My Roman example was intended as satire; playing with how “superstition” is applied only to the beliefs of the enemies of the faith. In the same way, you can find as many accounts as you care for of Catholic missionaries talking about the “superstitious” animism of native peoples and almost none talking about the superstition inherent in the idea of transubstantiation. It’s pure self-serving hypocrisy.
My view of superstition is simply this; if you believe something flatly contradicted by the evidence of both scientific inquiry elementary logic and your own eyes, that belief is superstitious in character. If you throw a finger-pinch of salt over your shoulder to hit the devil in the eye, that is a superstition. If you throw vast numbers of unqualified blacks at a university system to “fight racism,” that is just as superstitious and much more resource intensive. Even when salt was worth more than gold people only threw away a few dozen grains at a time.
My view of superstition is simply this; if you believe something flatly contradicted by the evidence of both scientific inquiry elementary logic and your own eyes, that belief is superstitious in character.
You might want to replace “superstitious” with “obviously wrong”, then, to prevent confusion.
Oh, okay. I didn’t catch the satire. Are you saying that my definition of “superstition” declining is akin to Catholics saying that “superstition” is declining among pagans?
if you believe something flatly contradicted by the evidence of both scientific inquiry elementary logic and your own eyes, that belief is superstitious in character.… If you throw vast numbers of unqualified blacks at a university system to “fight racism,” that is just as superstitious and much more resource intensive.
Can you explain why it should be obvious to a non-superstitious layperson that this won’t work?
Even if a belief is false, it isn’t superstition. Believing in Santa Claus is not superstition if your parents told you that there is a Santa Claus and you are a child and consider them trustworthy—it’s just bad epistemic luck.
Can you explain why it should be obvious to a non-superstitious layperson that this won’t work?
Speaking as a Devil’s Advocate … if someone is not qualified for a university, they are more likely to fail than the qualified, non-black students in the example. If your evidence for the existence of racism demons is that black people fail more often, then you will continue to receive said evidence and thus, presumably, continue throwing endless streams of black people.
On the other hand, hey, if spilling salt really was taken as a sign of weakness by salt-vulnerable extradimensional vampires, and they enter our world and sneak up behind you to drain your vitality; then hitting them smack in the eye with some salt should show ’em who’s boss. Right?
EDIT:
Believing in Santa Claus is not superstition if your parents told you that there is a Santa Claus and you are a child and consider them trustworthy—it’s just bad epistemic luck.
Under the definition you cited, Santa seems more designed to create superstition—I was good and then I got presents!
Okay, I am now going to give you not my own views, but the views of the average liberal layperson on this matter. This is meant to illustrate why it’s not obvious to laypeople that AA doesn’t work, not a defense of AA.
if someone is not qualified for a university, they are more likely to fail than the qualified, non-black students in the example.
“The point of affirmative action is to uplift the entire group. It doesn’t matter if minority students fail out at higher rates—if the net effect is more minority students with degrees who have come into contact with college culture and gotten education, they will go home and have a positive impact on their families (especially younger siblings) and wider community. Even if they don’t impact anyone else, said minority students can get a higher paying job. They will have left the poverty cycle. If these benefits in any way transmit to their direct progeny, racial inequality will be reduced in the long run. ”
Are you saying that my definition of “superstition” declining is akin to Catholics saying that “superstition” is declining among pagans?
More or less, although I don’t mean it venomously; I am glad to see Christianity and Islam weakening even if I do find I prefer them to their replacements.
Can you explain why it should be obvious to a non-superstitious layperson that this won’t work?
The mean IQ for an American Black adult is 85, and since adult IQ is 60-80% heritable this is fairly strong evidence to start with that race itself is the cause. Attempts to test that have controlled for SES education level and other factors in early childhood, income and education level in adults, even multiple twin adoption studies where one twin was raised by higher-class whites. Consistently it has been found that not only is this gap a question of genetics, but that the degree of the gap can be predicted by knowing the proportions of the individual’s racial admixture.
So, what does that mean in practice?
About 2% of Blacks will have an IQ of 115 or above, which is considered “bright” and about the level of the average undergrad or white-collar worker. Only the top 1% will have an IQ of 120 or above, which is considered “gifted” and about the level of the average college graduate. The very best 0.1% will have an IQ of 130 or above, which is considered “borderline genius” and is both the mean for PhD recipients and is the very lowest IQ Mensa will accept.
In other words, in a perfectly fair system a maximum of one in every fifty Blacks would go to college at all and half would drop out before graduating, with a tenth of those remaining being able to pursue higher degrees. About eighteen times that many Blacks enroll in college today (~38%), seventeen times that many graduate college (~17%) and four times as many are given PhDs (0.4%). Unsurprisingly most of the latter are unemployed or work in higher education themselves. These figures are proudly attributed to Affirmative Action and represent one of the biggest wastes of time and energy ever undertaken by our government.
TL;DR: There are Black Americans who are capable of benefiting from a college education, but they are the exception, and this fact is patently obvious to anyone who’s even glanced at the statistics or has lived/worked on a college campus.
The heritability of IQ reduces with socioeconomic status. Primary source. So lets go with 60%.
this is fairly strong evidence to start with that race itself is the cause
How? If it is 60% heritable, and if the mean is 100, is a loss of 15% due to environmental factors really that unlikely?
Attempts to test that have controlled
Attempts to control for things do generally reduce the gap, but yes, you are right that they do not completely eliminate it. This is the reason why we can’t dismiss the idea that behavioral differences of genetic origin exist, not a reason why we should accept the idea. It isn’t possible to control for all factors. It could easily be something weird and unexpected (say, vitamin D deficiency, or maternal health) that creates the difference.
Consistently it has been found that not only is this gap a question of genetics
No: Consistently, attempts to control for things have not accounted for the entirety of the gap. There is a difference.
fact is patently obvious to anyone who’s even glanced at the statistics or has lived/worked on a college campus.
I’ve done both. My anecdotal experience disagrees. My glances at statistics haven’t settled anything.
PhD
African immigrants to the US (not African Americans, recent voluntary immigrants) are currently one of the most impressive model minorities in the US, outperforming both Asian and European immigrants in educational achievement. (I know that the “race realists” will say that this is because only smart people can immigrate. That explanation is not be sufficient to extinguish the doubt the evidence raises, especially since we’re comparing immigrants to immigrants)
Keep in mind, I’m only maintaining that there is cause for uncertainty. The evidence I provide is not meant to refute your claim—only to reduce what I perceive as your overconfidence and to dispute your claim that any layman could see that you are right, but for their biases. Mine is the weaker claim.
We can keep putting data back and forth, but the very fact that a reasonable argument can be made for either case is my evidence for the claim that uncertainty is warranted.
African immigrants to the US (not African Americans, recent voluntary immigrants) are currently one of the most impressive model minorities in the US, outperforming both Asian and European immigrants in educational achievement.
Wat. Citation needed. As a racist, that breaks my model. Please explain.
Note that even though the educational achievement goes African immigrant >Asian immigrant > European immigrant > US-born, most of the metrics of financial and economic success go European immigrant > US-born > Asian Immigrant > African Immigrant.
I’ve seen findings to the effect that with each successive generation after the second, non-white immigrants tend to become poorer and less educated, though i don’t remember which group they were looking at. If this interests you enough for me to go find them, let me know.
There are various possible explanations for this...
1) Self-Selection effects cause immigrants to seek education in greater numbers. interpersonal racism distorts market forces (see: various race-resume and job interview studies) to counteract the benefits of higher education. After the 2nd generations any self selection effect dies out and members of non-white racial groups drift economically downward.
I consider [1] to be the strongest hypothesis for the cause of race-related differences in socio-economics regardless of whether or not race-correlated-genetically-based differences in intelligence exist. I think there is plenty of evidence that racism is sufficient to create economic disparities—the mechanism is parsimonious and the steps are well-supported.
Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that there are not also genetic differences. Just because racism is sufficient to explain socioeconomic disparity doesn’t mean it’s necessary. Furthermore, we can’t just assume that socioeconomic disparities alone can create the observed trends in behavioral intelligence testing. I don’t think it’s silly to have suspicions that genetic differences exist, but I still feel that it is really silly to be confident that they exist and claim high certainty concerning the magnitude, direction, and nature of these differences when we don’t currently have much general insight into the mechanisms behind genetics and intelligence. It’s even more overconfident to be certain that said supposed genetic differences have large-scale economic consequences. In general, one aught to be suspicious of big ideas with no well-understood mechanisms.
I was going to have a 2) and a 3) alternative hypotheses arguing devils advocate for the race realist side (invoking regression to the mean, affirmative action, etc) as well as a non-race-realist but also non-racism side, but as there appear to be a sufficient number of people who disagree with me present maybe I should just wait for someone who actually holds that opinion to supply those arguments.
I think there is plenty of evidence that racism is sufficient to create economic disparities—the mechanism is parsimonious and the steps are well-supported.
If racism is sufficient, then we should not see examples of groups who suffered racism but did not have economic disparities (or had economic disparities which favored them). Are there no such examples?
(I think it’s important to separate out sufficiency- an if-then relationship- and a strong direct effect. It seems likely that the direct effect of racism is to lower economic standing, but to claim sufficiency argues that its direct effect is larger than any other possible combination of total effects.)
The cause of this seems highly separated from the topic of discussion (heritable intelligence) though. I think it is more than obvious that the main cause is selection bias; that is in general why immigrants in general often outperform those who already live there. If you have the drive, determination, and consciousness to be able to go through such a major life change, that itself says something about you. So this filter lets in only those who are talented in this regard.
This model makes the prediction that immigrants from countries that are harder to migrate from will be smarter than those who can migrate more freely. This is seen in the real world: As stated here, African immigrants to the US are currently one of the most impressive model minorities in the US. They beat out, say, Asian immigrants (who also overperform on average.) And Asian immigrants beat out, say, Canadian immigrants, who no one really claims are all that special or particularly distinguished (as migrating from Canada even easier.)
Fascinating. Full marks to the US Human Resources department for their recruitment efforts in this area. The difference in achievement between those various groups of immigrants suggest some powerful selection effects. Simply because that amount of difference in achievement dwarfs the intelligence difference between racial groups no matter which direction that difference goes.
FWIW, your model is really badly broken if you didn’t expect this- I would expect even most racist models (or, at least, my Turing-test-passing attempts at racist models) to predict this.
FWIW, your model is really badly broken if you didn’t expect this- I would expect even most racist models (or, at least, my Turing-test-passing attempts at racist models) to predict this.
Why are you so confident that even most racist models would predict this? Prior to acquiring domain specific knowledge about trends or immigration policies in the United States it doesn’t seem especially likely. Until Randaly provided the relevant link I knew next to nothing about the particulars of which racial groups successfully immigrate to the US at which education level. In the absence of such information it seems reasonable to guess that the patterns would tend toward following the trends for IQ among the groups as well as correlating with the distribution of educational qualifications for individuals in the respective countries. ie. I’d guess that East Asian groups would have more educational achievement than African groups.
I’d call the model possessed by myself of the recent past wrong and also ignorant of that and related pieces of trivia but I’d hardly call it “really badly broken”. Perhaps you consider this and related information far more important or fundamental than I do?
I am Randaly; I didn’t know that specific information before, but it did not surprise me. My understanding was that phenomenon of brain drain is fairly well known.
I don’t usually refer to brain drain in my understanding of things. If this is true, I should. But why expect differential brain drain between Africa and Asia, which is what is necessary to explain this.
But why expect differential brain drain between Africa and Asia
Here is a throwaway guess: because Asia is rapidly developing and Africa is not. If you’re very smart and in (ex-Japan) Asia, you can stay and be successful (make millions / cure cancer / become a pop star / etc.) locally. It’s a fluid growing environment. But if you’re in Africa, your chances of local success are much smaller and, correspondingly, your incentives to emigrate are much higher.
I endorse Lumifer’s reason. Other reasons would include less patriotism (as I understand, loyalties in much of Africa are to tribes/clans/families rather than a nationstate, religion, or ideology, so bringing your family abroad of going abroad to look for money would be less of a shift) and less perceived safety (e.g. apparently 75% of Ethiopia’s skilled laborers moved abroad during its famines).
I am Randaly; I didn’t know that specific information before, but it did not surprise me. My understanding was that phenomenon of brain drain is fairly well known.
Brain drain is familiar to me… it’s even what I attribute most of the success of the US to, especially when it comes to silicone valley. What I had no information about (and little need to collect information about) was the specific details of which countries the US attracts and permits immigrants from most freely. Without those details knowledge of brain drain is irrelevant, it doesn’t distinguish between drain-sources.
Really? A racist model take the base IQ of africans, compares it to that of eurasions, notices that the latter is ~2 std devs higher, and predicts superior achievement by eurasions. You would only expect such over-achievement if Asian immigrants were average folks and African immigrants were the cream of the intellectual class, but why would I predict that, a priori?
Because the Nigerian “middle class” makes on average about $6,000 a year while the Japanese middle class on average makes $52,000 a year? The average African might very well want to come to the US, but only the very wealthiest (and since g correlates strongly with wealth, brightest) actually can.
In the last half century, as Subsaharan Africa’s population has skyrocketed to nearly a billion people, we’ve had about 900,000 African immigrants come to the US and those immigrants have shown exceptional talent; both are entirely consistent with the numbers we’d expect if we’re taking people with an average IQ of 115-120 (AKA, at or above the Ashkenazi Jewish mean).
Edit: Also, racist is a fairly charged (if hardly inaccurate) word and absolutely adds more heat than light, to use that delightful turn of phrase. Sticking with the generally-preferred term “Racial Realist” or even the milder British epithet “Racialist” might help reduce the reflexive opposition that tends to crop up in these discussions.
Consistent given the base IQ assumptions if the majority of all the most intellectually outstanding Africans are emigrating and coming to America specifically.
(America is not the most common destination for African immigrants, a majority of them go to Europe.)
The numbers are only weird if we assume they all came this year; remember, we’re talking about a period of more than five decades here.
Edit: Also, Continental Europe and the Anglosphere have two entirely disparate experiences with African Immigration these days. It’s hardly fair to focus on the small numbers legal immigrants to the vast numbers of illegal ones given Europe’s current position. It would be like saying that America’s Latin American population was predominantly middle-class or wealthy republicans; from a legal standpoint it’s arguable, but the demographics favor the illegal immigrants.
I’d add that sticking to the term “race realist” is unlikely to moderate responses here, since the majority of Less Wrong is already quite familiar with “race realism,” and speaking for myself at least, that sort of self-promoting name scheme, in the vein of pro-life or pro-choice (implying that those who hold it are the realists and those who do not are thus in some way deluded) serves only to move it from the realms of the empirical into the political.
Edit: If we’re looking at legal immigration to America alone, we were up to about 85,000 a year eight years ago, with trends moving upwards at that point (I haven’t found any more recent data yet,) and while a majority of immigration to America is legal, America doesn’t get a majority of the legal immigration.
That does bring the levels to statistical consistency assuming a sufficiently high level of retreat from Africa among the intellectual elite, but the more of the top people in Africa who leave, the less competition those who stay are going to face. It becomes a choice, not between being middle class in Africa or middle class in America, but between being the top of the heap in Africa versus middle class in America.
I think you missed my edit, so just a restatement; comparing modern illegal immigrants to Europe with legal immigration is not a useful comparison, as it’s apples to oranges in terms of demography.
Okay, but I hope you don’t mind if I respond to it here for coherency’s sake.
the more of the top people in Africa who leave, the less competition those who stay are going to face. It becomes a choice, not between being middle class in Africa or middle class in America, but between being the top of the heap in Africa versus middle class in America.
Don’t forget a lot of African immigrants are here mid-term or have a dual citizenship; they come here to get educated and make enough money to set themselves up back home and become millionaires, then bring the kids back to the US for round two. I know a sweet Nigerian girl who came here for exactly that purpose, since a doctor with an American MD can run their own hospital in Africa.
But yes, in any remotely stable country there should be an equilibrium point where permanent immigration lets off entirely. That’s a perfectly reasonable observation.
How? If it is 60% heritable, and if the mean is 100, is a loss of 15% due to environmental factors really that unlikely?
Given the way the modern IQ scale is defined, it makes little sense to say that 100 to 85 is “a loss of 15%”. You can only say it’s a loss of one standard deviation.
The leopard’s name is human cognitive biodiversity. While the evidence for human cognitive biodiversity is indeed debatable, what’s not debatable is that it is debatable. Since it’s also the case that everyone who is not a white nationalist has spent the last 50 years informing us that it is not debatable, we have our leopard one way or another.
Your primary source is measuring IQ heritability in children, which is typically held as 20-40% rather than the 60-80% for adults I mentioned. Children are in a constant state of flux, and their IQs hard to norm due to maturation rates, but when they hit the late end of puberty you can see the effect of genes really shake out.
In terms of African immigrants I need to look at the actual data more closely but it sounds like a fairly simple case of Brain Drain. The Bantu mean IQ is typically scored in the 70s range, so if we’re able to skim the top 0.04% that’s a group more than 400,000 strong with a higher average IQ than Ashkenazi Jews. Normal Distributions + Huge Populations = Lots and lots of outliers.
Keep in mind, I’m only maintaining that there is cause for uncertainty. The evidence I provide is not meant to refute your claim—only to reduce what I perceive as your overconfidence and to dispute your claim that any layman could see that you are right, but for their biases. Mine is the weaker claim.
We can keep putting data back and forth, but the very fact that a reasonable argument can be made for either case is my evidence for the claim that uncertainty is warranted.
Look at this from a different perspective; how much evidence of climate change would I have to reject as “just indicative,” how many discipline’s consensus’s would I have to ignore, how much special pleading and goalpost-moving would I have to do before you gave up on reasonable argument and called me a climate kook?
Probably not much, and I’d have the same lack of patience for anyone else doing that whether it’s a Creationist arguing against Evolution or a Whole Foods junkie pushing Vitalist nonsense.
Why does the game completely change when it comes to the intersection of psychometry and biology? Doesn’t it make you even a little suspicious how unprecedentedly low our priors drop as soon as we hear the word race? Why are the conclusions of more than a century of exhaustive psychometric research, backed up by our recent advances in genetics, still so completely unpersuasive?
We can keep putting data back and forth, but the very fact that a reasonable argument can be made for either case is my evidence for the claim that uncertainty is warranted.
Look at this from a different perspective; how much evidence of climate change would I have to reject as “just indicative,” how many discipline’s consensus’s would I have to ignore, how much special pleading and goalpost-moving would I have to do before you gave up on reasonable argument and called me a climate kook?
As far as I can tell, the implied analogy here between Ishaan’s position and climate kookery is an unfair one. I am not aware of a consensus on the aetiology of between-race IQ differences comparable to the consensus on global warming.
Of course, even if there aren’t synthesis reports written by hundreds of scientists, or statements from national scientific societies, there are smaller-scale reports & surveys on the IQ controversy. But what Ishaan wrote turns out to broadly agree with those.
The two obvious examples here are the research summaries published in the wake of the commotion around The Bell Curve. One is “Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns”, a report by an 11-member panel approved by the American Psychological Association.
For IQ’s heritability the panel reports values “of the order of .45” in childhood and “around .75″ “by late adolescence” (p. 85). On the possibility of environmental factors entering into the white-black IQ gap it suggests that socioeconomic status “cannot be the whole explanation”, but pays respectful attention to other cultural explanations of the gap (pp. 94-95) while acknowledging that they “have little direct empirical support” (p. 97). As for genetic factors: “There is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation. At present, no one knows what causes this differential.” (p. 97); “There is not much direct evidence on this point, but what little there is fails to support the genetic hypothesis.” (p. 95). These conclusions are compatible with Ishaan’s, except for the review’s estimate of adult IQ heritability being higher than Ishaan’s 60%.
The other research summary is Linda S. Gottfredson’s “Mainstream Science on Intelligence: An Editorial With 52 Signatories, History, and Bibliography”. It goes into less detail on IQ’s heritability, but where it gets quantitative it says “estimates range from 0.4 to 0.8″ (p. 14), which brackets Ishaan’s 60% estimate nicely. As for the cause of lower black IQ, it says:
22. There is no definitive answer to why IQ bell curves differ across racial-ethnic groups. The reasons for these IQ differences between groups may be markedly different from the reasons for why individuals differ among themselves within any particular group (whites or blacks or Asians). [...] Most experts believe that environment is important in pushing the bell curves apart, but that genetics could be involved too.
23. Racial-ethnic differences are somewhat smaller but still substantial for individuals from the same socioeconomic backgrounds. To illustrate, black students from prosperous families tend to score higher in IQ than blacks from poor families, but they score no higher, on average, than whites from poor families.
This too is consistent with what Ishaan wrote.
(A shorter petition, “Behavior and Heredity”, appeared in American Psychologist in 1972 over the names of 50 researchers. But it doesn’t make any claims specific enough to compare to Ishaan’s.)
I also know of a couple of surveys. The more recent is Charlie Reeve & Jennifer Charles’s “Survey of opinions on the primacy of g and social consequences of ability testing: A comparison of expert and non-expert views”, but that didn’t ask its respondents about heritability or causes of interracial IQ differences. The older survey is Mark Snyderman & Stanley Rothman’s “Survey of Expert Opinion on Intelligence and Aptitude Testing”, which did ask.
In fact, it broke the heritability question down further, by asking about IQ’s heritability among American whites and American blacks, considered separately:
7. White heritability estimate. Despite a consensus that there is a significant heritability to IQ in the American white population, experts disagree on the issue of whether there is sufficient evidence to arrive at a reasonable estimate of this heritability. Thirty-nine percent feel that there is sufficient evidence, compared to 40% who do not. Twenty-one percent do not feel qualified to answer. Only those respondents who feel there is sufficient evidence were asked to provide a heritability estimate. The mean estimate for the 214 received is 0.596 (SD = 0.166), meaning that these experts believe, on the average, that 60% of the variation in IQ within the American white population is associated with genetic variation.
8. Black heritability estimate. Experts are much less inclined to believe that sufficient evidence exists for an estimate of IQ heritability among the American black population. Twenty percent feel there is sufficient evidence, and 54% feel there is not. The mean heritability estimate for 101 received is 0.571 (SD = 0.178).
Those averages are very close to Ishaan’s. As for the black-white IQ difference:
12. The source of the black-white difference in IQ. [...] Forty-five percent believe the difference to be a product of both genetic and environmental variation, compared to only 15% who feel the difference is entirely due to environmental variation. Twenty-four percent of experts do not believe there are sufficient data to support any reasonable opinion, and 14% did not respond to the question. Eight experts (1%) indicate a belief in an entirely genetic determination.
There was no majority opinion in the survey. Even after cutting out the non-responses, only a bare majority (about 53%) felt confident in saying the IQ difference had a genetic component. Meanwhile, about 45% of those who responded took either the same position as Ishaan (insufficient data) or a more environmentalist one.
All in all, Ishaan’s views are about as hereditarian as the expert consensus, where that consensus exists. I don’t understand which “discipline’s consensus’s” Ishaan’s meant to be ignoring. (I’m leery of the suggestion of “goalpost-moving”, too, since I can’t spot any substantial drift in the claims Ishaan made over time.)
In other words, in a perfectly fair system a maximum of one in every fifty Blacks would go to college at all and half would drop out before graduating, with a tenth of those remaining being able to pursue higher degrees. About eighteen times that many Blacks enroll in college today (~38%), seventeen times that many graduate college (~17%) and four times as many are given PhDs (0.4%). Unsurprisingly most of the latter are unemployed or work in higher education themselves. These figures are proudly attributed to Affirmative Action and represent one of the biggest wastes of time and energy ever undertaken by our government.
Not all the abilities measured by IQ are that important to education; see the last two sentences in this comment. Calculations like yours would underestimate the ideal number of women and Jews in academia, and for all I know (admittedly little) that may also apply to African-Americans.
Not all the abilities measured by IQ are that important to education; see the last two sentences in this comment. Calculations like yours would underestimate the ideal number of women and Jews in academia, and for all I know (admittedly little) that may also apply to African-Americans.
My measure is a little crude; it uses IQ scores without dividing them into fluid/crystallized or verbal/nonverbal and that does have a cost in terms of accuracy. Unfortunately I don’t have the time or energy to do much better than a back-of-the-envelope calculation, not to mention my access to census data blows now that the Federal Government is shut down. This is part of why I didn’t bother looking at Asian-White or Male-Female differences where the numbers are smaller and the breakdown of scores is messier.
But at the same time; a 1sd difference (either the −1 for Black Americans or the +1 for Ashkenazi Jews) in a highly g-loaded test is such a heavy finger on the scale that I can’t imagine how my numbers would be off by the order of magnitude required to call the modern proportions “reasonable.”
But at the same time; a 1sd difference (either the −1 for Black Americans or the +1 for Ashkenazi Jews) in a highly g-loaded test is such a heavy finger on the scale that I can’t imagine how my numbers would be off by the order of magnitude required to call the modern proportions “reasonable.”
Sure, I didn’t mean that modern proportions are reasonable; mine was just a nitpick.
My Roman example was intended as satire; playing with how “superstition” is applied only to the beliefs of the enemies of the faith. In the same way, you can find as many accounts as you care for of Catholic missionaries talking about the “superstitious” animism of native peoples and almost none talking about the superstition inherent in the idea of transubstantiation. It’s pure self-serving hypocrisy.
My view of superstition is simply this; if you believe something flatly contradicted by the evidence of both scientific inquiry elementary logic and your own eyes, that belief is superstitious in character. If you throw a finger-pinch of salt over your shoulder to hit the devil in the eye, that is a superstition. If you throw vast numbers of unqualified blacks at a university system to “fight racism,” that is just as superstitious and much more resource intensive. Even when salt was worth more than gold people only threw away a few dozen grains at a time.
You might want to replace “superstitious” with “obviously wrong”, then, to prevent confusion.
Oh, okay. I didn’t catch the satire. Are you saying that my definition of “superstition” declining is akin to Catholics saying that “superstition” is declining among pagans?
Can you explain why it should be obvious to a non-superstitious layperson that this won’t work?
Even if a belief is false, it isn’t superstition. Believing in Santa Claus is not superstition if your parents told you that there is a Santa Claus and you are a child and consider them trustworthy—it’s just bad epistemic luck.
Speaking as a Devil’s Advocate … if someone is not qualified for a university, they are more likely to fail than the qualified, non-black students in the example. If your evidence for the existence of racism demons is that black people fail more often, then you will continue to receive said evidence and thus, presumably, continue throwing endless streams of black people.
On the other hand, hey, if spilling salt really was taken as a sign of weakness by salt-vulnerable extradimensional vampires, and they enter our world and sneak up behind you to drain your vitality; then hitting them smack in the eye with some salt should show ’em who’s boss. Right?
EDIT:
Under the definition you cited, Santa seems more designed to create superstition—I was good and then I got presents!
Okay, I am now going to give you not my own views, but the views of the average liberal layperson on this matter. This is meant to illustrate why it’s not obvious to laypeople that AA doesn’t work, not a defense of AA.
“The point of affirmative action is to uplift the entire group. It doesn’t matter if minority students fail out at higher rates—if the net effect is more minority students with degrees who have come into contact with college culture and gotten education, they will go home and have a positive impact on their families (especially younger siblings) and wider community. Even if they don’t impact anyone else, said minority students can get a higher paying job. They will have left the poverty cycle. If these benefits in any way transmit to their direct progeny, racial inequality will be reduced in the long run. ”
Clearly the racism demons will ensure they still get worse jobs and continue the poverty society regardless.
:P
More or less, although I don’t mean it venomously; I am glad to see Christianity and Islam weakening even if I do find I prefer them to their replacements.
The mean IQ for an American Black adult is 85, and since adult IQ is 60-80% heritable this is fairly strong evidence to start with that race itself is the cause. Attempts to test that have controlled for SES education level and other factors in early childhood, income and education level in adults, even multiple twin adoption studies where one twin was raised by higher-class whites. Consistently it has been found that not only is this gap a question of genetics, but that the degree of the gap can be predicted by knowing the proportions of the individual’s racial admixture.
So, what does that mean in practice?
About 2% of Blacks will have an IQ of 115 or above, which is considered “bright” and about the level of the average undergrad or white-collar worker. Only the top 1% will have an IQ of 120 or above, which is considered “gifted” and about the level of the average college graduate. The very best 0.1% will have an IQ of 130 or above, which is considered “borderline genius” and is both the mean for PhD recipients and is the very lowest IQ Mensa will accept.
In other words, in a perfectly fair system a maximum of one in every fifty Blacks would go to college at all and half would drop out before graduating, with a tenth of those remaining being able to pursue higher degrees. About eighteen times that many Blacks enroll in college today (~38%), seventeen times that many graduate college (~17%) and four times as many are given PhDs (0.4%). Unsurprisingly most of the latter are unemployed or work in higher education themselves. These figures are proudly attributed to Affirmative Action and represent one of the biggest wastes of time and energy ever undertaken by our government.
TL;DR: There are Black Americans who are capable of benefiting from a college education, but they are the exception, and this fact is patently obvious to anyone who’s even glanced at the statistics or has lived/worked on a college campus.
But this is modulated by SES.
The heritability of IQ reduces with socioeconomic status. Primary source. So lets go with 60%.
How? If it is 60% heritable, and if the mean is 100, is a loss of 15% due to environmental factors really that unlikely?
Attempts to control for things do generally reduce the gap, but yes, you are right that they do not completely eliminate it. This is the reason why we can’t dismiss the idea that behavioral differences of genetic origin exist, not a reason why we should accept the idea. It isn’t possible to control for all factors. It could easily be something weird and unexpected (say, vitamin D deficiency, or maternal health) that creates the difference.
No: Consistently, attempts to control for things have not accounted for the entirety of the gap. There is a difference.
I’ve done both. My anecdotal experience disagrees. My glances at statistics haven’t settled anything.
African immigrants to the US (not African Americans, recent voluntary immigrants) are currently one of the most impressive model minorities in the US, outperforming both Asian and European immigrants in educational achievement. (I know that the “race realists” will say that this is because only smart people can immigrate. That explanation is not be sufficient to extinguish the doubt the evidence raises, especially since we’re comparing immigrants to immigrants)
Keep in mind, I’m only maintaining that there is cause for uncertainty. The evidence I provide is not meant to refute your claim—only to reduce what I perceive as your overconfidence and to dispute your claim that any layman could see that you are right, but for their biases. Mine is the weaker claim.
We can keep putting data back and forth, but the very fact that a reasonable argument can be made for either case is my evidence for the claim that uncertainty is warranted.
Wat. Citation needed. As a racist, that breaks my model. Please explain.
(La Wik says brain drain)
Here is one source which lays them out cleanly. Click on the first table.
http://www.asian-nation.org/immigrant-stats.shtml
Note that even though the educational achievement goes African immigrant >Asian immigrant > European immigrant > US-born, most of the metrics of financial and economic success go European immigrant > US-born > Asian Immigrant > African Immigrant.
I’ve seen findings to the effect that with each successive generation after the second, non-white immigrants tend to become poorer and less educated, though i don’t remember which group they were looking at. If this interests you enough for me to go find them, let me know.
There are various possible explanations for this...
1) Self-Selection effects cause immigrants to seek education in greater numbers. interpersonal racism distorts market forces (see: various race-resume and job interview studies) to counteract the benefits of higher education. After the 2nd generations any self selection effect dies out and members of non-white racial groups drift economically downward.
I consider [1] to be the strongest hypothesis for the cause of race-related differences in socio-economics regardless of whether or not race-correlated-genetically-based differences in intelligence exist. I think there is plenty of evidence that racism is sufficient to create economic disparities—the mechanism is parsimonious and the steps are well-supported.
Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that there are not also genetic differences. Just because racism is sufficient to explain socioeconomic disparity doesn’t mean it’s necessary. Furthermore, we can’t just assume that socioeconomic disparities alone can create the observed trends in behavioral intelligence testing. I don’t think it’s silly to have suspicions that genetic differences exist, but I still feel that it is really silly to be confident that they exist and claim high certainty concerning the magnitude, direction, and nature of these differences when we don’t currently have much general insight into the mechanisms behind genetics and intelligence. It’s even more overconfident to be certain that said supposed genetic differences have large-scale economic consequences. In general, one aught to be suspicious of big ideas with no well-understood mechanisms.
I was going to have a 2) and a 3) alternative hypotheses arguing devils advocate for the race realist side (invoking regression to the mean, affirmative action, etc) as well as a non-race-realist but also non-racism side, but as there appear to be a sufficient number of people who disagree with me present maybe I should just wait for someone who actually holds that opinion to supply those arguments.
If racism is sufficient, then we should not see examples of groups who suffered racism but did not have economic disparities (or had economic disparities which favored them). Are there no such examples?
(I think it’s important to separate out sufficiency- an if-then relationship- and a strong direct effect. It seems likely that the direct effect of racism is to lower economic standing, but to claim sufficiency argues that its direct effect is larger than any other possible combination of total effects.)
Very well.
Racism is sufficient to lower SES, but if other factors are involved it may be insufficient to induce a negative disparity.
The cause of this seems highly separated from the topic of discussion (heritable intelligence) though. I think it is more than obvious that the main cause is selection bias; that is in general why immigrants in general often outperform those who already live there. If you have the drive, determination, and consciousness to be able to go through such a major life change, that itself says something about you. So this filter lets in only those who are talented in this regard.
This model makes the prediction that immigrants from countries that are harder to migrate from will be smarter than those who can migrate more freely. This is seen in the real world: As stated here, African immigrants to the US are currently one of the most impressive model minorities in the US. They beat out, say, Asian immigrants (who also overperform on average.) And Asian immigrants beat out, say, Canadian immigrants, who no one really claims are all that special or particularly distinguished (as migrating from Canada even easier.)
See here.
Fascinating. Full marks to the US Human Resources department for their recruitment efforts in this area. The difference in achievement between those various groups of immigrants suggest some powerful selection effects. Simply because that amount of difference in achievement dwarfs the intelligence difference between racial groups no matter which direction that difference goes.
FWIW, your model is really badly broken if you didn’t expect this- I would expect even most racist models (or, at least, my Turing-test-passing attempts at racist models) to predict this.
Are you sure you could have correctly predicted beforehand whether African immigrants would outperform other immigrants?
Why are you so confident that even most racist models would predict this? Prior to acquiring domain specific knowledge about trends or immigration policies in the United States it doesn’t seem especially likely. Until Randaly provided the relevant link I knew next to nothing about the particulars of which racial groups successfully immigrate to the US at which education level. In the absence of such information it seems reasonable to guess that the patterns would tend toward following the trends for IQ among the groups as well as correlating with the distribution of educational qualifications for individuals in the respective countries. ie. I’d guess that East Asian groups would have more educational achievement than African groups.
I’d call the model possessed by myself of the recent past wrong and also ignorant of that and related pieces of trivia but I’d hardly call it “really badly broken”. Perhaps you consider this and related information far more important or fundamental than I do?
I am Randaly; I didn’t know that specific information before, but it did not surprise me. My understanding was that phenomenon of brain drain is fairly well known.
I don’t usually refer to brain drain in my understanding of things. If this is true, I should. But why expect differential brain drain between Africa and Asia, which is what is necessary to explain this.
Here is a throwaway guess: because Asia is rapidly developing and Africa is not. If you’re very smart and in (ex-Japan) Asia, you can stay and be successful (make millions / cure cancer / become a pop star / etc.) locally. It’s a fluid growing environment. But if you’re in Africa, your chances of local success are much smaller and, correspondingly, your incentives to emigrate are much higher.
I endorse Lumifer’s reason. Other reasons would include less patriotism (as I understand, loyalties in much of Africa are to tribes/clans/families rather than a nationstate, religion, or ideology, so bringing your family abroad of going abroad to look for money would be less of a shift) and less perceived safety (e.g. apparently 75% of Ethiopia’s skilled laborers moved abroad during its famines).
Brain drain is familiar to me… it’s even what I attribute most of the success of the US to, especially when it comes to silicone valley. What I had no information about (and little need to collect information about) was the specific details of which countries the US attracts and permits immigrants from most freely. Without those details knowledge of brain drain is irrelevant, it doesn’t distinguish between drain-sources.
Really? A racist model take the base IQ of africans, compares it to that of eurasions, notices that the latter is ~2 std devs higher, and predicts superior achievement by eurasions. You would only expect such over-achievement if Asian immigrants were average folks and African immigrants were the cream of the intellectual class, but why would I predict that, a priori?
Because the Nigerian “middle class” makes on average about $6,000 a year while the Japanese middle class on average makes $52,000 a year? The average African might very well want to come to the US, but only the very wealthiest (and since g correlates strongly with wealth, brightest) actually can.
In the last half century, as Subsaharan Africa’s population has skyrocketed to nearly a billion people, we’ve had about 900,000 African immigrants come to the US and those immigrants have shown exceptional talent; both are entirely consistent with the numbers we’d expect if we’re taking people with an average IQ of 115-120 (AKA, at or above the Ashkenazi Jewish mean).
Edit: Also, racist is a fairly charged (if hardly inaccurate) word and absolutely adds more heat than light, to use that delightful turn of phrase. Sticking with the generally-preferred term “Racial Realist” or even the milder British epithet “Racialist” might help reduce the reflexive opposition that tends to crop up in these discussions.
Consistent given the base IQ assumptions if the majority of all the most intellectually outstanding Africans are emigrating and coming to America specifically.
(America is not the most common destination for African immigrants, a majority of them go to Europe.)
The numbers are only weird if we assume they all came this year; remember, we’re talking about a period of more than five decades here.
Edit: Also, Continental Europe and the Anglosphere have two entirely disparate experiences with African Immigration these days. It’s hardly fair to focus on the small numbers legal immigrants to the vast numbers of illegal ones given Europe’s current position. It would be like saying that America’s Latin American population was predominantly middle-class or wealthy republicans; from a legal standpoint it’s arguable, but the demographics favor the illegal immigrants.
However, about half that number actually does emigrate from Africa on a yearly basis.
I’d add that sticking to the term “race realist” is unlikely to moderate responses here, since the majority of Less Wrong is already quite familiar with “race realism,” and speaking for myself at least, that sort of self-promoting name scheme, in the vein of pro-life or pro-choice (implying that those who hold it are the realists and those who do not are thus in some way deluded) serves only to move it from the realms of the empirical into the political.
Edit: If we’re looking at legal immigration to America alone, we were up to about 85,000 a year eight years ago, with trends moving upwards at that point (I haven’t found any more recent data yet,) and while a majority of immigration to America is legal, America doesn’t get a majority of the legal immigration.
That does bring the levels to statistical consistency assuming a sufficiently high level of retreat from Africa among the intellectual elite, but the more of the top people in Africa who leave, the less competition those who stay are going to face. It becomes a choice, not between being middle class in Africa or middle class in America, but between being the top of the heap in Africa versus middle class in America.
I think you missed my edit, so just a restatement; comparing modern illegal immigrants to Europe with legal immigration is not a useful comparison, as it’s apples to oranges in terms of demography.
Your edit came after I wrote up my comment, but I did read it, and edited my own comment in response.
Okay, but I hope you don’t mind if I respond to it here for coherency’s sake.
Don’t forget a lot of African immigrants are here mid-term or have a dual citizenship; they come here to get educated and make enough money to set themselves up back home and become millionaires, then bring the kids back to the US for round two. I know a sweet Nigerian girl who came here for exactly that purpose, since a doctor with an American MD can run their own hospital in Africa.
But yes, in any remotely stable country there should be an equilibrium point where permanent immigration lets off entirely. That’s a perfectly reasonable observation.
To quote moldbug on this issue:
May or may not be relevant.
Your primary source is measuring IQ heritability in children, which is typically held as 20-40% rather than the 60-80% for adults I mentioned. Children are in a constant state of flux, and their IQs hard to norm due to maturation rates, but when they hit the late end of puberty you can see the effect of genes really shake out.
In terms of African immigrants I need to look at the actual data more closely but it sounds like a fairly simple case of Brain Drain. The Bantu mean IQ is typically scored in the 70s range, so if we’re able to skim the top 0.04% that’s a group more than 400,000 strong with a higher average IQ than Ashkenazi Jews. Normal Distributions + Huge Populations = Lots and lots of outliers.
Look at this from a different perspective; how much evidence of climate change would I have to reject as “just indicative,” how many discipline’s consensus’s would I have to ignore, how much special pleading and goalpost-moving would I have to do before you gave up on reasonable argument and called me a climate kook?
Probably not much, and I’d have the same lack of patience for anyone else doing that whether it’s a Creationist arguing against Evolution or a Whole Foods junkie pushing Vitalist nonsense.
Why does the game completely change when it comes to the intersection of psychometry and biology? Doesn’t it make you even a little suspicious how unprecedentedly low our priors drop as soon as we hear the word race? Why are the conclusions of more than a century of exhaustive psychometric research, backed up by our recent advances in genetics, still so completely unpersuasive?
I can guess the answer, and I think you can too.
As far as I can tell, the implied analogy here between Ishaan’s position and climate kookery is an unfair one. I am not aware of a consensus on the aetiology of between-race IQ differences comparable to the consensus on global warming.
Of course, even if there aren’t synthesis reports written by hundreds of scientists, or statements from national scientific societies, there are smaller-scale reports & surveys on the IQ controversy. But what Ishaan wrote turns out to broadly agree with those.
The two obvious examples here are the research summaries published in the wake of the commotion around The Bell Curve. One is “Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns”, a report by an 11-member panel approved by the American Psychological Association.
For IQ’s heritability the panel reports values “of the order of .45” in childhood and “around .75″ “by late adolescence” (p. 85). On the possibility of environmental factors entering into the white-black IQ gap it suggests that socioeconomic status “cannot be the whole explanation”, but pays respectful attention to other cultural explanations of the gap (pp. 94-95) while acknowledging that they “have little direct empirical support” (p. 97). As for genetic factors: “There is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation. At present, no one knows what causes this differential.” (p. 97); “There is not much direct evidence on this point, but what little there is fails to support the genetic hypothesis.” (p. 95). These conclusions are compatible with Ishaan’s, except for the review’s estimate of adult IQ heritability being higher than Ishaan’s 60%.
The other research summary is Linda S. Gottfredson’s “Mainstream Science on Intelligence: An Editorial With 52 Signatories, History, and Bibliography”. It goes into less detail on IQ’s heritability, but where it gets quantitative it says “estimates range from 0.4 to 0.8″ (p. 14), which brackets Ishaan’s 60% estimate nicely. As for the cause of lower black IQ, it says:
This too is consistent with what Ishaan wrote.
(A shorter petition, “Behavior and Heredity”, appeared in American Psychologist in 1972 over the names of 50 researchers. But it doesn’t make any claims specific enough to compare to Ishaan’s.)
I also know of a couple of surveys. The more recent is Charlie Reeve & Jennifer Charles’s “Survey of opinions on the primacy of g and social consequences of ability testing: A comparison of expert and non-expert views”, but that didn’t ask its respondents about heritability or causes of interracial IQ differences. The older survey is Mark Snyderman & Stanley Rothman’s “Survey of Expert Opinion on Intelligence and Aptitude Testing”, which did ask.
In fact, it broke the heritability question down further, by asking about IQ’s heritability among American whites and American blacks, considered separately:
Those averages are very close to Ishaan’s. As for the black-white IQ difference:
There was no majority opinion in the survey. Even after cutting out the non-responses, only a bare majority (about 53%) felt confident in saying the IQ difference had a genetic component. Meanwhile, about 45% of those who responded took either the same position as Ishaan (insufficient data) or a more environmentalist one.
All in all, Ishaan’s views are about as hereditarian as the expert consensus, where that consensus exists. I don’t understand which “discipline’s consensus’s” Ishaan’s meant to be ignoring. (I’m leery of the suggestion of “goalpost-moving”, too, since I can’t spot any substantial drift in the claims Ishaan made over time.)
Not all the abilities measured by IQ are that important to education; see the last two sentences in this comment. Calculations like yours would underestimate the ideal number of women and Jews in academia, and for all I know (admittedly little) that may also apply to African-Americans.
My measure is a little crude; it uses IQ scores without dividing them into fluid/crystallized or verbal/nonverbal and that does have a cost in terms of accuracy. Unfortunately I don’t have the time or energy to do much better than a back-of-the-envelope calculation, not to mention my access to census data blows now that the Federal Government is shut down. This is part of why I didn’t bother looking at Asian-White or Male-Female differences where the numbers are smaller and the breakdown of scores is messier.
But at the same time; a 1sd difference (either the −1 for Black Americans or the +1 for Ashkenazi Jews) in a highly g-loaded test is such a heavy finger on the scale that I can’t imagine how my numbers would be off by the order of magnitude required to call the modern proportions “reasonable.”
Sure, I didn’t mean that modern proportions are reasonable; mine was just a nitpick.