fuzzy.

There isn't an appreciable, though. Large-scale population flow and trade along the Nile valley and the coast of Africa has been happening since time immemorial.

The opposite: I can easily tell you are saying nothing. The purpose of using long words is to hope that I don't understand, ad assume what you are saying must be meaningful because it is spoken in academic dialect.

All I'm doing is laying out the framework of my argument - all human biology is the result of evolutionary processes, and if races reflect real differences in biology then we would necessarily expect those differences to have roots in evolutionary processes and be visible in the population genetics of humanity. Neither of those two cases are true.

By the same token my house is not 100% watertight but that does not mean that it does not provide any barrier against water and to consider water in and outside the house as meaningfully separated is wrong.

We're not even talking about a meaningful barrier, though. As I noted above contact and movement along the Red Sea and Nile have been going on for thousands of years.

Maybe we shouldn't. But at this point race is primarily being invoked by anti-racists. Why? Because a race-blind system results in Indo-Europeans, Jews and Asians dominating everything, blacks as a coolie race, and aborigines starving to death in the street, because of their trait differences.

We in the West have never had a race-blind social organization so this is entirely hypothetical.

Sure, not every individual, but visibly on average. If you are willing to say "this is an acceptable outcome because, although it correlates with race, it's actually down to traits that aren't necessarily connected with any particular race" then fine. That is more or less my position. But you will quickly find yourself on the unacceptable far right with me if you do that. Real life anti-racists are not making the argument that races are invalid categories but that they are valid categories and all of them are equally capable at birth. It's a dishonest ploy that they only wheel out when someone challenges the data on the claim that all these groups are originally equally capable, which is very rare anyway since it's very dangerous to do that.

The perception among 'anti-racists' is that races are existing social categories, inasmuch that people believe they exist, have certain qualities and act upon that belief. Since those races don't have a biological reality, then arguing that the social categorization is invalid is a reasonable position to take.

Now what happens if we go even further than dumping race (and, hence, anti-racism - affirmative action, hate speech laws, the whole lot) and "try and find the real patterns present in human populations"? We find that class is biological and, although unevenly distributed between the races, upper and lower class people of all races have more in common with their fellows than with people of the same race and different class. We find that the problems of the poor, broadly defined, are unfixable, and that social programmes designed to fix them should not be expected to work (as they do not). We find that the most beneficial social intervention, and indeed the prerequisite of long term civilisation survival, is to boost the birth rate of the higher class people while letting the lower class people slowly die out. In other words, we most totally repudiate socialism (and what Americans call "liberalism"). I.e. we move even further right even within the unacceptable right.

From what I've read about the heritable effects of class, it's that the effects of environmental conditions like class are not generally strongly inherited. The example I can think of is the Dutch famine study, which looked at a cohort of women who gave birth after going through the famine of 1944 - their childrens' birth weights were smaller, as would be expected, but when those kids came of age and had babies of their own there was no detectable difference in birth weight from the average. If you have data suggesting otherwise then I'd be interested in seeing it.

[Taihei Tengoku]

There was no large-scale contact and movement along the Red Sea and Nile because there was no large-scale population below the Sahara until the 20th century.

[Oil exporting People]

Well see there's the rub in itself - there are many different definitions of intelligence.

No there is most definitely not.

[Neanderthaland]

Well see there's the rub in itself - there are many different definitions of intelligence.

No there is most definitely not.

Really?

Because when I took my IQ test, the Psychiatrist administering it told me there were. Ah, but she was only an expert in the field, I'm sure you know better.

[Oil exporting People]

Because when I took my IQ test, the Psychiatrist administering it told me there were. Ah, but she was only an expert in the field, I'm sure you know better.

> Ancedotal evidence

As I pointed out earlier in the thread:

General intelligence, or "g", which is the dominant view among Psychologists. As Howard Gardner, the propagator of the multiple intelligences theorem admits:

“MI theory has few enthusiasts among psychometricians or others of a traditional psychological background” This, he further states, is because they require “psychometric or experimental evidence that allows one to prove the existence of the several intelligences.”

In effect, the entire basis of the claim has no evidence, according to it's own creator. Indeed, common sense would dictate this, as one can hardly have an aptitude for say Music without also having one for math.

[The Widening Gyre]

There was no large-scale contact and movement along the Red Sea and Nile because there was no large-scale population below the Sahara until the 20th century.

... yes there was? Estimates I've seen centre around a population around 100 million for the whole continent in 1650, most of which was south of the Sahara.

Well see there's the rub in itself - there are many different definitions of intelligence.

No there is most definitely not.

Yes there is. From the Wiki, a few formal definitions;

Alfred Binet - Judgment, otherwise called "good sense", "practical sense", "initiative", the faculty of adapting one's self to circumstances ... auto-critique.[10]
David Wechsler - The aggregate or global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment.[11]
Lloyd Humphreys - "...the resultant of the process of acquiring, storing in memory, retrieving, combining, comparing, and using in new contexts information and conceptual skills".[12]
Howard Gardner - To my mind, a human intellectual competence must entail a set of skills of problem solving — enabling the individual to resolve genuine problems or difficulties that he or she encounters and, when appropriate, to create an effective product — and must also entail the potential for finding or creating problems — and thereby laying the groundwork for the acquisition of new knowledge.[13]
Linda Gottfredson -The ability to deal with cognitive complexity.[14]
Sternberg & Salter - Goal-directed adaptive behavior.[15]
Reuven Feuerstein - The theory of Structural Cognitive Modifiability describes intelligence as "the unique propensity of human beings to change or modify the structure of their cognitive functioning to adapt to the changing demands of a life situation".[16]
Legg & Hutter - A synthesis of 70+ definitions from psychology, philosophy, and AI researchers: "Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments",[6] which has been mathematically formalized.[17]
Alexander Wissner-Gross - F = T ∇ S τ[18], "Intelligence is a force, F, that acts so as to maximize future freedom of action. It acts to maximize future freedom of action, or keep options open, with some strength T, with the diversity of possible accessible futures, S, up to some future time horizon, τ. In short, intelligence doesn't like to get trapped".

[Republic of Corey]

A: IQ tests are not particularly accurate.

So then they might understate the differences, right?

[Taihei Tengoku]

There was no large-scale contact and movement along the Red Sea and Nile because there was no large-scale population below the Sahara until the 20th century.

... yes there was? Estimates I've seen centre around a population around 100 million for the whole continent in 1650, most of which was south of the Sahara.

ergo a population density comparable to Siberia

[The Parkus Empire]

Our ability to manipulate matter has to do with the tools at hand and our aquintance with said tools.

[The Parkus Empire]

It also has nothing to do with intelligence. Intelligence is the capacity for abstract thought.

[Oil exporting People]

Yes there is. From the Wiki, a few formal definitions;

Alfred Binet - Judgment, otherwise called "good sense", "practical sense", "initiative", the faculty of adapting one's self to circumstances ... auto-critique.[10]
David Wechsler - The aggregate or global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment.[11]
Lloyd Humphreys - "...the resultant of the process of acquiring, storing in memory, retrieving, combining, comparing, and using in new contexts information and conceptual skills".[12]
Howard Gardner - To my mind, a human intellectual competence must entail a set of skills of problem solving — enabling the individual to resolve genuine problems or difficulties that he or she encounters and, when appropriate, to create an effective product — and must also entail the potential for finding or creating problems — and thereby laying the groundwork for the acquisition of new knowledge.[13]
Linda Gottfredson -The ability to deal with cognitive complexity.[14]
Sternberg & Salter - Goal-directed adaptive behavior.[15]
Reuven Feuerstein - The theory of Structural Cognitive Modifiability describes intelligence as "the unique propensity of human beings to change or modify the structure of their cognitive functioning to adapt to the changing demands of a life situation".[16]
Legg & Hutter - A synthesis of 70+ definitions from psychology, philosophy, and AI researchers: "Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments",[6] which has been mathematically formalized.[17]
Alexander Wissner-Gross - F = T ∇ S τ[18], "Intelligence is a force, F, that acts so as to maximize future freedom of action. It acts to maximize future freedom of action, or keep options open, with some strength T, with the diversity of possible accessible futures, S, up to some future time horizon, τ. In short, intelligence doesn't like to get trapped".

None of those quotes, sans Gardner's, say what you claim. Further, Gardner's entire MI thesis has no evidence to confirm it, by his own admission.

[The Widening Gyre]

... yes there was? Estimates I've seen centre around a population around 100 million for the whole continent in 1650, most of which was south of the Sahara.

ergo a population density comparable to Siberia

Which has no bearing on the fact that there were 100 million people. And that over the period of operation of the Arab slave trade, for example, at least 17 million people were taken out of sub-Saharan Africa and sent elsewhere in Africa or the Middle East. That is certainly an appreciable population and migratory pattern.

None of those quotes, sans Gardner's, say what you claim. Further, Gardner's entire MI thesis has no evidence to confirm it, by his own admission.

There are many different definitions of intelligence. I posted a few of them. Where's the problem exactly?

[Oil exporting People]

There are many different definitions of intelligence. I posted a few of them. Where's the problem exactly?

Because you're attempting to use different definitions of intelligence as a way of claiming different intelligences.

[Oil exporting People]

A: IQ tests are not particularly accurate.

With regards to what, exactly? It certainly is accurate for what we consider important:

- Hunter and Hunter (1984) and Huffcutt and Arthur (1994) both found that Ability Composite (IQ) was a greater predictor of job performance ratings than any other factor at 0.54 as opposed to education or experience among other things.

- Strenze (2006) reviewed longitudinal studies and found that IQ correlated with educational level, occupational level, and income level higher than any other factor.

- Roth and co (2015) found that school grades correlated with IQ at p = 0.54

So whether you think IQ is accurate or not is pretty irrelevant, because it does quite clearly measure what is most critical in life.

[The Widening Gyre]

There are many different definitions of intelligence. I posted a few of them. Where's the problem exactly?

Because you're attempting to use different definitions of intelligence as a way of claiming different intelligences.

I'm not claiming anything about whether or not more than one types of intelligence exist, I'm saying that there isn't even a concrete definition of what intelligence is in the first place.