No, it means he’s saying that all the examples I gave are of people who aren’t actually any good at what they do and are interesting only because for a black person to be able to attempt those tasks at all is remarkable. The stupidity and obnoxiousness of that doesn’t depend on a comparison with animals.
In any case, one reason why people use metaphors is precisely the fact that the literal sense of the metaphor produces an effect. You call someone a “dancing bear”, and your readers are going to get a mental image of a dancing bear and (in so far as they accept what you say) associate it with the person you’re talking about. You don’t get to do that and claim you’re not comparing the person to an animal.
No, it means he’s saying that all the examples I gave are of people who aren’t actually any good at what they do and are interesting only because for a black person to be able to attempt those tasks at all is remarkable.
In all fairness, this describes a lot of lists of “achievements of minority X in field Y”. To some extent, it’s a natural result of looking for “achievements” from a tiny minority (e.g. Turks or whatever) in a field where they don’t really have a comparative advantage.
Eugene is saying not that “they don’t really have a comparative advantage”, but that they have a comparative disadvantage so strong that any purported great achievements should be dismissed as fakery, exaggeration, or, if it seems that one of them really has achieved something, “exceptions”. In Eugene’s view, they’re still nothing more than performing dogs, they’ve just managed the miracle, despite their intrinsic inferiority, of doing it as well as the best real people.
I think it’s possible to make the same point, drained of malice. To take Neil deGrasse Tyson as an example, he’s a PhD physicist, but when compared to other popularizers of science I’d say he’s closer to Bill Nye than he is to Carl Sagan when it comes to scientific productivity. (All three of those are people I like and respect, so this isn’t meant as a slur against any of them; if only there were more Nyes and Tysons and Sagans!)
Similarly, I remember the three recurring examples of scientists during my time in elementary school being Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and George Washington Carver. Again, all three are worthy of respect, but it’s misrepresenting the mechanics of science to see those three as equally prominent in the history of science, and when comparing groups what matters is not the most extreme member of each group, but the depth of the field.
I agree. But the less hyperbolically you make the point, the more reasonable it is to suggest that the shortage of Einstein-level black scientists is the result of factors other than a fundamental mental inferiority in the black population. And that wouldn’t suit Eugine’s purposes at all.
(It seems to me, though, that even quite a strong “race realist” position would not come close to justifying Eugine’s talk of dancing bears.)
To clarify things, do you believe that there are measurable IQ differences between populations or you think it’s all bloody nonsense made up by malicious people?
I haven’t looked at the evidence with enough care to have a strong opinion. I certainly don’t think the “race realist” position is impossible in principle. (Some versions of it, anyway. I’m sure there are stupid versions that are obviously wrong, but there are stupid versions of everything that are obviously wrong.) On the other hand, I’m not impressed by the quality of some of the research I’ve seen cited to support it, and the startling rapidity of the Flynn effect seems to me to give good reason to think that performance on IQ tests is more affected by cultural and/or environmental factors than everyone would like them to be. On the other other hand, while the relevant evidence is pretty shitty there does seem to be quite a lot of shitty evidence pointing the same way. On the other other other hand, most of the people making noise about the aforesaid evidence show signs of really genuinely being horrible racists, which is maybe what I’d expect if the evidence were crap and people only believed it because it suits their prejudices. On the other^4 hand, that’s also roughly what I’d expect if the evidence were perfectly OK but it were socially unacceptable to say such things, as in fact it is.
So, all things considered, I’m buggered if I know, and getting to the bottom of it seems like it would involve wading into a swamp of horrible racism on one side and kneejerk social justice on the other, filled with research that’s crappy because (1) doing decent research on this stuff is really difficult and (2) for very understandable reasons hardly anyone actually wants to work on it. Which sounds like a lot of No Fun.
So I’m reserving judgement and leaving that particular cesspool well alone; it occasionally makes itself slightly useful by encouraging people whose brains have been fried by one sort of politics or another to reveal themselves as such by shouting obnoxiously about it.
(My political prejudices incline me to the “it’s all bloody nonsense” side. My prejudice in favour of things with sciency-looking studies backing them up inclines me the other way. I try not to be pushed around too much by my prejudices.)
The first interesting question here is in whose interests it it to create a massive ugh field around studies of how humanity is structured and what are the differences between the groups. As a hint, consider from which direction the shit comes when you touch that field.
the relevant evidence is pretty shitty
Is it? That’s not my impression and you say you prefer to stay away from the subject, so how would you know?
Yvain wrote a kinda- literature review a couple of years ago and didn’t find the evidence problematic. In fact, in his post he inserted a plea for someone to take apart that evidence and show that it’s wrong because he doesn’t like the conclusions. Yvain, in general, does not have problems taking studies apart and showing their failures. In this case he couldn’t.
There is also The Bell Curve book written by Charles Murray (and Richard Herrnstein) who isn’t exactly a foaming-at-the-mouth Neanderthal. And before that there’s Sociobiology by E.O.Wilson.
You might also find interesting a series of blog posts when a liberal blogger Andrew Sullivan discovered that race is linked with IQ and had an interesting conversation with another (black) commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates—see e.g. here.
On the other other other hand
At this point I usually switch to tentacles :-D
Which sounds like a lot of No Fun.
Don’t you think that the topic is important?
But yes, touching it is perilous to your social and professional reputation. I probably wouldn’t recommend honestly discussing it from an account easily linked to your Real Name. The Islamic practice of taqiyyah is relevant here :-)
The first interesting question here is in whose interests is it [...]
That’s an interesting question, but I’m not at all sure it’s the first. Making it the first question seems like the same intellectual failure mode as Bulverism. In a hypothetical world (which may or may not be or resemble the real world) in which there are absolutely no systematic differences between “races” in anything other than superficial appearance, it seems to me there could still be all the same strong pressure against such research. (In particular, I don’t think it’s credible that the people generating such pressure have all already evaluated the evidence, realised on some level that “race realism” is definitely right, and started objecting to the research just for that reason.)
how would you know?
All I know is that the bits of evidence I’ve looked at—which, indeed, may be unrepresentative for some reason—looked bad to me. E.g., estimating that some country has an average IQ of 80ish on the basis of interpolating values from other nearby countries and treating that estimate as data; estimating national IQs on the basis of small and probably-unrepresentative samples.
Yvain wrote a kinda- literature review a couple of years ago
I had a look and failed to find it. Got a link?
The Bell Curve
Whose reliability is pretty controversial.
liberal blogger Andrew Sullivan
My recollection is that one thing he was notable for was being a gay Republican. I’m not sure “liberal” is a great one-word description of him. (For the avoidance of doubt, “not best described in one word as ‘liberal’” is not a criticism in my idiolect.)
At this point I usually switch to tentacles.
Alas, I have none and must make do with hands.
Don’t you think that the topic is important?
Depends on what “important” means. I’m pretty sure that whatever the truth is on this issue, knowing it with more confidence would make rather little difference to my life.
I probably wouldn’t recommend honestly discussing it from an account easily linked to your Real Name.
It’s not hard to link this one to my real name, and I have already honestly discussed it here in this thread. I don’t anticipate any terrible personal or professional consequences, but we’ll see.
It’s in his explanation of NRx piece. To quote from there (“biological hypothesis” is the one which says biology strongly affects IQ):
I don’t want to dwell on the biological hypothesis too much, because it sort of creeps me out even in a “let me clearly explain a hypothesis I disagree with” way. I will mention that it leaves a lot unexplained … For a sympathetic and extraordinarily impressive defense of the biological hypothesis I recommend this unpublished (and unpublishable) review article. I will add that I am extremely interested in comprehensive takedowns of that article (preferably a full fisking) and that if you have any counterevidence to it at all you should post it in the comments and I will be eternally grateful.
Meanwhile, The Bell Curve was lambasted in the popular press and by many academics. But it also got fifty of the top researchers in its field to sign a consensus statement saying it was pretty much right about everything and the people attacking it were biased and confused. Three years later, they re-issued their statement saying nothing had changed and more recent findings had only confirmed their opinion. The American Psychological Association launched a task force to settle the issue which stopped short of complete agreement but which given the circumstances was pretty darned supportive. There are certainly a lot of smart people with very strong negative opinions, but each one is still usually met by an equally ardent and credentialed proponent.
As to
Alas, I have none and must make do with hands.
I recommend acquiring some. They are highly useful :-)
Pardon my ignorance, but all the “intellect realism” theories seem like they can be charitably paraphrased as group X:
has a different mean IQ than the general population and/or
has a different standard deviation for IQ and/or
has a significantly skewed distribution from the normal curve
I’ve seen claimed IQ means in the 80s for black Americans. Observationally, American public life includes many black people for whom I find it implausible that they aren’t pretty smart—eg Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Condeleeza Rice.
If I assume no difference in std dev or skew in intelligence distribution, it seems to me that I observe too many intelligent black folks for the mean to be in the 80s. Moreover, adding an assumption that std dev is lower doesn’t help—now the successful black folk are explained, but I don’t observe enough extreme low IQ folk.
That’s why I conclude some error exists in the assumption of an 80s mean IQ.
Why would we have to assume that IQ is a good measure of intelligence across different sub-cultures? Aren’t there experiments we could perform to measure the validity?
It seems like a core assumption of the “intellectual” realists. I’m conceding it to strong-man the opposing argument. If we don’t assume IQ is culturally independent, the correlation between IQ and life outcome looks like a hidden-variable measure of social acceptability—i.e. an expected status quo bias if people prefer those they perceive as in-group. That just weakens the realist argument.
That’s not what that link says—best I can tell, the book summarized states living in a high-IQ country is more predictive of good life outcomes than your own IQ.
Getting down to brass tacks, we are assuming a lot when we compare IQ numbers from different tests. WIAS-IV is not necessarily comparable to other tests in English. Assuming that the French language test measures the same thing as the WIAS-IV assumes the very conclusion that I’m not agreeing with. (Although I’m not arguing this point in our other discussion).
Getting down to brass tacks, we are assuming a lot when we compare IQ numbers from different tests.
You keep on saying “assuming” and Vaniver keeps on telling you that there is no need for assumptions: we have data. It’s not hard to give the same people different tests and then look at how do the scores correlate.
In fact, that’s how the whole concept of IQ came into being—IQ is an estimate of the general intelligence component (g) that is common to performance on a variety of intelligence-measuring tests.
eg Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Condeleeza Rice.
Clarence Thomas is widely considered one of the worst Supreme Court justices in memory, and is famously uninvolved, going years without a question; he has also written harshly about how he feels affirmative action cheapened his degrees. Colin Powell’s parents are both Jamaican immigrants, similar to Malcolm Gladwell or Barack Obama whose father was African, highlighting how select and successful African immigrants are. Condoleezza Rice, amusingly enough, is almost as white as Obama is (which given the last admixture fractions I read, means she has about twice as much European genetics as the average African-American).
If I assume no difference in std dev or skew in intelligence distribution, it seems to me that I observe too many intelligent black folks for the mean to be in the 80s. Moreover, adding an assumption that std dev is lower doesn’t help—now the successful black folk are explained, but I don’t observe enough extreme low IQ folk.
Now, moving on from absurd assertions from anecdotes, we can see that there are a reasonably large absolute number of intelligent black professionals who you might often run into, especially in government circles, by calculating the implications of the gap.
The US black population is apparently ~38,929,319. People who strike one as notably intelligent tends to imply >=130 IQ, in my experience, or more specifically the famous 99th percentile, which specifically works out to 2.32SD. We combine this with the 0.9SD gap to get an equivalent selectiveness on blacks of 3.2SDs, which translates back to 0.21% of the black population. And out of 39m people, that’s a good dnorm(qnorm(0.99) + 0.9) * 38929319 ~> 86,000 black people who pass that highly stringent bar. So one could arrange to run into more intelligent black people than one could ever keep straight in one’s head without any contradiction of the gap.
(Incidentally, given a life expectancy of something like 75 implies that there’s around 1173 very intelligent young black people each year being fought over by elite universities, which helps explain why they have such ferocious difficulties recruiting and why Harvard can be so thrilled at enrolling 170 black students.)
Clarence Thomas is widely considered one of the worst Supreme Court justices in memory, and is famously uninvolved, going years without a question; he has also written harshly about how he feels affirmative action cheapened his degrees.
Thomas is extremely conservative, far out of the mainstream of American legal thought. That said, worse Supreme Court Justice is roughly like worst tenured physicist at MIT. It hardly means he isn’t smart. In particular, not-talking-during-oral-argument doesn’t mean not involved, and is another arguments-are-soldiers attack by liberal American legal society on someone who is admittedly far out of mainstream legal thought.
Your reference to his position on affirmative action is particularly confusing to me, because his point is a standard, fairly mainstream argument against AA. If that was his most extreme legal position, he’d be the swing vote, not the farthest right (or second farthest, depending on how one counts Alito).
The rest of your post is well taken, and I will have to think on it.
When was the last time you saw a retarded person bashing their head against the wall?
Thomas is extremely conservative, far out of the mainstream of American legal thought.
As are Rehnquist, Scalia, and others, yet Thomas is by far the least respected, least cited, and least noted. (Of all the people you had to cite as accomplished black people, you had to pick Clarence Thomas...) If Thomas is still so ‘extreme’ despite his bully pulpit for expounding & enforcing his views, that also says a lot about how good a justice he has been.
That said, worse Supreme Court Justice is roughly like worst tenured physicist at MIT.
Not really. The tenure process at MIT can be trusted a lot more than ‘whatever candidate is young, politically expedient, and can be pushed through Congress’, especially considering that justice nominations used to be relatively deferential. A candidate has to be as bad as, say, Harriet Miers to get rejected. I don’t know how many physicists would make tenure with a similar slate of accomplishments and, to illustrate the relative looseness, highly public accusations of sexual harassment.
In particular, not-talking-during-oral-argument doesn’t mean not involved
That would be reasonable to note if he wrote many majority opinions, played a large role in changing the others’ opinions (of course, then he’d look less ‘extreme’ if he was contributing behind the scenes, wouldn’t he?), or in any way was not a ghost who could be replaced by his clerks with no one the wiser.
Your reference to his position on affirmative action is particularly confusing to me, because his point is a standard, fairly mainstream argument against AA.
You misunderstood my point. My point there was that I agree with the criticisms of AA as harmful and pernicious through its effects in promoting people to positions and degrees they are not fully qualified for (the relevance of which should be obvious), and I was noting that far from being a nasty personal attack by me on Thomas, he himself says it played a part in his career, and who are we to disagree?
I can only point to my professional work as an attorney for special education students to give you a sense of my experience with what an 80 IQ student is like.
That’s not an answer to any of my other questions. Why do you think your limited, bubble-filled experience is good evidence for overriding a century of carefully constructed tests drawing on millions of nationally representative people and exhaustively vetted for bias as documented in books like Jensen’s Bias in Mental Testing?
(Even if we granted your special ed beliefs accurate status, although I don’t know about that either—I too was a special ed kid, but any lawyer who spent some time with me as my family fought the school district would not have had a representative impression of special ed kids, both because I was unrepresentative (and that’s why I was mainstreamed), and because the long cumulative day to day interactions are different from occasional interactions. My mom still works with special ed kids and mentioned that one of her teachers had her nose broken by one of her kids who was handleable right up until he broke her nose; one of my best friends was also in special ed, and he could be a pretty decent guy for weeks or months at a time until his anger problems finally exploded at you—we drifted apart so I’m not sure what happened to him but last I heard he was in prison, which did not surprise me in the least bit. Life is as much about the lowest points as the average points.)
Thomas is the “least respected” because the left has a special hatred for black people who don’t toe the line and take the political side that they want black people to take, not because he is actually less worthy of respect than the other conservative justices.
I think this is almost certainly the case, as well as the fact that Thomas is even more extremely conservative than the others. So I found Gwern’s comment surprising, since he really seems to be attacking Thomas for his politics alone. As for the fact that he doesn’t get involved in the questions, he has said himself that the reason is that he already knows his opinion and it isn’t going to change. We have no reason to doubt this assertion, which is arrogant and overconfident, but which does not even come close to proving that he’s stupid. As for behind-the-scenes influence, it is very possible that he has had quite a bit, e.g. with the interpretation of the Second Amendment.
But it’s also obvious that Thomas is no legal genius. (Unlike, say, Scalia, who I actually abhor more, probably for that reason). Why no black legal geniuses, theoretical physicists, abstract mathematicians, or analytic philosophers? This is more telling than fishing about in the superior range, which, even on the assumptions, is only as rare as falling in the general population’s very-superior range.
There are lots of brilliant black scientists, I collaborate closely with one. You guys are toxic idiots, you should get out more and meet more smart people.
You know, sometimes the troll doesn’t even need to make people believe their point to win; they just need to make people treat their point as if it was seriously worth debating.
I don’t disagree, but I think LW (and slatestar actually) is too passive about these guys. There are nrx communities out on the net where they can debate their perfect society.
I can only remember one instance in which I noticed a black person in a CS class*. He clearly wasn’t connecting with anyone else there on a cultural level, but he was making much better observations and comments than most anyone else (some of the people who sounded like a Racial Realist’s dream programmers were answering simple questions with facepalm-worthy wonkiness).
What stuck out to me most, though, was whenever the teacher would elaborate on or correct any of that black student’s responses, the student would respond to everything with a very submissive and depressed-sounding “Yes sir.” He didn’t sound quite so broken in any other context as that. He disappeared halfway through the semester and I have no idea why (was he better at in-class discussion than tests or homework? Did he drop the class because he didn’t like it? Were there other classes he wanted/needed into which conflicted with it? Did he quit school entirely?)
It seemed abundantly clear to me that, of all the students that spoke up during class, this one was probably in the top 3 in terms of understanding the material, at least in a classroom context. There might have been problems, but I wouldn’t dare pin them on intelligence. Culture seemed dramatically and obviously a source of tension. If there were others, they were not where I could observe them.
* There could have been others I missed, or that were in previous classes who I just forgot about. I can only identify race based on accent (which I should point out is not genetic) or if someone else points it out without being contradicted by other evidence. … Well, and names, sometimes, but those aren’t genetic, either.
That would be reasonable to note if he wrote many majority opinions, played a large role in changing the others’ opinions (of course, then he’d look less ‘extreme’ if he was contributing behind the scenes, wouldn’t he?), or in any way was not a ghost who could be replaced by his clerks with no one the wiser.
You are repeating a Democratic Party talking point as fact. A particularly stupid talking point. One of the reasons I used Thomas as an example is to try to push against this stupid assertion by those who are otherwise my political allies.
In point of fact, Thomas writes about 1⁄9 of the Supreme Court opinions and deals with about 1⁄9 of the other legal work (motions, etc), as would be expected of a body with nine members. I can’t speak to behind-the-scenes influence. As a lawyer, I don’t think any of the current Justices has historically notable intellectual influence except Scalia (Rehnquist also was unusually influential, by he is no longer on the court).
Speaking of which, neither Rehnquist nor Scalia are outside the mainstream of American legal thought. Their legal theories are notably on the conservative side, but well within the current Overton window of legal thought. To say Rehnquist and Scalia are as extreme as Thomas is another Democratic Party talking point.
I can only point to my professional work as an attorney for special education students to give you a sense of my experience with what an 80 IQ student is like.
That’s not an answer to any of my other questions. Why do you think your limited, bubble-filled experience is good evidence for overriding a century of carefully constructed tests drawing on millions of nationally representative people and exhaustively vetted for bias as documented in books like Jensen’s Bias in Mental Testing?
(Even if we granted your special ed beliefs accurate status, although I don’t know about that either—I too was a special ed kid, but any lawyer who spent some time with me as my family fought the school district would not have had a representative impression of special ed kids, both because I was unrepresentative (and that’s why I was mainstreamed), and because the long cumulative day to day interactions are different from occasional interactions. My mom still works with special ed kids and mentioned that one of her teachers had her nose broken by one of her kids who was handleable right up until he broke her nose; one of my best friends was also in special ed, and he could be a pretty decent guy for weeks or months at a time until his anger problems finally exploded at you—we drifted apart so I’m not sure what happened to him but last I heard he was in prison, which did not surprise me in the least bit. Life is as much about the lowest points as the average points.)
I see a wide range of students in my practice with many different profiles. It would be a mistake to conclude that a student with your profile was representative of all special education students. Given the broad scope of special education coverage, no special education student is truly “typical” of special education in general. At best, one student might be typical of a sub-population of a particular eligibility category, but likely not.
My experience with special education is presented to justify my conclusion that a student with an IQ of 80 is incapable of producing the kind of work Thomas routinely produces. I’m skeptical whether many 100 IQ students could create a career path like Thomas’ path. That’s relevant to the argument because the number of “black swan” high IQ people we observe should be related to the mean IQ of the population.
Separately, I’m well aware that an 80 IQ student is not typical of a special education student. In point of law, an 80 IQ by itself is not likely to lead a student to be formally included in special education. At a minimum, student must be within a particular category of need, such as autism spectrum or emotional dysfunction, to be entitled to legal classification as a special education student.
a student with an IQ of 80 is incapable of producing the kind of work Thomas routinely produces [...] I’m skeptical whether many 100 IQ students could create a career path like Thomas’s path.
No one’s denying that. The “race realists” claim not that all black people in the US have an IQ in the 80-90 range, but that the average IQ of black people in the US is in the 80-90 range. That’s perfectly consistent, as gwern said, with plenty of those people being very smart.
Clearly you don’t get onto the Supreme Court without being distinctly cleverer than average. For all his negative comments about Clarence Thomas, gwern is not (so far as I can see) denying that.
That’s relevant to the argument because the number of “black swan” high IQ people we observe should be related to the mean IQ of the population.
Yup. But “smart enough to be on the Supreme Court” doesn’t seem to me like black-swan IQ, even in a (real or hypothetical) subpopulation with an average IQ in the eighties. Unusual, sure. But well within the range we should expect there to be plenty of.
In point of fact, Thomas writes about 1⁄9 of the Supreme Court opinions and deals with about 1⁄9 of the other legal work (motions, etc), as would be expected of a body with nine members.
My understanding was that Thomas only writes his fair share when you include all his idiosyncratic one-man dissents which influence no one and have failed to move the Overton Window. Is that wrong?
I can’t speak to behind-the-scenes influence.
Kind of important a thing to leave out in a political role like that of the nine.
As a lawyer, I don’t think any of the current Justices has historically notable intellectual influence except Scalia (Rehnquist also was unusually influential, by he is no longer on the court). Speaking of which, neither Rehnquist nor Scalia are outside the mainstream of American legal thought. Their legal theories are notably on the conservative side, but well within the current Overton window of legal thought.
Gee, I wonder why. Could it have something to do with Rehnquist and Scalia’s opinions actually being more persuasive, as I already suggested?
Personally, I am not bothered by Thomas’s originalism, as you seem to think; if I had to classify myself, I’d have to admit to considerable sympathy with his positions as I’ve noted in the past on LW (I think, possibly I argued it elsewhere), originalism is the only position which makes any kind of sense, and the attempts to move away from it and reinterpret it as liberals wish reflects the fact that the Constitution is atrociously outdated and irrelevant because the updating mechanisms have failed completely due to the continual growth of the USA. (When was the last Constitutional amendment which mattered? Do you expect to see another meaningful amendment in your lifetime? I don’t.) But the American political system is unable to acknowledge this or come up with any solution, and so we get absurdities like the Supreme Court saying the Constitution protects a right to gay marriage or trying to ban the death penalty, which makes about as much sense as saying the Bible or the Koran protect a right to gay marriage or disapprove of the death penalty.
What I am bothered by is his apparent failure to contribute much to the Court in asking questions to get to the heart of issues, mold or at least influence the thinking of his peers, and influence the majority opinions which matter. A justice who neither is influenced nor influences is a waste of space, and even harmful—like IE6 or Google’s neglect of Google Reader. In contrast, I much prefer to read Rehnquist or Scalia’s opinions because they were not so blind or irrelevant.
I’m skeptical whether many 100 IQ students could create a career path like Thomas’ path.
I’m sure they couldn’t, at least not without extenuating circumstances like very able aids or an extremely gross imbalance of verbal and other skills. (IQs are just of the general factor, individual skills can be much higher or lower than the mean; someone can write very well even if they wouldn’t understand a statistic if it bit them on the arse.)
But Thomas could easily be one of the 80k that the normal distribution implies, or be a bit below, maybe 97th or 98th percentile or something, which increases the numbers of candidates substantially (more than 3x) while still being plausible. (When I look at thresholds on IQ and characteristics broken down by deciles, I get the impression that for anything which is a fraction of a standard deviation, it is more a difference of quantity than quality; someone 1⁄3 or 2⁄3 SDs lower can do just about anything the other person can do, but with more time and effort, perhaps, while at 1 SD it starts to seem like there are things the lower person just won’t get with any reasonable amount of time/effort. So a lot of 130 is just plain out of reach for 100, but not for 120.)
As well, the normal distribution is rarely exactly true; for example, when it comes to intelligence, very rare or de novo mutations mean there is an excess of retarded or very disabled people than the calculations would predict, because one mutation in the wrong place can break a mind, and there are a few phenomenon which might create little bumps in the black tail as well—most obviously, given your mentioned examples, immigrants from Africa or the Caribbeans, but a few other things like assortative mating might also happen.
My understanding was that Thomas only writes his fair share when you include all his idiosyncratic one-man dissents which influence no one and have failed to move the Overton Window. Is that wrong?
Yes. Check out Scotusblog if you want to look at other terms.
What I am bothered by is his apparent failure to contribute much to the Court in asking questions to get to the heart of issues
Oral argument is performance, not persuasion. The evidence of influence is citation of majority decisions in future terms and future courts. In other words, the rest of that paragraph would be just as true without reference to questions at oral argument. Please stop repeating the stupid talking point.
Personally, I am not bothered by Thomas’s originalism, as you seem to think
Thomas is an originalist only if one thinks that the US Constitution is intended to codify natural law. Many originalists across the political spectrum don’t. Further, I’m much more of a textualist, and textualism and natural law get together like oil and water.
But Thomas could easily be one of the 80k that the normal distribution implies, or be a bit below, maybe 97th or 98th percentile or something, which increases the numbers of candidates substantially (more than 3x) while still being plausible. (When I look at thresholds on IQ and characteristics broken down by deciles, I get the impression that for anything which is a fraction of a standard deviation, it is more a difference of quantity than quality; someone 1⁄3 or 2⁄3 SDs lower can do just about anything the other person can do, but with more time and effort, perhaps, while at 1 SD it starts to seem like there are things the lower person just won’t get with any reasonable amount of time/effort. So a lot of 130 is just plain out of reach for 100, but not for 120.)
This is the heart of the issue. I think an 85 IQ would have difficulty consistently simulating a 100 IQ in professional life. But the evidence on this is too sparse for me to persuasively present in this forum. So I’m trying to highlight how we see too many black swans. Which itself is complicated by the difficulty in distinguishing between 120 &130.
The Constitution protects all rights that are originally retained by the people:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
If there is a natural right to gay marriage, the Constitution protects it. That is, the Constitution protects gay marriage to the extent that recognition of gay marriage is in some sense naturally required as a precondition of fostering “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; as are the rights to free speech and free exercise of religion, to self-defense and self-organized collective defense, and all of the other rights recognized in the U.S. Constitution. A natural right “is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.” (United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542, 553 (1876))
I like the Ninth Amendment too, but it’s worth noting that the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges cited the due process and equal protection clauses, not natural rights: one could argue that the rationale was absurd even if the outcome was correct.
So, the 14th Amendment protects “privileges or immunities.” There’s some of historical evidence of what those might include. But in the Slaughterhouse cases, the Supreme Court drained the phrase of any legal significance. There are many legal scholars across the political spectrum who think the Slaughterhouse cases are inconsistent with original public meaning.
Those scholars who think Obergefell, Roe, and such are consistent with original public meaning tend to say that “substantive” due process should be understood as code for “privileges or immunities.”
It’s a controversial position that natural rights are what the Constitution protects, even among legal scholars who think the Constitution should be interpreted according to original public meaning (most “originalists”).
has a different mean IQ than the general population and/or
has a different standard deviation for IQ and/or
has a significantly skewed distribution from the normal curve
One and two, yes, but I haven’t seen data that would indicate some population has a significant skew in its IQ distribution.
it seems to me that I observe too many intelligent black folks for the mean to be in the 80s.
Why don’t you do the numbers? The purely-black IQ mean is about 85, I believe. A great deal of American blacks have some admixture of whte genes, so I think the IQ average for US blacks is in high 80s, maybe 90. There are about 42m of them. So lets’ try three standard deviations above the mean, IQ > 130-135, more or less. That would be about 0.13% of the population, so about 56,700 individuals. You’d actually expect a bit more because many people with a lot of white genes (which would push their expected IQ up) identify as black.
How many do you observe? :-/
You can also look at IQ proxies, like SAT. Here are 2015 scores by race—LW sucks at formatting tables, but basically scores of whites (average ~530) are consistently about 100 points above the scores of blacks (average ~430). Asians score the highest.
First, 42 million includes children for who I doubt there is a public criteria we can agree on as proxy for intelligence. Second, I’m not sure IQ > 130 is .13%. Wikipedia suggests 1%.
Since those cut in opposite directions, let’s pretend they wash out. I am comfortable asserting there are more than 60k black folks in the set of:
senior military officers (colonel or greater)
highly successful national public intellectuals (eg Powell, Coates, Rice)
highly successful lawyers (Clarence Thomas is top 1% of lawyers)
highly successful MDs & research PhDs (eg Neil DeGrasse Tyson).
highly successful MDs & research PhDs (eg Neil DeGrasse Tyson).
As discussed elsewhere in this thread, Neil DeGrasse Tyson is “media science personality” not a successful researcher.
highly successful technocrats (mayors / police chiefs / school superintendent in large metro areas)
It doesn’t take that much intelligence to be elected Mayor. Especially if your black in a majority black city and the electorate votes on tribal solidarity. Hence a few infamous cases, like Mayor Marion Barry of DC.
From personal experience, there are lots of dumb lawyers. When I say highly successful, I mean roughly the level of screening that occurs through promotion from fresh-out-of-academy lieutenant to colonel.
For reference, Clarence Thomas easily clears the bar I’m trying to set, as did Johnny Cochran before he died. For entertainers, it seems clear that talent isn’t correlated with intelligence. But I think staying power requires some, so the ultra-successful are candidates.
For my broader argument, the categories I set out are potentially under-inclusive. There are lots of folks (like business people) not included in the categories I explicitly listed. We also haven’t included any children, on the grounds that we don’t agree on how to identify them.
it seems to me that I observe too many intelligent black folks for the mean to be in the 80s.
You, personally, observe too many? Is that statement true? Or do you merely expect to see many?
By convenience sampling in my personal life and observing public figures, I see a certain proportion of successful folk are black. Extrapolating from the proportion I see, 60k smart black folks is plausible. A much lower number is not plausible. What number of smart black folk should we expect to see if the mean were 85?
By convenience sampling in my personal life and observing public figures, I see a certain proportion of successful folk are black.
Public figures are what, a few dozen at most? So you rely on your personal sample and why in the world do you think that it’s representative?
Let’s take our favourite people—Alice and Bob. Alice lives in rural Alabama. She knows zero smart black people and extrapolates her personal sample to “all black folk are stupid”. Bob hails from Idaho and is an undergrad at Harvard -- 100% of black people he knows are very smart. He extrapolates his personal sample to “all black people are smart”. Why is your sample any better than Alice’s or Bob’s?
The purely-black IQ mean is about 85, I believe. A great deal of American blacks have some admixture of whte genes, so I think the IQ average for US blacks is in high 80s, maybe 90.
African American mean IQ is typically measured at 85 to 90. Sub-Saharan African IQs are difficult to estimate because of a number of factors, but 85 is much higher than typical estimates.
Observationally, American public life includes many black people for whom I find it implausible that they aren’t pretty smart—eg Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Condeleeza Rice.
Observing three people isn’t observing many people. Blacks like those people aren’t in the majority. Most blacks are less successful than most whites.
Gotcha. Unfortunately, the link to that “sympathetic and extraordinarily impressive defence” is broken. I don’t suppose you happen to know of another source for it?
Since we’re quoting Yvain, let’s continue
It’s maybe worth saying a word or two about the context for that quotation: Yvain was writing about the tendency to take “someone wrote a decent-looking rebuttal to X” as justification for saying “X has been refuted and debunked”. His argument is not “TBC is in fact right because all these people say positive things about it”—that’s just the mirror image of the thing he’s objecting to. It’s “You don’t get to claim that TBC has been refuted just because lots of eminent people trashed it—look, lots of equally eminent people defended it too.” With which I agree. Which is why I called it “pretty controversial” rather than, say, “known to be bad”.
(“biological hypothesis” is the one which says biology strongly affects IQ):
Note that some forms of the “biological hypothesis” are especially hard to refute. Few people disagree that eating too much lead paint as a child will give you a low IQ. If black kids eat a lot more lead paint than white kids, the end result will be that blacks will on average be rather bad at science, and scholarship in general.
The biological hypothesis pretty much means genetics. There are a lot of environmental influences (from eating lead paint chips to being deficient in iodine to being dropped on one’s head as a child) that are well-known to affect IQ.
AIUI, Eugine The Fourth is trying to suggest that there’s something more than this going on: that black people are underrepresented in lists of successful people not because there are few of them but because they’re mentally inferior for some (presumably genetic) reason.
Black people are not a tiny minority globally, so to first order it would be evidence for that theory if in fact lists of successful black people look like lists of successful Turkish people.
Of course there are other factors; e.g., most of Africa is grindingly poor—though I expect Eugine would say, or at least imply, that that’s because Africa is full of mentally-inferior people—and while there are quite a lot of black people in the USA they’ve historically had somedifficulties to contend with.
So, first of all, if you drew up a list of highly successful people in mediaeval Europe, I don’t think there would be many Jews there.
Secondly, I take it you have in mind Cochran’s theory that European Jews are super-smart because of evolutionary pressure from mediaeval persecution. But Cochran’s story isn’t simply “they were persecuted, persecution leads to more brains, the end”. It depends crucially on the details of the persecution. And the treatment of black slaves in the US is very different in pretty much every relevant respect from the treatment of Jews in mediaeval Europe. The Jews were forbidden to do many jobs but highly lucrative finance was (for bizarre path-dependent reasons) open to them; black slaves in the US were given backbreaking physical labour to do and had no opportunity to choose their work. The Jews were left more or less alone much of the time but subject to occasional slaughter where the best opportunities for survival went to those who anticipated trouble, had accumulated valuable resources for escape, etc; black slaves in the US were subject to constant low-level mistreatment and occasional individual murder, and opportunities for getting the hell out were … limited. European Jews, Cochran suggests, had very little inward gene flow; female black slaves in the US were routinely made pregnant by their owners, and I’m pretty sure the children were generally (1) also slaves and (2) considered black.
So, first of all, if you drew up a list of highly successful people in mediaeval Europe, I don’t think there would be many Jews there.
Depends on whether you see the glass as half-full or half-empty. From Murray’s Human Accomplishment on that topic, pg292:
Jews make their first appearance in the annals of the arts and sciences during the centuries when the Middle East and Moorish Spain were at their cultural peak. When science historian George Sarton set out to enumerate the top scientists across the world, including East Asia, South Asia, the Arab world, and Christian Europe, from 1150 to 1300, he came up with 626 names, of whom 95 were Jews—15 percent of the total, produced by a group that at the time represented about half of 1 percent of the world’s population that was in a position to produce scientists. 5 But few of those 626 are important enough in the broader sweep of scientific history to warrant a mention in histories that are less tightly focused. Of the 10 Jews who qualified as significant figures in the inventories prior to 19C, only 2 are still familiar to the general public, Montaigne and Spinoza, and neither of them was a typical Jew of his time. Montaigne’s mother came from a wealthy Spanish/Portuguese Jewish family, but Montaigne himself was a lifelong Catholic. Spinoza was excommunicated by his Dutch Jewish community for his unorthodox views.
Five of the 8 other Jews who appear in the inventories before 1800 were also part of the philosophy inventory. They were Philo Judaeus from ancient Roman Alexandria, Solomon ibn Gabirol (Avicebron) and Maimonides from Moorish Spain, and Moses Mendelssohn and Johann Herder from 18C Germany. In all of those 26 centuries, the roster of Western significant figures includes not one Jewish artist, scientist, physician, or inventor, and just one writer (Fernando Rojas), one composer (Salamone Rossi), and one mathematician (Paul Guldin).
This sparse representation in European arts and sciences through the beginning of 19C reflects Jews’ near-total exclusion from the arts and sciences. Jews were not merely discouraged from entering universities and the professions, they were often forbidden by law from doing so....I will not try to establish a hierarchy of victimhood among Jews, women, and other minorities, but an uncomplicated point needs emphasis: Until the end of 18C throughout Europe, and well into 19C in most parts of Europe, Jews lived under a regime of legally restricted rights and socially sanctioned discrimination as severe as that borne by any population not held in chattel slavery.
Personally, I would say that a 30x overrepresentation in the 1100s-1300s is rather medieval, and pretty respectable especially considering the constraints they labored under.
And obviously those constraints did make a difference because once the constraints starting being lifted, Jews began overperforming even more to a degree so absurd that if it were a novel, you’d throw it against the wall in disgust and angrily tweet at the author to look up the phrase ‘Mary Sue’:
This history provides us with a nice example of what social scientists call an interrupted time series. Until nearly 1800, Jews are excluded. Then, over about 70 years, the legal exclusions are lifted and the social exclusion eases. What happens? “The suddenness with which Jews began to appear . . . is nothing short of astounding,” writes historian Raphael Patai. “It seemed as if a huge reservoir of Jewish talent, hitherto dammed up behind the wall of Talmudic learning, were suddenly released to spill over into all fields of Gentile cultural activity.” 8 During the four decades from 1830 to 1870, when the first Jews to live in emancipation (or at least to live under less rigorously enforced suppression) reach their forties, 16 Jewish significant figures appear. In the next four decades, from 1870 to 1910, when all non-Russian Jews are living in societies that offer equal legal protections if not social equality, that number jumps to 40. During the next four decades until 1950—including the years of the Third Reich and the Holocaust—the number of Jewish significant figures almost triples, to 114. I do not show the results for philosophy because the Jewish proportion becomes so high in 1900–1950, when Jews represented 6 out of the 18 significant figures in philosophy (33 percent), that it distorts the other trendlines. The results shown in the graph above are already impressive enough without philosophy, as Jewish representation rises steeply in all the inventories but music, where it had begun at a high rate even in 1800–1850...To get a sense of the density of accomplishment these numbers represent, I will focus on 1870 onward, after legal emancipation had been achieved throughout Central and Western Europe. Only from this latter period can we draw a roughly accurate sense of the magnitude and patterns of Jewish accomplishment—“roughly,” because Jews were still subject to pervasive social and educational discrimination even after 1870.
(I won’t quote any more since I know we’re all familiar with Jewish performance in the 1900s.)
No, it means he’s saying that all the examples I gave are of people who aren’t actually any good at what they do and are interesting only because for a black person to be able to attempt those tasks at all is remarkable. The stupidity and obnoxiousness of that doesn’t depend on a comparison with animals.
In any case, one reason why people use metaphors is precisely the fact that the literal sense of the metaphor produces an effect. You call someone a “dancing bear”, and your readers are going to get a mental image of a dancing bear and (in so far as they accept what you say) associate it with the person you’re talking about. You don’t get to do that and claim you’re not comparing the person to an animal.
[EDITED to fix a trivial typo.]
BTW, the original, sourceable quotation uses the image of “a dog walking on its hind legs”. Your response still applies.
In all fairness, this describes a lot of lists of “achievements of minority X in field Y”. To some extent, it’s a natural result of looking for “achievements” from a tiny minority (e.g. Turks or whatever) in a field where they don’t really have a comparative advantage.
Eugene is saying not that “they don’t really have a comparative advantage”, but that they have a comparative disadvantage so strong that any purported great achievements should be dismissed as fakery, exaggeration, or, if it seems that one of them really has achieved something, “exceptions”. In Eugene’s view, they’re still nothing more than performing dogs, they’ve just managed the miracle, despite their intrinsic inferiority, of doing it as well as the best real people.
I think it’s possible to make the same point, drained of malice. To take Neil deGrasse Tyson as an example, he’s a PhD physicist, but when compared to other popularizers of science I’d say he’s closer to Bill Nye than he is to Carl Sagan when it comes to scientific productivity. (All three of those are people I like and respect, so this isn’t meant as a slur against any of them; if only there were more Nyes and Tysons and Sagans!)
Similarly, I remember the three recurring examples of scientists during my time in elementary school being Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and George Washington Carver. Again, all three are worthy of respect, but it’s misrepresenting the mechanics of science to see those three as equally prominent in the history of science, and when comparing groups what matters is not the most extreme member of each group, but the depth of the field.
I agree. But the less hyperbolically you make the point, the more reasonable it is to suggest that the shortage of Einstein-level black scientists is the result of factors other than a fundamental mental inferiority in the black population. And that wouldn’t suit Eugine’s purposes at all.
(It seems to me, though, that even quite a strong “race realist” position would not come close to justifying Eugine’s talk of dancing bears.)
To clarify things, do you believe that there are measurable IQ differences between populations or you think it’s all bloody nonsense made up by malicious people?
I haven’t looked at the evidence with enough care to have a strong opinion. I certainly don’t think the “race realist” position is impossible in principle. (Some versions of it, anyway. I’m sure there are stupid versions that are obviously wrong, but there are stupid versions of everything that are obviously wrong.) On the other hand, I’m not impressed by the quality of some of the research I’ve seen cited to support it, and the startling rapidity of the Flynn effect seems to me to give good reason to think that performance on IQ tests is more affected by cultural and/or environmental factors than everyone would like them to be. On the other other hand, while the relevant evidence is pretty shitty there does seem to be quite a lot of shitty evidence pointing the same way. On the other other other hand, most of the people making noise about the aforesaid evidence show signs of really genuinely being horrible racists, which is maybe what I’d expect if the evidence were crap and people only believed it because it suits their prejudices. On the other^4 hand, that’s also roughly what I’d expect if the evidence were perfectly OK but it were socially unacceptable to say such things, as in fact it is.
So, all things considered, I’m buggered if I know, and getting to the bottom of it seems like it would involve wading into a swamp of horrible racism on one side and kneejerk social justice on the other, filled with research that’s crappy because (1) doing decent research on this stuff is really difficult and (2) for very understandable reasons hardly anyone actually wants to work on it. Which sounds like a lot of No Fun.
So I’m reserving judgement and leaving that particular cesspool well alone; it occasionally makes itself slightly useful by encouraging people whose brains have been fried by one sort of politics or another to reveal themselves as such by shouting obnoxiously about it.
(My political prejudices incline me to the “it’s all bloody nonsense” side. My prejudice in favour of things with sciency-looking studies backing them up inclines me the other way. I try not to be pushed around too much by my prejudices.)
The first interesting question here is in whose interests it it to create a massive ugh field around studies of how humanity is structured and what are the differences between the groups. As a hint, consider from which direction the shit comes when you touch that field.
Is it? That’s not my impression and you say you prefer to stay away from the subject, so how would you know?
Yvain wrote a kinda- literature review a couple of years ago and didn’t find the evidence problematic. In fact, in his post he inserted a plea for someone to take apart that evidence and show that it’s wrong because he doesn’t like the conclusions. Yvain, in general, does not have problems taking studies apart and showing their failures. In this case he couldn’t.
There is also The Bell Curve book written by Charles Murray (and Richard Herrnstein) who isn’t exactly a foaming-at-the-mouth Neanderthal. And before that there’s Sociobiology by E.O.Wilson.
You might also find interesting a series of blog posts when a liberal blogger Andrew Sullivan discovered that race is linked with IQ and had an interesting conversation with another (black) commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates—see e.g. here.
At this point I usually switch to tentacles :-D
Don’t you think that the topic is important?
But yes, touching it is perilous to your social and professional reputation. I probably wouldn’t recommend honestly discussing it from an account easily linked to your Real Name. The Islamic practice of taqiyyah is relevant here :-)
That’s an interesting question, but I’m not at all sure it’s the first. Making it the first question seems like the same intellectual failure mode as Bulverism. In a hypothetical world (which may or may not be or resemble the real world) in which there are absolutely no systematic differences between “races” in anything other than superficial appearance, it seems to me there could still be all the same strong pressure against such research. (In particular, I don’t think it’s credible that the people generating such pressure have all already evaluated the evidence, realised on some level that “race realism” is definitely right, and started objecting to the research just for that reason.)
All I know is that the bits of evidence I’ve looked at—which, indeed, may be unrepresentative for some reason—looked bad to me. E.g., estimating that some country has an average IQ of 80ish on the basis of interpolating values from other nearby countries and treating that estimate as data; estimating national IQs on the basis of small and probably-unrepresentative samples.
I had a look and failed to find it. Got a link?
Whose reliability is pretty controversial.
My recollection is that one thing he was notable for was being a gay Republican. I’m not sure “liberal” is a great one-word description of him. (For the avoidance of doubt, “not best described in one word as ‘liberal’” is not a criticism in my idiolect.)
Alas, I have none and must make do with hands.
Depends on what “important” means. I’m pretty sure that whatever the truth is on this issue, knowing it with more confidence would make rather little difference to my life.
It’s not hard to link this one to my real name, and I have already honestly discussed it here in this thread. I don’t anticipate any terrible personal or professional consequences, but we’ll see.
It’s in his explanation of NRx piece. To quote from there (“biological hypothesis” is the one which says biology strongly affects IQ):
Getting to The Bell Curve,
Since we’re quoting Yvain, let’s continue:
As to
I recommend acquiring some. They are highly useful :-)
Pardon my ignorance, but all the “intellect realism” theories seem like they can be charitably paraphrased as group X:
has a different mean IQ than the general population and/or
has a different standard deviation for IQ and/or
has a significantly skewed distribution from the normal curve
I’ve seen claimed IQ means in the 80s for black Americans. Observationally, American public life includes many black people for whom I find it implausible that they aren’t pretty smart—eg Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Condeleeza Rice.
If I assume no difference in std dev or skew in intelligence distribution, it seems to me that I observe too many intelligent black folks for the mean to be in the 80s. Moreover, adding an assumption that std dev is lower doesn’t help—now the successful black folk are explained, but I don’t observe enough extreme low IQ folk.
That’s why I conclude some error exists in the assumption of an 80s mean IQ.
Why would we have to assume the IQs for groups, when we could just go out and give people tests?
More technically, the assumption that IQ is a good measure of intelligence across different sub-cultures.
Why would we have to assume that IQ is a good measure of intelligence across different sub-cultures? Aren’t there experiments we could perform to measure the validity?
It seems like a core assumption of the “intellectual” realists. I’m conceding it to strong-man the opposing argument. If we don’t assume IQ is culturally independent, the correlation between IQ and life outcome looks like a hidden-variable measure of social acceptability—i.e. an expected status quo bias if people prefer those they perceive as in-group. That just weakens the realist argument.
This would mean the IQ scores are meaningless for cross-country comparison. And that just aint’ so.
That’s not what that link says—best I can tell, the book summarized states living in a high-IQ country is more predictive of good life outcomes than your own IQ.
Getting down to brass tacks, we are assuming a lot when we compare IQ numbers from different tests. WIAS-IV is not necessarily comparable to other tests in English. Assuming that the French language test measures the same thing as the WIAS-IV assumes the very conclusion that I’m not agreeing with. (Although I’m not arguing this point in our other discussion).
You keep on saying “assuming” and Vaniver keeps on telling you that there is no need for assumptions: we have data. It’s not hard to give the same people different tests and then look at how do the scores correlate.
In fact, that’s how the whole concept of IQ came into being—IQ is an estimate of the general intelligence component (g) that is common to performance on a variety of intelligence-measuring tests.
Clarence Thomas is widely considered one of the worst Supreme Court justices in memory, and is famously uninvolved, going years without a question; he has also written harshly about how he feels affirmative action cheapened his degrees. Colin Powell’s parents are both Jamaican immigrants, similar to Malcolm Gladwell or Barack Obama whose father was African, highlighting how select and successful African immigrants are. Condoleezza Rice, amusingly enough, is almost as white as Obama is (which given the last admixture fractions I read, means she has about twice as much European genetics as the average African-American).
I don’t see why you think you observe remotely close to a population sample; ordinary observations are censored in many ways—how many supermax prisons do you visit every day? How many ghettos? When was the last time you saw a retarded person bashing their head against the wall? How many people do you know that are Creationists, anti-gay marriage, depressive, schizophrenic, on probation, demented, alcoholics, or have been sexually abused? What is your score on Murray’s high-IQ bubble quiz?
Now, moving on from absurd assertions from anecdotes, we can see that there are a reasonably large absolute number of intelligent black professionals who you might often run into, especially in government circles, by calculating the implications of the gap.
The gap has shrunk somewhat over time: http://humanvarieties.org/2013/01/15/secular-changes-in-the-black-white-cognitive-ability-gap/ It’s probably around 0.9 standard deviations right now, so the mean would not be ’80s’, it’d be 100-(0.9 * 15) = ~87.
The US black population is apparently ~38,929,319. People who strike one as notably intelligent tends to imply >=130 IQ, in my experience, or more specifically the famous 99th percentile, which specifically works out to 2.32SD. We combine this with the 0.9SD gap to get an equivalent selectiveness on blacks of 3.2SDs, which translates back to 0.21% of the black population. And out of 39m people, that’s a good
dnorm(qnorm(0.99) + 0.9) * 38929319 ~> 86,000black people who pass that highly stringent bar. So one could arrange to run into more intelligent black people than one could ever keep straight in one’s head without any contradiction of the gap.(Incidentally, given a life expectancy of something like 75 implies that there’s around 1173 very intelligent young black people each year being fought over by elite universities, which helps explain why they have such ferocious difficulties recruiting and why Harvard can be so thrilled at enrolling 170 black students.)
Thomas is extremely conservative, far out of the mainstream of American legal thought. That said, worse Supreme Court Justice is roughly like worst tenured physicist at MIT. It hardly means he isn’t smart. In particular, not-talking-during-oral-argument doesn’t mean not involved, and is another arguments-are-soldiers attack by liberal American legal society on someone who is admittedly far out of mainstream legal thought.
Your reference to his position on affirmative action is particularly confusing to me, because his point is a standard, fairly mainstream argument against AA. If that was his most extreme legal position, he’d be the swing vote, not the farthest right (or second farthest, depending on how one counts Alito).
The rest of your post is well taken, and I will have to think on it.
I can only point to my professional work as an attorney for special education students to give you a sense of my experience with what an 80 IQ student is like.
As are Rehnquist, Scalia, and others, yet Thomas is by far the least respected, least cited, and least noted. (Of all the people you had to cite as accomplished black people, you had to pick Clarence Thomas...) If Thomas is still so ‘extreme’ despite his bully pulpit for expounding & enforcing his views, that also says a lot about how good a justice he has been.
Not really. The tenure process at MIT can be trusted a lot more than ‘whatever candidate is young, politically expedient, and can be pushed through Congress’, especially considering that justice nominations used to be relatively deferential. A candidate has to be as bad as, say, Harriet Miers to get rejected. I don’t know how many physicists would make tenure with a similar slate of accomplishments and, to illustrate the relative looseness, highly public accusations of sexual harassment.
That would be reasonable to note if he wrote many majority opinions, played a large role in changing the others’ opinions (of course, then he’d look less ‘extreme’ if he was contributing behind the scenes, wouldn’t he?), or in any way was not a ghost who could be replaced by his clerks with no one the wiser.
You misunderstood my point. My point there was that I agree with the criticisms of AA as harmful and pernicious through its effects in promoting people to positions and degrees they are not fully qualified for (the relevance of which should be obvious), and I was noting that far from being a nasty personal attack by me on Thomas, he himself says it played a part in his career, and who are we to disagree?
That’s not an answer to any of my other questions. Why do you think your limited, bubble-filled experience is good evidence for overriding a century of carefully constructed tests drawing on millions of nationally representative people and exhaustively vetted for bias as documented in books like Jensen’s Bias in Mental Testing?
(Even if we granted your special ed beliefs accurate status, although I don’t know about that either—I too was a special ed kid, but any lawyer who spent some time with me as my family fought the school district would not have had a representative impression of special ed kids, both because I was unrepresentative (and that’s why I was mainstreamed), and because the long cumulative day to day interactions are different from occasional interactions. My mom still works with special ed kids and mentioned that one of her teachers had her nose broken by one of her kids who was handleable right up until he broke her nose; one of my best friends was also in special ed, and he could be a pretty decent guy for weeks or months at a time until his anger problems finally exploded at you—we drifted apart so I’m not sure what happened to him but last I heard he was in prison, which did not surprise me in the least bit. Life is as much about the lowest points as the average points.)
Thomas is the “least respected” because the left has a special hatred for black people who don’t toe the line and take the political side that they want black people to take, not because he is actually less worthy of respect than the other conservative justices.
I think this is almost certainly the case, as well as the fact that Thomas is even more extremely conservative than the others. So I found Gwern’s comment surprising, since he really seems to be attacking Thomas for his politics alone. As for the fact that he doesn’t get involved in the questions, he has said himself that the reason is that he already knows his opinion and it isn’t going to change. We have no reason to doubt this assertion, which is arrogant and overconfident, but which does not even come close to proving that he’s stupid. As for behind-the-scenes influence, it is very possible that he has had quite a bit, e.g. with the interpretation of the Second Amendment.
But it’s also obvious that Thomas is no legal genius. (Unlike, say, Scalia, who I actually abhor more, probably for that reason). Why no black legal geniuses, theoretical physicists, abstract mathematicians, or analytic philosophers? This is more telling than fishing about in the superior range, which, even on the assumptions, is only as rare as falling in the general population’s very-superior range.
There are lots of brilliant black scientists, I collaborate closely with one. You guys are toxic idiots, you should get out more and meet more smart people.
You know, sometimes the troll doesn’t even need to make people believe their point to win; they just need to make people treat their point as if it was seriously worth debating.
I don’t disagree, but I think LW (and slatestar actually) is too passive about these guys. There are nrx communities out on the net where they can debate their perfect society.
I can only remember one instance in which I noticed a black person in a CS class*. He clearly wasn’t connecting with anyone else there on a cultural level, but he was making much better observations and comments than most anyone else (some of the people who sounded like a Racial Realist’s dream programmers were answering simple questions with facepalm-worthy wonkiness).
What stuck out to me most, though, was whenever the teacher would elaborate on or correct any of that black student’s responses, the student would respond to everything with a very submissive and depressed-sounding “Yes sir.” He didn’t sound quite so broken in any other context as that. He disappeared halfway through the semester and I have no idea why (was he better at in-class discussion than tests or homework? Did he drop the class because he didn’t like it? Were there other classes he wanted/needed into which conflicted with it? Did he quit school entirely?)
It seemed abundantly clear to me that, of all the students that spoke up during class, this one was probably in the top 3 in terms of understanding the material, at least in a classroom context. There might have been problems, but I wouldn’t dare pin them on intelligence. Culture seemed dramatically and obviously a source of tension. If there were others, they were not where I could observe them.
* There could have been others I missed, or that were in previous classes who I just forgot about. I can only identify race based on accent (which I should point out is not genetic) or if someone else points it out without being contradicted by other evidence. … Well, and names, sometimes, but those aren’t genetic, either.
Latinos as well—both Cruz and Rubio have been called “traitors”.
You are repeating a Democratic Party talking point as fact. A particularly stupid talking point. One of the reasons I used Thomas as an example is to try to push against this stupid assertion by those who are otherwise my political allies.
In point of fact, Thomas writes about 1⁄9 of the Supreme Court opinions and deals with about 1⁄9 of the other legal work (motions, etc), as would be expected of a body with nine members. I can’t speak to behind-the-scenes influence. As a lawyer, I don’t think any of the current Justices has historically notable intellectual influence except Scalia (Rehnquist also was unusually influential, by he is no longer on the court).
Speaking of which, neither Rehnquist nor Scalia are outside the mainstream of American legal thought. Their legal theories are notably on the conservative side, but well within the current Overton window of legal thought. To say Rehnquist and Scalia are as extreme as Thomas is another Democratic Party talking point.
I see a wide range of students in my practice with many different profiles. It would be a mistake to conclude that a student with your profile was representative of all special education students. Given the broad scope of special education coverage, no special education student is truly “typical” of special education in general. At best, one student might be typical of a sub-population of a particular eligibility category, but likely not.
My experience with special education is presented to justify my conclusion that a student with an IQ of 80 is incapable of producing the kind of work Thomas routinely produces. I’m skeptical whether many 100 IQ students could create a career path like Thomas’ path. That’s relevant to the argument because the number of “black swan” high IQ people we observe should be related to the mean IQ of the population.
Separately, I’m well aware that an 80 IQ student is not typical of a special education student. In point of law, an 80 IQ by itself is not likely to lead a student to be formally included in special education. At a minimum, student must be within a particular category of need, such as autism spectrum or emotional dysfunction, to be entitled to legal classification as a special education student.
No one’s denying that. The “race realists” claim not that all black people in the US have an IQ in the 80-90 range, but that the average IQ of black people in the US is in the 80-90 range. That’s perfectly consistent, as gwern said, with plenty of those people being very smart.
Clearly you don’t get onto the Supreme Court without being distinctly cleverer than average. For all his negative comments about Clarence Thomas, gwern is not (so far as I can see) denying that.
Yup. But “smart enough to be on the Supreme Court” doesn’t seem to me like black-swan IQ, even in a (real or hypothetical) subpopulation with an average IQ in the eighties. Unusual, sure. But well within the range we should expect there to be plenty of.
My understanding was that Thomas only writes his fair share when you include all his idiosyncratic one-man dissents which influence no one and have failed to move the Overton Window. Is that wrong?
Kind of important a thing to leave out in a political role like that of the nine.
Gee, I wonder why. Could it have something to do with Rehnquist and Scalia’s opinions actually being more persuasive, as I already suggested?
Personally, I am not bothered by Thomas’s originalism, as you seem to think; if I had to classify myself, I’d have to admit to considerable sympathy with his positions as I’ve noted in the past on LW (I think, possibly I argued it elsewhere), originalism is the only position which makes any kind of sense, and the attempts to move away from it and reinterpret it as liberals wish reflects the fact that the Constitution is atrociously outdated and irrelevant because the updating mechanisms have failed completely due to the continual growth of the USA. (When was the last Constitutional amendment which mattered? Do you expect to see another meaningful amendment in your lifetime? I don’t.) But the American political system is unable to acknowledge this or come up with any solution, and so we get absurdities like the Supreme Court saying the Constitution protects a right to gay marriage or trying to ban the death penalty, which makes about as much sense as saying the Bible or the Koran protect a right to gay marriage or disapprove of the death penalty.
What I am bothered by is his apparent failure to contribute much to the Court in asking questions to get to the heart of issues, mold or at least influence the thinking of his peers, and influence the majority opinions which matter. A justice who neither is influenced nor influences is a waste of space, and even harmful—like IE6 or Google’s neglect of Google Reader. In contrast, I much prefer to read Rehnquist or Scalia’s opinions because they were not so blind or irrelevant.
I’m sure they couldn’t, at least not without extenuating circumstances like very able aids or an extremely gross imbalance of verbal and other skills. (IQs are just of the general factor, individual skills can be much higher or lower than the mean; someone can write very well even if they wouldn’t understand a statistic if it bit them on the arse.)
But Thomas could easily be one of the 80k that the normal distribution implies, or be a bit below, maybe 97th or 98th percentile or something, which increases the numbers of candidates substantially (more than 3x) while still being plausible. (When I look at thresholds on IQ and characteristics broken down by deciles, I get the impression that for anything which is a fraction of a standard deviation, it is more a difference of quantity than quality; someone 1⁄3 or 2⁄3 SDs lower can do just about anything the other person can do, but with more time and effort, perhaps, while at 1 SD it starts to seem like there are things the lower person just won’t get with any reasonable amount of time/effort. So a lot of 130 is just plain out of reach for 100, but not for 120.)
As well, the normal distribution is rarely exactly true; for example, when it comes to intelligence, very rare or de novo mutations mean there is an excess of retarded or very disabled people than the calculations would predict, because one mutation in the wrong place can break a mind, and there are a few phenomenon which might create little bumps in the black tail as well—most obviously, given your mentioned examples, immigrants from Africa or the Caribbeans, but a few other things like assortative mating might also happen.
Yes. Check out Scotusblog if you want to look at other terms.
Oral argument is performance, not persuasion. The evidence of influence is citation of majority decisions in future terms and future courts. In other words, the rest of that paragraph would be just as true without reference to questions at oral argument. Please stop repeating the stupid talking point.
Thomas is an originalist only if one thinks that the US Constitution is intended to codify natural law. Many originalists across the political spectrum don’t. Further, I’m much more of a textualist, and textualism and natural law get together like oil and water.
This is the heart of the issue. I think an 85 IQ would have difficulty consistently simulating a 100 IQ in professional life. But the evidence on this is too sparse for me to persuasively present in this forum. So I’m trying to highlight how we see too many black swans. Which itself is complicated by the difficulty in distinguishing between 120 &130.
The Constitution protects all rights that are originally retained by the people:
If there is a natural right to gay marriage, the Constitution protects it. That is, the Constitution protects gay marriage to the extent that recognition of gay marriage is in some sense naturally required as a precondition of fostering “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; as are the rights to free speech and free exercise of religion, to self-defense and self-organized collective defense, and all of the other rights recognized in the U.S. Constitution. A natural right “is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.” (United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542, 553 (1876))
I like the Ninth Amendment too, but it’s worth noting that the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges cited the due process and equal protection clauses, not natural rights: one could argue that the rationale was absurd even if the outcome was correct.
So, the 14th Amendment protects “privileges or immunities.” There’s some of historical evidence of what those might include. But in the Slaughterhouse cases, the Supreme Court drained the phrase of any legal significance. There are many legal scholars across the political spectrum who think the Slaughterhouse cases are inconsistent with original public meaning.
Those scholars who think Obergefell, Roe, and such are consistent with original public meaning tend to say that “substantive” due process should be understood as code for “privileges or immunities.”
Huh? What would the word “protection” in the latter clause refer to, if not protection of natural rights?
It’s a controversial position that natural rights are what the Constitution protects, even among legal scholars who think the Constitution should be interpreted according to original public meaning (most “originalists”).
One and two, yes, but I haven’t seen data that would indicate some population has a significant skew in its IQ distribution.
Why don’t you do the numbers? The purely-black IQ mean is about 85, I believe. A great deal of American blacks have some admixture of whte genes, so I think the IQ average for US blacks is in high 80s, maybe 90. There are about 42m of them. So lets’ try three standard deviations above the mean, IQ > 130-135, more or less. That would be about 0.13% of the population, so about 56,700 individuals. You’d actually expect a bit more because many people with a lot of white genes (which would push their expected IQ up) identify as black.
How many do you observe? :-/
You can also look at IQ proxies, like SAT. Here are 2015 scores by race—LW sucks at formatting tables, but basically scores of whites (average ~530) are consistently about 100 points above the scores of blacks (average ~430). Asians score the highest.
First, 42 million includes children for who I doubt there is a public criteria we can agree on as proxy for intelligence. Second, I’m not sure IQ > 130 is .13%. Wikipedia suggests 1%.
Since those cut in opposite directions, let’s pretend they wash out. I am comfortable asserting there are more than 60k black folks in the set of:
senior military officers (colonel or greater)
highly successful national public intellectuals (eg Powell, Coates, Rice)
highly successful lawyers (Clarence Thomas is top 1% of lawyers)
highly successful MDs & research PhDs (eg Neil DeGrasse Tyson).
highly successful media/entertainment personalities (Sean “Diddy” Combs, Oprah, etc).
highly successful technocrats (mayors / police chiefs / school superintendent in large metro areas)
As discussed elsewhere in this thread, Neil DeGrasse Tyson is “media science personality” not a successful researcher.
It doesn’t take that much intelligence to be elected Mayor. Especially if your black in a majority black city and the electorate votes on tribal solidarity. Hence a few infamous cases, like Mayor Marion Barry of DC.
The tail above three standard deviations for a normal distribution constitutes about 0.13% of the population.
Media/entertainment personalities can be oh so very dumb :-)
Otherwise, I am doubting your assertion. Do you have data?
From personal experience, there are lots of dumb lawyers. When I say highly successful, I mean roughly the level of screening that occurs through promotion from fresh-out-of-academy lieutenant to colonel.
For reference, Clarence Thomas easily clears the bar I’m trying to set, as did Johnny Cochran before he died. For entertainers, it seems clear that talent isn’t correlated with intelligence. But I think staying power requires some, so the ultra-successful are candidates.
For my broader argument, the categories I set out are potentially under-inclusive. There are lots of folks (like business people) not included in the categories I explicitly listed. We also haven’t included any children, on the grounds that we don’t agree on how to identify them.
Yeah, but it’s all hand-waving. I see this if I squint this way and you see that if you squint that way…
You originally said
You, personally, observe too many? Is that statement true? Or do you merely expect to see many?
By convenience sampling in my personal life and observing public figures, I see a certain proportion of successful folk are black. Extrapolating from the proportion I see, 60k smart black folks is plausible. A much lower number is not plausible. What number of smart black folk should we expect to see if the mean were 85?
Public figures are what, a few dozen at most? So you rely on your personal sample and why in the world do you think that it’s representative?
Let’s take our favourite people—Alice and Bob. Alice lives in rural Alabama. She knows zero smart black people and extrapolates her personal sample to “all black folk are stupid”. Bob hails from Idaho and is an undergrad at Harvard -- 100% of black people he knows are very smart. He extrapolates his personal sample to “all black people are smart”. Why is your sample any better than Alice’s or Bob’s?
Most IQ scales set the standard deviation at 15 points, not 10 points.
Yes, but we are starting from the mean which is 85 in this particular case.
Oh, I see. I was confused about what calculation you were doing; my apologies.
African American mean IQ is typically measured at 85 to 90. Sub-Saharan African IQs are difficult to estimate because of a number of factors, but 85 is much higher than typical estimates.
Observing three people isn’t observing many people. Blacks like those people aren’t in the majority. Most blacks are less successful than most whites.
Gotcha. Unfortunately, the link to that “sympathetic and extraordinarily impressive defence” is broken. I don’t suppose you happen to know of another source for it?
It’s maybe worth saying a word or two about the context for that quotation: Yvain was writing about the tendency to take “someone wrote a decent-looking rebuttal to X” as justification for saying “X has been refuted and debunked”. His argument is not “TBC is in fact right because all these people say positive things about it”—that’s just the mirror image of the thing he’s objecting to. It’s “You don’t get to claim that TBC has been refuted just because lots of eminent people trashed it—look, lots of equally eminent people defended it too.” With which I agree. Which is why I called it “pretty controversial” rather than, say, “known to be bad”.
Well, the usual...
D’oh!
Note that some forms of the “biological hypothesis” are especially hard to refute. Few people disagree that eating too much lead paint as a child will give you a low IQ. If black kids eat a lot more lead paint than white kids, the end result will be that blacks will on average be rather bad at science, and scholarship in general.
The biological hypothesis pretty much means genetics. There are a lot of environmental influences (from eating lead paint chips to being deficient in iodine to being dropped on one’s head as a child) that are well-known to affect IQ.
AIUI, Eugine The Fourth is trying to suggest that there’s something more than this going on: that black people are underrepresented in lists of successful people not because there are few of them but because they’re mentally inferior for some (presumably genetic) reason.
Black people are not a tiny minority globally, so to first order it would be evidence for that theory if in fact lists of successful black people look like lists of successful Turkish people.
Of course there are other factors; e.g., most of Africa is grindingly poor—though I expect Eugine would say, or at least imply, that that’s because Africa is full of mentally-inferior people—and while there are quite a lot of black people in the USA they’ve historically had some difficulties to contend with.
Funny how that worked out for Jews in Medieval Europe...
So, first of all, if you drew up a list of highly successful people in mediaeval Europe, I don’t think there would be many Jews there.
Secondly, I take it you have in mind Cochran’s theory that European Jews are super-smart because of evolutionary pressure from mediaeval persecution. But Cochran’s story isn’t simply “they were persecuted, persecution leads to more brains, the end”. It depends crucially on the details of the persecution. And the treatment of black slaves in the US is very different in pretty much every relevant respect from the treatment of Jews in mediaeval Europe. The Jews were forbidden to do many jobs but highly lucrative finance was (for bizarre path-dependent reasons) open to them; black slaves in the US were given backbreaking physical labour to do and had no opportunity to choose their work. The Jews were left more or less alone much of the time but subject to occasional slaughter where the best opportunities for survival went to those who anticipated trouble, had accumulated valuable resources for escape, etc; black slaves in the US were subject to constant low-level mistreatment and occasional individual murder, and opportunities for getting the hell out were … limited. European Jews, Cochran suggests, had very little inward gene flow; female black slaves in the US were routinely made pregnant by their owners, and I’m pretty sure the children were generally (1) also slaves and (2) considered black.
Depends on whether you see the glass as half-full or half-empty. From Murray’s Human Accomplishment on that topic, pg292:
Personally, I would say that a 30x overrepresentation in the 1100s-1300s is rather medieval, and pretty respectable especially considering the constraints they labored under.
And obviously those constraints did make a difference because once the constraints starting being lifted, Jews began overperforming even more to a degree so absurd that if it were a novel, you’d throw it against the wall in disgust and angrily tweet at the author to look up the phrase ‘Mary Sue’:
(I won’t quote any more since I know we’re all familiar with Jewish performance in the 1900s.)