If you think another poster is trollijng or acting as a sock puppet, the appropriate response is to notify the staff, (preferably with citations to evidence).
It is very much frowned upon to post a “question” suggesting that another poster might be in violation of the rules.
[ /Moderating ]
My apologies TD will contact you soonish when I sus out the reporting system.
I think I’ve now sent you a private message T.D. but not sure.
In that case, your opinion is not too far from mine.
As I said before, it doesn’t follow from your premises that Lynn’s numbers have to be false. And even if his numbers are off, you agree with the basic point that low IQ = low GDP.
It would seem to me that if you average IQ scores over many many people, it would be easier not harder to read something into the total. For example, let’s suppose that the average IQ in the United States is 99. What do you think would happen to the average IQ if all of a sudden, the U.S had worse education; worse nutrition; etc.? I think the average IQ would drop by at least a few points. And the difference would mean something.
Ok, so let’s keep things simple by limiting the discussion to rural areas, which is apparently where most Nigerians live anyway.
That would be very interesting if Rushton has stated or implied that white people are superior to blacks and Asians.
Do you have a cite?
It is not supposed to follow from my premise. It is an observation of reality. Lynn’s numbers are irretrievably wrong. He claims IQs for entire populations that are in direct conflict with the possibility of those societies surviving for months, much less years.
My premise is that IQ can only be measured on a gross scale.
My observation is that people who test at a level of 70 or below cannot survive if they do not receive substantial support from society–support that would not be available in a society in which fully half the people are at or below that level of intelligence.
Low IQ = low GDP is not a “basic point” so much as a tautology. It is certainly not a “basic point” for Lynn and Vanhanen, who make the more precise claim that there is a direct correlation between IQ and GDP at all levels. They do not say that if we found a society full of low intelligence people, then that society would struggle to survive. They actually claim that they can plot either the intelligence or the GDP of a society simply by knowing the other number and assuming a direct correlation. My attacks on their work are based on the clear problem that they have made a claim that there are multiple societies in the world in which more than half of the population is not capable of surviving, based on an acceptance of their numbers.
I have challenged that point because it is so clearly false, but their thesis is also subect to objection at the other end where they carefully lay out IQs (derived, as noted earlier, from the fudging and invention of many disparate numbers) alongside national GDPs to claim a direct correspondence when they are working on a range of IQ that is statistically insignificant.
[ nitpick ] It is the contention of proponents of IQ tests that their culturally neutral efforts will not be affected by education. This whole farrago of psychometrics is based on their belief that intelligence is innate and that they are measuring something separate from education. [ /nitpick]
As to the broader question, I have seen no evidence that IQ can be tested with consistent accuracy to within a couple of points. So even if you are extending your population sample to 300,000,000, you are still left with a question of analysis. In order to draw meaning, you’d have to examine where the numbers originated. Did the numbers drop because everyone with an IQ of 130 and above “lost” some portion of their intelligence? Did the numbers drop because there was an influx of much lower IQ people? Did the numbers drop for every human in the nation? If it is one of the first two scenarios, the bulk of the population is not affected, so the numbers really do not have meaning for day-to-day existence. (For the second scenario, it might mean that the country has to address a social problem with an influx of new people.) If it is the third scenario, then a drop of one or two points is well within the range to lack meaning.
Why? I have already shown, (although not to your satisfaction) that agriculture cannot be carried out by large numbers of independent but mentally retarded individuals. If we say that the ones with lower intelligence moved to the cities, you have to explain how they are surviving in a monetary environment and if the ones with lower intelligence have stayed in the country, you have to explain how they can plant, cultivate, harvest, process, and store their food on an annual cycle.
He is pretty careful to avoid saying that, explicitly, even denying that assertion, if rather ineffectively, although that is a fair conclusion (drawn by numerous reviewers) regarding the thesis of his book Race, Evolution and Behavior.
= = =
I get the impression that we might be talking at cross purposes, here.
You seem to be saying that Lynn and Vanhanen are only discussing the possibility that average national intelligence if low enough or high enough could have a bearing on GDP and that that is a valid premise to explore. I suppose that there might be some truth in that–if there was actually a considerable difference in intelligence among humans unaffected by all the various factors of ecology, natural resources, political strife, and luck. However, I doubt that you could actually find a real case to demonstrate that contention.
I am saying that Lynn and Vanhanen have made a much more explicit claim: that intelligence dictates a direct correlation to GDP (even in the upper registers where the numbers are not significant) and that they claim that intelligence actually dictates the success of a nation. They then go on to support their belief by using unreal statistics (unrealistically low at one end and unrealistically fine at the other end) to manufacture support for their work. Given the other issues facing the world, I contend that they have failed to make their case and that we have no reason to look to their work when attempting to solve any issues among or within nations.
But it is an observation based on an assumption about IQ – that it has meaning outside of North America.
I don’t understand. Are you saying that Lynn is claiming that if you limit the study to nations with an average IQ between 100 and 105, there is still a strong correllation between IQ and GDP?
Can you give me a cite for that? I would think that most psychometric types would agree that if a child spends his or her early years in a more mentally stimulating environment, the child is likely to end up with a higher IQ.
Let me give you an analogy:
Suppose that height could be measured, but only grossly. So if Harry is measured at 5’5" and Larry is measured at 5’8", you still couldn’t be confident that Larry is taller.
On the other hand, if Harry is measured at 5’0" and Larry is measured at 6’0", you can be pretty confident that Larry is taller.
Now suppose a study is done that claims the average height is 5’8" in the USA and 5’5" in Canada. By virtue of the large populations being compared, the difference is far more likely to be significant than if you were measuring just 2 invididuals.
Granted, by those numbers alone you couldn’t tell whether Canadians are all shorter or whether Canada happens to have a large population of dwarves. But that’s a different objection.
To make the discussion simpler. Most Nigerians live in rural areas. Discussing the cities requires one to argue over what sort of bias there is in terms of who moves to the cities.
I’m skeptical. It doesn’t make sense that a white supremacist would trumpet the fact that Asians have higher average IQ’s than whites.
Which is merely a way of giving the Lynn and Vanhanen argument the benefit of the doubt long enough to show that it fails on its own silliness.
It is true that I do not believe that their silly scores have meaning, but for the sake of argument I accept their claim that they have discovered these sub-70 IQ nations around the world. Based on their claim for the accuracy of their numbers compared to the reality of people who actually test to those numbers in the U.S., I conclude that their numbers are silly. In other words, I demonstrate that their thesis fails on its own supposition. Having done that, I can go back to my own thesis that the attempts to gather such measurements are futile.
If an IQ of 70 does mean the same thing in the U.S. as in Nigeria, then their 70 is clearly the result of bad testing, because no nation could survive with half its population operating below the levbel of mental retardation.
If an IQ of 70 does not mean the same thing in the U.S. as in Nigeria, then it cannot be used, at all, and their thesis fails on the apples and oranges test.
I don’t think we’re getting anywhere. If you really think that we can measure IQ effectively (when the numbers that are used are so improbable and the methods used to collect them are demonstrably bogus) and that there is some sort of real world value to trying to take those measurements, then I guess that is your view. I cannot reconcile that view with the world as I see it and I am not going to keep trying to persuade you when you seem eager to accept Lynn’s and Vanhanen’s conclusions.
Would a reasonable way to get a a population intelligence be to take scores and/or performance measures of the children of emigrants of that population against another population’s emigrant’s children, both sets of which find themselves in a similar environment? A number of variables could be removed in this way.
For instance, would your expectation be that first-generation Nigerian kids (or whatever population you want to define) and first-generation East Asian kids both attending the same high school in Chicago would have equivalent scores and performances?
Also, in reference to comments posted by you and brazil84 above about IQ and the ability of a population to survive: I do no see the correlation between survival and IQ. I’d bet on cockroaches outsurviving humans, and they certainly have a longer track record to date. Moreover, one can imagine a population becoming so intelligent they can create nuclear weapons. They manage to do so and a war breaks out in which the entire population croaks. So maybe they ranked high on the IQ scale but were still total morons on the stupidity scale.
I am still holding out for a definition of intelligence that makes sense to me and is not a collection of factors that one psychometricist prefers over some others. Therefore, I am not really going to get into a discussion of “how could we make it more accurate?” if we still have not determined what “it” is.
As for removing variables, since I believe (against the psychometricists) that the tests test the tests, I am not sure that it is possible to devise a truly neutral examination. I would guess that you would have to remove the children from the birth home at birth and place them with some sort of neutral parental units in order to reduce cultural variations sufficiently to make sense.
Baby grazing creatures can run with their mothers within hours of birth. The “childhood” of apes is significantly shorter than that of humans. Humanity has created an environment for itself that requires intelligence and education to survive well beyond what many other animals, relying far more on instinct, require.
I would guess that it might be possible to survive as a hunter-gatherer in an environment that was food rich and danger poor with much less intelligence than is required in any society organized into a nation. However, a person who simply “hunted” other people’s livestock or “gathered” other people’s grains or fruits would not survive long in a society that required the efforts of the majority of its citizens to produce enough food (or the means for distribution) in order to survive, itself.
As tomndebb pointed out earlier, it’s that whites were just “right”. Much like the often told child’s tale, Goldilocks and the three Bears. Not too hot (BAD), not too cold (BAD), but just right (Good). Whites are the perfect blend of all the good things of other races without the calories. The company he keeps is more than enough evidence to tell you of his character.
You aren’t attacking the fundamental argument so much as arguing that the underlying data can’t be right.
Anyway, you didn’t answer my last question:
Are you saying that Lynn is claiming that if you limit the study to nations with an average IQ between 100 and 105, there is still a strong correllation between IQ and GDP?
Sure, and tomndebb’s point sounds like a “just so story” to me.
If Rushton had claimed that whites have higher IQ’s than Asians and Asians have higher IQ’s than blacks, would you infer that Rushton is claiming that Asians are somehow superior – because they are “just right”?
Intelligence is only one factor. His associated claim is that Asians are undersexed and Africans are oversexed.
At any rate, I have not claimed that he was a white supremacist, per se, only that he has odd views that his imaginary category of “race” is real.
The “whites are just right” observation has been made by other reviewers of his work and you are free to ignore it if you’d like. The “brilliant undersexed Asians/stupid oversexed Africans/Europeans in the middle” conclusion, however, is the explicit point of the work I cirted and has been repeated in subsequnt publications.
Does he really use the words “undersexed” and “oversexed”? I doubt it.
Anyway, if the qualities that Rushton used to order the races were all qualities like sex drive, you might have a point. But it’s hard to see how a white supremacist would put Asians above whites in terms of intelligence.
You said earlier that J. Phillippe Rushton “has spent most of his career trying to prove that Asians are undersexed geniuses and Africans are oversexed fools and white folks, in the middle, are ‘just right.’” To me, that implies that you think that Rushton is pushing for a value judgment that puts whites above blacks and Asians. i.e. he is a white supremacist.
So, you are taking a single statement of mine, parsing it in two different ways, then inferring a claim I have not made while arguing against the claim I have not made that Rushton could not be something I have not said? OK.
Yes.
No, I parsed it in just one way.
I’m inferring the claim that you did make.
I’m arguing against the claim that you did make.
I’m not saying that Rushton could not possibly be a white supremacist. Only that your evidence seems pretty weak.
But maybe I misunderstood you?
What exactly did you mean when you said this:
I meant that Rushton has some really odd and insupportable views on race, intelligence, and sex that he has published and that multiple reviewers have noted the way in which he has characterized Asian intelligence and African sexuality as above some fictive norm while characterizing African intelligence and Asian sexuality as being below some fictive norm, with Europeans providing the middle ground that appears to be normative. You are the one who decided that a casual description of that activity had to imply white supremacy and then claimed that it could not indicate white supremacy if Rushton acknowledged that Asians were smarter that Europeans.
I have accurately, (if casually), described his published research.
I have not called him a white supremacist.
Your statement didn’t say anything about reviewers.
You could have said “The current director of the Pioneer Fund is J. Phillippe Rushton who, according to some, has spent most of his career trying to prove that Asians are undersexed geniuses and Africans are oversexed fools and white folks, in the middle, are ‘just right.’”
But you didn’t.
Anyone who spends his life trying to prove that blacks are excessively X; Asians are excessively Y; and whites are “just right” is a white supremacist.
Well, I guess obsessing over whether you have correctly inferred something I have not said is better than pretending that a nation of around 140,000,000 people can survive when more than half of them are “slow” and at leasst half of them are mentally retarded.
If it was the ONLY thing, which is not the case (I count 23 out of 25 categories, of which they didn’t score the lowest and tied for the best twice), then no.