In modern-day America, anyone arguing that the difference in average IQ between blacks and whites is part of the reason for the difference in average outcomes risks accusation of racism. Anyone arguing that the difference in the distribution of IQ between men and women is part of the reason that there are more men than women with elite positions in fields such as mathematics risks being accused of sexism. Examples of the risk of publicly offering such ideas are provided by the cases of James Watson and Lawrence Summers. Watson, who received a Nobel prize for his role in the discovery of the nature of DNA, arguably the most important biological breakthrough of the century, was so careless as to tell the
This study found that countries in Sub-Saharan Africa perform about as well on esports and traditional mental sports as you'd expect based on their average IQ:
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".
"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.
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?
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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
This study found that countries in Sub-Saharan Africa perform about as well on esports and traditional mental sports as you'd expect based on their average IQ:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331859319_Is_National_Mental_Sport_Ability_a_Sign_of_Intelligence_An_Analysis_of_the_Top_Players_of_12_Mental_Sports
These two studies found sizeable race differences in average IQ in the UK:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341433335_Measured_Cognitive_Differences_among_UK_adults_of_Different_Ethnic_Backgrounds_Results_from_National_Samples
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351935350_Recent_Studies_of_Ethnic_Differences_in_the_Cognitive_Ability_of_Adolescents_in_the_United_Kingdom
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".
"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.
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?
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?
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
Is it plausible that Africa has many ~isolated populations, only a couple/few of which produce its Scrabble & checkers stars?
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.
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?
[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.
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.
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.
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?
https://www.mattball.org/2018/05/our-capacity-for-self-delusion.html
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).