People wandering from Africa , affecting IQ?

Great Debates
61

My cites were support for the statement that family income and parental education don’t account for SAT differences. They stand.

So…it would be a bitch, but in this case all you’ve done is parrot alternate explanations.
It’s unlikely the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education would suggest the difference is genetic, so they cast around for other explanations, not one of which has panned out any better than the original ideas that the problem is economic advantage or parental education advantage. (And note that folks like Zoe who haven’t actually bothered to look anything up still accept those standard two explanations: It’s education or it’s wealth. Can’t possibly be innate differences.)

Now you may find that it’s a satisfying explanation to suggest that edcuated black parents are unable to figure out that their children should take appropriate preparatory courses in high school. You might find it satisfying to suggest that wealthy black parents are sending their kids to some sort of crappy school where there’s no guidance for curricula. I’m underwhelmed with that explanation.

I suggest it’s the case that students from educated families, or families with better incomes (and therefore ones whose kids attend better schools) take courses they are able to pass–better students take better and more rigorous courses; crummier students take weaker and easier courses. This notion that there is some sort of educational conspiracy out there to steer bright black students toward shop and needlework while we secretly steer whites and asians toward calculus is…bullshit. And unsupported. I’m not aware of a cabal of educators hoping their black cohort craps out.

There are social causes, of course. When we first started improving opportunities for our black population, we did see an improvement in scores–roughly from the 60’s to the 80’s. And since then the gap has remained stubbornly persistent, on average, despite accounting for opportunity.

62

I doubt that there is any real physical difference in the brain at all between groups. What MAY exist is a cultural selection for a more aggressive creative thinker in cooler/ or more hostile climate populations. The result of that, along with the pressures placed upon pre industrial peoples by the climate have resulted in a baseline population more likely to innovate. In modern times this may reflect as scoring higher due to slightly improved logic or creative thinking skills.

63

Fortunately the scientific method need not take into account your feelings.

You have arbitrarily ruled out the obvious explanation in favour of your own ‘theory’.

You cannot jump from SATS differences unexplained by income to ‘Blacks are thicker than Mr Thickity Thick McThick of Thicksville’ without ruling out the social differences identified in your own underwhelming cite.

The Pit thread is indeed the only place to discuss this with you.

64

It is nonsense to suggest that measures of IQ were designed to predict future IQ scores. They were designed to measure general intelligence, or g.

Further, if they only predicted future IQ scores, they would predict nothing else, right? Yet they ae the best general predictor of job performance and job success, of academic performance, and are correlated with mental and behavioral disorders.

IQ is of course an imperfect measure of g, just as measures of anxiety and depression are imperfect measures of those phenomena. I don’t agree with the OP, but if you want to argue that there is no such thing as general intelligence, I’ll ask you what the word “smart” means, and whether you would prefer to be treated by a smart doctor or one who is not smart, or whether you would hire a smart architect to design your home or a not-smart one.

65

Well, you are right that the Pit is the only place where you can discuss what a racist I am, or any other slur…
It’s fine to post data here in GD, though.

Do you have any data supporting an example of black-white-asian groups performing on par with one another in quantitative sciences? Sports, maybe? (hi, you with the face! ) Whatcha got? I’ll be happy to review it.

Or is all you have vague and unsubstantiated criticism of the thousands of comparisons demonstrating they do not? The egalitarian world is holding its breath waiting for your cite. They’ve been limping along on name-calling and vague criticisms for years, and haven’t actually been able to produce much in the way of actually equalizing performance gaps.

Or you can just go to the pit, pretend I’m retarded, and call me names. That seems the easy way out.

66

“Book smart” or “street smart”? “Smart” by itself is as useless a concept as g, because it doesn’t really tell us anything about specific skills. I’d prefer to be treated by a doctor with medical training, preferably one who has some under-fire experience in his expertise area, and also preferably one with compassion and empathy. That’s why European trauma surgeons come to South African hospitals to be blooded - literally and figuratively. And I’d rather have gotten a heart transplant from uneducated Hamilton Naki than his world-lauded boss Dr Barnard, when all’s said and done.

And I’d prefer a *practical *architect, because while Falling Water may be pretty, I wouldn’t want to live there. FLW may have been intelligent, but it didn’t translate to liveable houses.

67

So, you’re saying that the term “smart” does not connote anything to you? I think you’re unusual in that regard, and certainly it’s quite simple to determine if there is any denotation of the word “smart” or whether it is regarded as a synonym of intelligent.

The rest of your post is simply evasive, unless you believe that all physicians or all architects are equally intelligent, or even that going through the exact same training and experience will result in all physicians being equally competent. Further, just because Frank Lloyd Wright designed funky houses doesn’t mean that I want to have to deal with any of these: Thirteen dumb mistakes in architectural design.

If you’re going to deny that there are individual differences in mental acuity, I’m going to suggest that you are simply being obtuse.

68

I’m saying it doesn’t denote any *one *thing. If you say “that guy is smart”, I have no context to tell if you mean educated, or intelligent, or even just socially cunning. Hell, just by itself, you might even mean he’s a snappy dresser, but let’s just stick with the mental stuff here.

…but as has been shown, just “intelligent” by itself isn’t very meaningful, either. So the two could be synonymous and it wouldn’t be as informative as other words like “logical”, “knowledgeable”, “innovative”, “creative”, words that tell us how a person is intelligent. And we wouldn’t be developing alternative measures of intelligence to capture those, like EQ, etc.

That’s not what I’m saying. What I am saying is that the link between the doctor’s measureable intelligence and his competence is, IMO, tenuous at best. The mere fact that someone successfully passed med school and residency and licencing already satisfies the intelligence requirement for me. I don’t need my doctor to be any more intelligent than that. I need her to be all the other things I listed. I mean it, I’ve changed GPs for one who, while not noticeably any more intelligent than my previous one, certainly is a better doctor.

Given. But you asked what I look for in an architect, and I answered. That’s not evasive. In fact, none of those mistakes look very practical at all, which was my criterion.

I’m not denying it. There’s the world of difference in both logical thought and knowledge base between, say, just me and my brothers. By the only common measure we’ve encountered thus far (WAIS-R), I test as much more intelligent than them, by at least one SD. But what I’m saying is that isn’t the be-all and end-all of intelligence. Or perhaps the word is “competence.” I’ll never be the carpenter my oldest brother is, nor be able to teach kids like another. And I’ve made dumb life decisions neither of them would have made.

69

Nor is anyone else saying that IQ is the be-all and end-all of intelligence. As I said, it is an imperfect measure of general intelligence, and if someone somewhere were arguing that a high IQ was a guarantee that someone would never make a mistake, you and I would be on the same side of the argument. Nobody here, unfortunately, is making such an argument.

However, even if you want to argue that “general intelligence” cannot be defined, that it is somehow too multifaceted or mercurial to even be described in conversation, our imperfect measure ends up looking even better. As an index of something so terribly resistant to consistent definition, IQ is very, very stable. And it does help to make meaningful, real-world predictions about people’s abilities and competences in how they perform their jobs. It is certainly not useful only in predicting itself.

70

I saw no claim that the word “smart” bore no connotation. I would say that the objection is to some artificial claim for g.

I know folks who can develop ingenious ways to make money in various markets or who can successfully steer a company through troubled financial situations who simply cannot get their heads around rather fundamental programming logic. I know people who appear to have an instinctive ability to diagnose a medical situation and to prescribe the right medicines and treatments who cannot figure out why a car will not start at the sound of a low battery. There are people who can keep a running total of their supermarket purchases in their head or a running total of an EBIT balance sheet projected on multiple slides on a screen who cannot compose a letter using basic grammar and syntax and people who can write extended philosophical treatises on law or other complex topics with clarity who cannot balance their checkbook.

Certainly, most people who get perceived as “smart” have a sufficient number of areas in which they demonstrate their intelligence, (and idiot savants are not part of this discussion), but even “smart” people often do well in some areas and poorly in others. The word “smart” seems to be a catchall for a good ability in one or more particular areas of intelligence that is used when one evaluates a person who is demonstrating intelligence in a particular area and then is extended to other areas about which the person may or may not demonstrate intelligence.

Look at the people who claimed that George W Bush was stupid because he stumbled over his words and made rash decisions. Yet, he was sufficiently smart to get through an Ivy League school with decent grades and was smart enough to find a way to get himself elected president. A mere assignment of his g, (whatever that would be), does not explain the fact that he demonstrated intelligence in some areas while failing to demonstrate intelligence in others. It indicates, to me, that even if we could find a rational definition of g, it would tell us next to nothing about any individual or group of individuals other than that he or they were able to complete whatever tests were used to determine g.

71

You know all these people? Or are you hypothesizing all of these people? Because I know people who can neither successfully steer a company through any type of financial times AND who also cannot get their heads around rather fundamental programming logic. I also know people who are programming wizards who cannot steer a company through troubled economic times. At least, I can comfortably hypothesize them.

Let’s set our real and/or hypothesized anecdotes aside for a moment. Imagine you have devised a reliable and valid measure of programming logic. Do you think that, on average, people with the capacity to successfully steer a company through troubled financial situations are going to score higher on your measure of programming logic than people who cannot, or than the average person?

This is why I bring up the connotation of smart. People do actually say, “He’s smart” or “He’s intelligent.” At least, they do when I’m around. I’m a Pittsburgh Pirates fan (perhaps arguably an indicator of the multifaceted nature of intelligence, you might snark). I’ve watched many games this year, and I have plenty of examples of stupid baseball plays. All other things being equal, I’d rather have smart ballplayers than dumb ones.

Because, perhaps, we conceive of this thing we call “intelligence,” we have done our best to measure it. Being intelligent, or having a high IQ, doesn’t mean that a person is a superman who can do all tasks with ease. It does mean, however, that you can have a better guess at who is going to perform relatively well on tasks that require mental acuity if you know that person’s IQ score. Of course, there are individual differences in other areas that moderate the relationship between IQ and specific task performance, including both experience/acquired knowledge as well as functional impairment, like ADHD.

My point is, however, that IQ does measure something by which we can make meaningful and reliable predictions.

72

This is exactly the point that Jared Diamond was making when he said that he thought that New Guineans were “smarter” than people from industrialized societies because they had the skills, knowledge, and senses that were attuned to surviving in a jungle – an environment in which a “smart” person from our point of view would find it difficult to survive for long. Oddly enough, Diamond’s point has been declaimed as “racism” on this very forum.

73

CP - Are intelligent blacks drawn to STEM, medicine and law in numbers comparable to other races? Because it seems likely that the paucity of black scholarship in these areas can come in large part from a lack of desire to pursue these fields. There seems to be a great amount of selection bias in your data.

Are intelligent blacks pushed by family, teachers, support systems, etc to pursue these subjects in the same way as whites/asians? If not, does your data really represent average ability?

Further, the tests themselves do not necessarily predict success. As an anecdote, in my graduating class, LSAT and GPA had a correlation of .21. National average is around .40.

Let’s see where the African nations stack up in FIFA rankings. What countries are represented in the Worlds’ Strongest Man competition? How about basketball? See if you find blacks anywhere in swimming. See any blacks in wrestling? How about tennis? Skiing? Hockey? Rugby?

Or by sports do you mean NBA basketball and sprinting, both of which you know nothing about?

74

I’d argue that those points bear more on the acquisition of knowledge rather than, necessarily, the ability to learn. To put it another way, can we imagine that there is something pertaining to mental acuity that distinguishes among New Guineans, even those who need to survive in the jungle, such that some are better at planning, observing and predicting, recognizing patterns, remembering and making mental representations that somehow help them to carry out the necessary jungle survival tasks better than other jungle-surviving New Guineans? I can certainly imagine individual variation in these abilities among such a population.

75

I have known them. As a programmer, trying to explain fairly simple things that we can do and cannot do with computers and, later, attempting to help some of these guys actually set up their own programs. As to people who can do neither, so what? Nothing that discusses intelligence insists that everyone is smart in something.

Based on my experience, it would be a crapshoot to predict who could do what. I have worked with comptrollers who I would hire in an instant, using them to replace much of the programming staff, while I have known a few who simply could never understand why some things were possible with computers and others not.

I certainly know people who are “smart” who display intelligence in a wide variety of situations and I would never claim otherwise. However, I have known enough “smart” people who were briiliant in some areas and totally clueless in other areas–even areas that they had studied–that I do not believe that we can ever discover the elusive g.

I think that with a certain amount of frequency, IQ will indicate individuals who fall into ranges of competency. I have seen no evidence that it will demonstrate anything more than a vague and unreliable hierarchy with too many exceptions to be useful.

I had a classmate with a 4.0 in high school, college, and grad school up to getting his doctorate who wound up as COO of an outfit with a $30 million/year revenue. His tested IQ was 113–above “average” but nothing special. I know lots of guys with IQs in the 120s or 130s who could not hope to compete with him. One more anecdote, but indicative of the issues I see with psychometrics.

76

Only it’s not, that’s the point. See e.g. the Ethiopian Jews in Israel study

I disagree. It can do a rough job at a very coarse level, but that’s as far as it goes.

True - it’s useful as a measure of how culture-adapted a person is, apparently.

77

Only it is. See nearly every study of repeated assessment of IQ or mental acuity on the same group of people, or every review or meta-analytical article on it. I did a lit search for Ethiopian Jews in Israel, and could not find the one you are suggesting contains a repeated assessment of intellectual functioning. Could you give me a cite for that?

Only if you disregard the science on the matter. But that’s of course your option.

If cultural adaptation were as strong a predictor of job performance and scholastic achievement, I might pay attention to this. Also, who knew there would be such dramatic individual differences in “cultural adaptation” within the same culture? Wow, how could we even have a concept of culture at all?

78

Wow. You might want to do even the most basic research on the SAT. Wikipedia is a good starting point.

79

Such as?

Tzuriel, D. & Kaufman, R. (1999).
Mediated learning and cognitive modifiability : Dynamic assessment of young Ethiopian immigrants in Israel.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Vol. 30, pp 359-380
Here’sthe abstract, if you like.

Looking to actual experimental researchers like Fagan and Holland rather than data massagers and biased tests is hardly “disregarding the science.”

If IQ is a measure of it, then you already are.

What, you think everyone has the same degree of adaption to culture?

I’m not denying that IQ tests are a measure of aspects of cognitive ability. I’m also not denying that specific tests are very good at assessing specific *elements *of intelligence, like block tests and the like. I’m saying they’re also overlain with all sorts of culture/knowledge baggage. And it’s often the more used and cited tests that have more of the baggage, rather than less. In that way, group (not individual) performance on such tests tells us more about how that group relates to the culture that devised the test than it does about that group’s cognitive abilities itself.

80

See this post, for a start. The literature on stability is large.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12104801&postcount=72

Where’s the change in IQ in that paper? There isn’t any reported.