Ok then. So yeah I disagree with you. I don’t think there’s anything useful to take from IQ test data for populations, certainly not in terms of aptitude.
Youve implied you understand the Flynn effect, but then in discussing the reliability of IQ tests, it’s simply ignored again. But the fact that populations’ test scores are not static is a huge body blow to the idea that we can know a population’s inherent mental aptitude based on a test.
Now I know you’ve enumerated many non genetic factors that you think affect IQ scores. Good. But then why is the IQ scoring even important – why don’t we just consider the individual factors?
If we can look at individual reasons why India vs Bangladesh vs Pakistan produce different numbers of scientists and mathematicians per capita, what do we gain by abstracting away from those reasons and giving a single score?
I mean apart from giving fuel to the people who want to believe it’s lord of the rings and X people are elves and Y are orcs?
My, what a completely credible cite you have there…
no, the other one, what’s the opposite of credible? Oh, yeah, bullshit, that’s it. Something your own cite is well aware of:
These results are controversial and have caused much debate, they must be interpreted with extreme caution.
“Controversial” is an odd euphemism for “unscientific racebaiting twaddle”, but whatever floats your boat for cites, I guess.
There is an insistence it can’t have anything to do with group genetic differences. Which I view as simply a belief. Not necessarily wrong, but just a belief about something science hasn’t, and politically may not be able to, deliver a verdict on at least for now.
All that demonstrates is that there’s tremendous variation among individuals which no reasonable person disputes. The fact that billions of Asians aren’t geniuses does not in any way demonstrate that the very skewed representation by race/nationality among people successful in fields requiring extremely high intelligence has nothing to do with a different underlying distribution influenced by group genetics.
Similarly the other arguments you give tend to be obvious things which aren’t really relevant. ‘If one person is better motivated than another they’ll likely go farther’. Who disputes this? But it again does not mean that if you could derive tests (assuming existing tests don’t already do this, it’s questionable to claim they don’t, actually) which filter out the effect of education and ‘nurture’ generally, that distribution by genetic group would be exactly the same. That IMO is a fairly extreme hypothesis. Exactly the same distribution. So assuming that extreme claim isn’t made, how different are those actual distributions? I would say we just don’t know that, and there is in fact no good reason to based heavy handed public policies on a ‘null hypothesis’ that no effect of genetics must be the 100% answer.
But we clearly do do that in US society now, assume differences in representation in highly desirable fields requiring high intelligence are automatically a product of unfairness. To the extent some people on the ‘can’t be genetics, at all’ side here are saying we shouldn’t worry about differing group outcomes, that’s not the tenor on the public debate at all, as I hear it especially on one side (for example NY mayor’s move to make sure the ‘unfairness’ of too many Asian and not enough African American and Hispanic students qualifying for the city’s elite HS’s gets ‘fixed’ by changing the entrance requirements to even it out). I don’t believe I’m imagining a problem where a dogma of pretending we know why groups achieve differently leads to heavy handing policies trying to ‘fix’ things that might or might not be fixable.
If there was more reservation about jumping in and evening out outcomes it wouldn’t really be an issue, not AFAIC. Some people want to believe the cause of differing group outcomes much include must be X, others want to believe it can’t. I don’t know or really care as to the theoretical issue. What makes it an issue for me is the policy implication of belief-based assumption that group performance differences must not be from something that would be uncomfortable to accept.
For this particular question, I don’t know that that’s particularly relevant. What the specific genes (or variations of genes are) may be interesting, but all we care about is knowing that IQ does seem to be at least partially hereditary.
If we can establish that there’s no particular genetic difference between the Chinese and the Cambodians, and yet there’s a 20 point IQ difference, then that would indicate that simple genetics is not the crux of the issue.
By experience from other discussions, it is clear to me that the problem here is that you ignore that the studies of inheritance of intelligence do not come telling us that there is a difference between the races about inheritance genes, or a lack of specific genes regarding the mechanisms of inheritance among different “races”.
There can be some differences among populations, but populations are not races.
Your phrasing is strange. Can you restate this? I don’t follow.
And yes, I was part of some discussion of race and populations. I recognize that there is no such thing as the first and that the popular conception has no parallel in the latter. I don’t recall what I had said in the previous thread that lead to any confusion on that point (possibly I was wrong about something at the time). And I didn’t say anything about races nor populations here.
It is like what I told another poster: That we can find that there are genes involved in the inheritance of intelligence does not lead one to declare that those genes are not there in a different population.
What I have seen is that studies about the inheritance of intelligence do not dwell about the differences among “races” at all.
Just clarifying here, as it seems that others are seeing your contributions as if you are looking for a genetic difference among populations, so far genes are IMHO like the climate we all humans can get on average, but the IQ test results are like the weather we get in the end, affected by geographical and local environmental factors.
Okay? I didn’t say anything about that and I don’t see how anything which I did say is even tangentially related to that.
One thing that I have learned over the years is that no matter how carefully you make your point in a way completely immune to misunderstanding, someone will read it and come away with a bizarre reading that you are a fan of kicking puppies or whatever, if your view is even 1% different than theirs, despite being 99% in alignment.
FTR: I think I recall the race vs. populations discussion now. I think I was trying to define a mapping between the terms, so that one could use genetic data to counter racism. Everyone in the thread decided that I accepted the validity of race as a meaningful concept and rejected the basic idea of trying to create such a mapping, regardless of whether it is useful or not. I hold that it’s easier to discuss a subject in terms of what the listener understands (e.g. in the same way that it is better to use ebonics to teach someone is not able to speak in standard English), as a first step, so the mapping is useful as a way to discuss the realities of genetics (we’re all the same) with someone who believes in racial differences. I think the others were lost at anything beyond “populations are all there is and ever can be!” and decided that I was being racist or obstinately stupid because it’s verboten to talk about race as a real thing, let alone try to map it to anything scientific.
In that case I understand better where you’re coming from but I would consider it misguided.
You can’t be oblivious to the baggage behind the concept of “race”.
There are a huge number of people (usually those with little contact with minorities or even different nationalities), who still think of different races as essentially different sub species with wildly different characteristics. Counter-examples are handwaved as “outliers”.
And it’s very serious: white supremacy is in a stronger position than its been in generations, and US government policy is now partly pandering to that group.
The concept of race and IQ is almost always started within this framing. There are countless examples on the dope (even if this OP was earnestly asking the question)
Now, I think it’s fine to use concepts that have baggage, when they are useful concepts. You just have to be careful to address the elephant in the room.
But with race, I don’t see that it’s even a useful concept.
Let’s say with this conversation, the OP wants to know if “Asians” have superiors “IQs” to “Europeans”. We have two ways that we can answer:
There is no such thing as Asians! There’s Russians, Indians, Chinese, Indonesians, etc.! And even those have no actual reality because of populations and haplogroups, etc.!
No, they aren’t. The smart ones were able to get a job over here, that’s all.
The first tells the OP that you’re a babbling ivory towerist who seems to be using terminology to explain away any differences or to avoid broaching the subject. That’s probably not what you’re actually saying nor doing - you’re just trying to inform the reader of the technical way to ask the question and compare differences - but that’s not how they’re going to read it. They’ll get halfway through the first sentence and skip past. They’re not going to read it and come to some great realization that they’ve been living a life of ignorance and need to get better informed.
The latter answers the OP’s question. No. No, there’s no difference. Here’s why you might think that there is, even though there isn’t.
And if no one comes along and gives answer 2, then the OP is left believing that Asians are superior and the smarties are deluding themselves. He doesn’t leave thinking that Asians is a meaningless concept. It’s fine to add as an addendum some of the other stuff, if the OP seems to be ready to move on to that level. But you need to go to them, not expect them to come to you.
But answer 2 is what i, and others, have given in this thread. And answer 2 does not require starting from race realism or that IQ tests accurately measure intellectual potential across populations.
Why, after* centuries* of this shit, are we still the ones who have to do all the work? Why can’t we just acknowledge the truth (which is your point 1) and leave it at that, and all those people who *do *think point 1 is “ivory towerism”, rather than the true science of “biological race”, can get left behind in the dustbin of history, where they belong.
Huh? Debating a topic is very different from researching.
If someone is researching a topic to find scientific data, one generally avoids information from scientists whose work has been criticized for bias. The first line of the article in the link shows the information from those social scientists is strongly biased:
…
Biased evidence is unreliable, so its use here on the SDMB often gets called out.
The purpose of a thread in Great Debates is to discuss controversial issues and ideas, and many people who disagree with the OP join in. That’s why it’s called a debate.
I’d have thought the difference was blindingly obvious, but I guess not.