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I wrote a reply to this post

In defense of hereditarianism: a reply to Friedman

https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/in-defense-of-hereditarianism-a-reply

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May 26, 2023
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And Oliver D Smith, hiding under yet another 1000 pseudonym, is this guy:

https://archive.is/anRwH

https://archive.is/hUDQU

Forever internet stalker.

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Do you have any response to Mr. K's points, or are irrelevant attacks on his character all you have to offer?

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I'm not interested in the legal babble but the RationalWiki link seems to reliably document Emil Kirkegaard is a massive racist and self-described ethnonationalist. This discredits what ever he says about race and IQ. It would be like taking serious a creationist's viewpoint on biological evolution. Too much bias.

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It may seem so. On closer look this "RationalWiki" entry is just smear, mis-representing any statements of people disliked in the most negative manner imaginable. It's like calling Lomborg or Ridley books "climate denial". - EK likes "the bell-curve", true. Cope.

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Honestly as someone who really likes reading and learning about evolution, I'd feel crazy if I wasn't familiar with creationism and it's variants.

This is a good intellectual history survey of it for those curious.

https://www.amazon.com/Creationists-Scientific-Creationism-Intelligent-Expanded/dp/0674023390/ref=sr_1_14?crid=2EW9RJ5GKS361&keywords=creationism&qid=1685110194&sprefix=creationism%2Caps%2C105&sr=8-14

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It says he was prevented from speaking at ISIR 2022 after the keynote speaker Abdel Abdellaoui called him a "racist lunatic". Predictably, Emil played the 'woke card' and accused the keynote speaker of being woke, liberal etc. However, this does not appear to be the case. Abdellaoui has himself come under attack by leftists for his research on genetics and IQ.

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Subscribe to his substack

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May 26, 2023
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Eh? Do you have any arguments against these papers? You make it look like you don't, and this is not supporting your position (whatever it is, because we don't know, you haven't told us). Also, if you have a personal problem with this guy, do you think here is a reasonable place to raise it? Shouldn't we be politely exchanging arguments here?

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It's notable that in both the Holocaust and the Hutu/Tutsi conflict it was the group generally considered higher IQ that was subject to genocide. The argument being something along the lines of "group X is more successful, they must be using black magic/secretly conspiring against us, thus we must destroy them".

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Yes, the nazis rejected IQ testing precisely because it made Jews look smart.

Of course, the idea that any kind of racial theory *caused* the holocaust is absolutely absurd. Anything of the sort was a justification for something they wanted to do anyway out of resentment.

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The only participant in WWII that believed in total genetic equality of the races was Stalin. That didn't seem to stop the killing.

Churchill certainly didn't believe in genetic equality. Most of the leaders on the allied side were friendly with the idea of eugenics.

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"Responding to the argument that Africans who decide to migrate to the U.K. are a select group, much more intelligent than the African average, he offers statistics showing that many are poor, few have high status careers. He also writes, responding to one critic: I do not really know how it works in Jamaica, but I am quite confident that realizing that life is better in a very rich country than in your poor country is never exactly the most g-loaded epiphany among Africans."

I don't really find this persuasive. Most immigrants take lower-class jobs than they had at home - the laywer/doctor turned cab-driver is an accurate stereotype. (My parents were engineers-turned-factory line workers.) And on the latter point, it's not the realization that life is better in a rich country that is the filter; it's the process of immigration itself. For legal immigrants, the bureaucracy alone filters for intelligence and conscientiousness above the population average (true in most countries, probably), not to mention some level of risk-taking to leave an established place and network behind. I think refuting the idea that immigrants are filtered along the relevant axes (intelligence, conscientiousness, maybe language) requires a lot more rebuttal than is offered here.

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Well not all black Africans are from same genetic subgroup. Just like not all dark skinned people are blacks. And some of these races could be above,say, average bantu intelligence

P.s. the iq debate is kinda ironic in light of the fact that pretty soon all humans wont be able to measure up to AGI.

Homo sapiens chauvinists will debate with same fervor that iq tests are wrong and its all nurture?

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What's more plausible?

Different populations with different evolutionary histories all just happened to converge on exactly identical distributions of intelligence potential (despite being different in many other ways), or that a board game simply isn't that g-loaded?

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https://www.unz.com/akarlin/unscrabbled/ A response to the Scrabble argument. I wrote about the UK argument here: https://georgefrancis.substack.com/p/solving-the-gcse-mystery?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2 TLDR it is pretty much only the GCSEs that show small/no intelligence gaps. Nearly tests in the UK still find large racial differences

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Is it plausible that Africa has many ~isolated populations, only a couple/few of which produce its Scrabble & checkers stars?

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Possibly. But scrabble probably just isn't that g-loaded.

https://www.unz.com/akarlin/unscrabbled/

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It seems to me that a lot of Chisala’s arguments (as you summarize them) depend on the unspoken assumptions that (a) “general intelligence” exists as a real thing, and (b) IQ tests are a good measure of it.

We can develop an enormous number of questions and puzzles intended to measure “intelligence”, and they’ll probably show a strong covariance. (Among the puzzles might be a game of Scrabble or checkers, for example.) A factor analysis looking for a single cluster will find it, with the remaining variance classified as “noise”. But a factor analysis looking for two clusters will find them too, with somewhat less “noise” left over; a factor analysis looking for three clusters will find them, with even less noise; and so on. It’s hard to make a statistical case that there really is one intelligence, or two, or three, or any particular number, because the more clusters you look for, the better you can fit the data.

Furthermore, the single factor we find by analyzing responses to the intelligence questions I write will differ somewhat from what we would find based on the questions you write, and differ _considerably_ from what we would find based on questions written by somebody from a completely different culture.

So if “IQ” is defined as “the ability to get high scores on IQ tests,” sure, you can analyze how heritable it is and how much of the heritability is genetic vs. environmental, but who cares? The ability to get high scores on IQ tests is not itself a particularly interesting or important property of people. And any argument that equates it with “intelligence” strikes me as dubious.

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Ability to get high scores on IQ tests IS interesting because it predicts outcomes in most areas of life very well, certainly better than any other single measure.

And is schooling performance related ro intelligence? Reading comprehension? How well you do at work? Performance on any task requiring cognition? IQ correlates with virtually anything that we might say requires intelligence, so it's useful to treat IQ as a measure of intelligence. If you say none of those things are indicative of intelligence, then you simply must have a conception of intelligence that is useful from any kind of practical perspective.

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>Ability to get high scores on IQ tests IS interesting because it predicts outcomes in most areas of life very well, certainly better than any other single measure.

There’s a chicken/egg conundrum there isn’t there?

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IQ is a very good measure of mental ability. You really can't argue with that. But it is designed for and validated against average people, not for extremes. We must be careful when relying on it at the tails, at under 80 and over 120. I haven't seen much research validating for those. African populations seem to score low, but I wonder how much we can push on *how* low.

Similarly, on the upper tail, it might be there are many many African geniuses, but we have to lean on the normal-distribution assumption very heavily to deduce that the average is therefore 100.

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“IQ is a very good measure of mental ability. You really can't argue with that.”

No, I can’t, because I don’t know what you mean by “mental ability”. Do you have a reliable way to measure it, other than IQ tests? Do you have evidence that it’s a real property of individuals, rather than a statistical artifact? If it’s real, do you have evidence that it’s _one_ property, as opposed to a combination of two or more somewhat-independent properties?

I’ve just invented a test that rates people by the number of dollars in their bank accounts plus their height in millimeters. It turns out to be a good predictor of lifespan, marriage, educational attainment, winning political office, and lots of other measures of societal success. It’s highly heritable, both genetically and environmentally. And both Africans and African-Americans, on average, score lower than white Americans on this measure. Does that mean it’s real and useful, and tells us something interesting about race?

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Income, and probably height, are indeed g-loaded and would predict performance. They just aren't as good. Education is better than either. Hardly anybody objects to using education for predicting job performance.

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You could equally well say that performance on IQ tests, and education, and performance on certain kinds of jobs, are all b-loaded, where “b” is my dollars-plus-millimeters measure (the “b” stands for “bogus”). That still doesn’t mean “b” measures anything real or interesting.

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Factor analysis doesn't look for clusters. It looks for factors. The second factor (the first one being g) when doing principal-component analysis on intelligence tends to be what is called "verbal–spatial contrast", which I don't think any reasonable person would refer to as a type of intelligence.

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Mostly retired high-level Scrabble player here. I'd say that while spatial strategy and skill with probability are important parts of the game, the most crucial skill at high levels is indeed efficient memorization and fast, reliable recall. Of course, this isn't "vocabulary" in the linguistic sense. But it's essential for a high-level scrabble player to have deeply automatized knowing essentially all of the words (including common sets of tiles that would plausibly seem to have a valid word in them but don't).

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If one accepts Chisala's other claims, then regarding the specific question of why afro-Americans might have lower IQ than native Africans: perhaps a plausible cause is artificial selection during the era of slavery.

As a thought experiment: it's easy to imagine that slaveholders might have punished their more intelligent slaves (perhaps they were more likely to stoke dissent, or less willing to be docile?) while rewarding those that were more compliant physical laborers. Over a few generations, perhaps this could create enough selection pressure such that less intelligent slaves procreated significantly more often. If you were an evil dictator trying to build an effective system of human slavery, this might be a strategy you'd consider explicitly: think of the caste system in A Brave New World, in which the lower working classes were subjected to calibrated amounts of alcohol in utero to ensure they'd turn into compliant workers.

In an uneasy way, this narrative throws a bone to both sides of the socio-political debate: hereditarianism and IQ are substantially correct, but (in the US at least) the relative racial gaps for blacks are primarily the fault of the legacy of slavery.

It might be possible to find circumstantial evidence for this thesis, if an enterprising scholar were to look quantitatively at records kept by slaveholders and determine that on average, indeed, they seemed to treat their slaves in a way that would have likely made the less intelligent more reproductively successful.

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Bah! This issue can never be settled to anyone's satisfaction. How about if we stop obsessing about race, let the most qualified people advance in every profession regardless of race (or gender), and let the chips fall where they may?

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[Replying to Jason Maguire]

Yes, performance on IQ tests is a good predictor of performance in many kinds of school courses, particularly those whose assessments resemble IQ tests. Such courses are typically taught and designed by people (like me) who did well in their own school courses, whose assessments also resembled IQ tests. Which tells us that different IQ tests designed by the same people correlate well with one another, but not that they measure something that actually exists and is inherently important.

Performance in math classes is highly correlated with performance in other math classes, less correlated with performance in literature, history, music, or theatre classes, and even less correlated with performance in shop, hairdressing, or gym classes. Any one of those might be a better predictor than the others of "how well I do at work", depending on what kind of work I do. If I happen to live in a culture in which the most prestigious or high-paid forms of work resemble a particular kind of IQ test, then performance on that kind of IQ test predicts my success in that culture -- but not in a culture that values different kinds of work.

This doesn't mean there's no genetic heritability: we have abundant observational evidence that there _is_. Both of my biological parents did well on IQ tests and school courses, as did their biological parents. But for reasons of both nature and nurture, we all probably would have done less well on IQ tests developed by preliterate craftsmen and farmers or by !Kung bushmen.

People whose ancestry and upbringing are in a particular culture will generally do better on IQ tests designed by members of that same culture, and worse on IQ tests designed by members of other cultures. If I then define "general intelligence" as "doing well on IQ tests written by people from my culture", then it follows that people from my culture and racial background are (on average) inherently better, "more intelligent", than people from any other culture or racial background -- a comforting conclusion that I can claim to have reached through objective science. But if I had started from a different culture, writing IQ tests that measure what _that_ culture values, I would reach the same conclusion: that people from that culture were inherently more intelligent than those from other cultures.

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Excellent post. See my chicken/ egg proposition earlier.

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On intelligence as a justification for genocide, what about the eugenics movement in the early 20th-century US, which involuntarily sterilized women on grounds that they were genetically inferior? I don’t think it explicitly targeted particular racial groups, but in practice was applied disproportionately to blacks.

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Racial differences are obvious - nobody needed IQ tests to know that black Americans weren't as smart as white people. The intelligence differences, whatever their cause, are manifest. Not to mention other undesirable behaviours and social pathologies.

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How are they manifest? How do you know, without actually seriously looking at evidence, that the differences you see (in outcomes for instance) aren’t due to environmental factors?

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There's also the eternal question of whether various methods of testing "IQ" actually measure G (general intelligence) very well across different populations. Murray and Herrnstein argued that they do in The Bell Curve, but one of their more risible arguments was, in a nutshell, that since poor black test results in South Africa (which was still a segregated apartheid state) matched black test results in poor inner city American neighborhoods, the testing was obviously just fine across cultures and race was the explanation.

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Africa is pretty much exactly how you would expect it to be given the measured IQ of the people living there. African IQ measures are not radically underpredicting African performance on other things we could infer intelligence from (no, scrabble doesn't count: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/unscrabbled/)

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genocide, ethnic cleansing, or slavery where either the main reason or the main justification offered was scientific or pseudo-scientific evidence that the victims were, on average, less intelligent than the perpetrators

How about sterilizing low Iq people?

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That's not genocide or ethnic cleansing.

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