Well, there’s a correlation between race and height, too, no doubt, but such correlation is utterly insignificant comparing to variance within either race—you don’t say whites are taller or blacks are taller, there’s very short black populations and very tall ones, and ditto for the whites whose variance is smaller.
The quantitative differences make a qualitative difference here.
Racists believe the correlation to be of greater significance than that of correlation between the height and intelligence. Based on fairly poor evidence—Raven’s matrices are not this culture fair, they’re culture fair in the sense that you can test British, Germans, French, Russian, and Chinese and Japanese with it, not in the sense that you can go and test some tribe that doesn’t do much arithmetic nor is exposed to similar visual stimuli.
By the way given the diversity of blacks it would be utterly surprising if there is not a single ethnicity there with an average IQ greater than 100, as well as IQ with greater or smaller variance. (I would expect blacks to have larger variance than whites because they’re plain more diverse, and mixed to have greater variance still)
Then the “rational” racists also object to use or even the existence of correlation between such racism and intelligence, conscientiousness, education, and other factors.
Notice I said nothing at all about racism or our policy responses to race. Of course intra-group variation is more important, that’s obvious and applies to height too. This much is well known and irrelevant to my point.
The thing I’m interested here is why it’s commonly accepted that there ought (in a strong moral sense) to be no correlation. Not our response to the actual existence of that correlation.
Based on fairly poor evidence—Raven’s matrices are not this culture fair, they’re culture fair in the sense that you can test British, Germans, French, Russian, and Chinese and Japanese with it, not in the sense that you can go and test some tribe that doesn’t do much arithmetic nor is exposed to similar visual stimuli.
I am not aware of any test of pattern recognition that is more culture fair than Raven’s, but would love to hear of one if you’re familiar with one, and I would be rightfully suspicious of the intellectual capabilities of a tribe that has not invented arithmetic.
By the way given the diversity of blacks it would be utterly surprising if there is not a single ethnicity there with an average IQ greater than 100
I’m not aware of many ethnicity-level studies; I think the best we have are nationality-level studies. The highest country mean in all of Africa that I’m aware of is Morocco, with 85.
I am not aware of any test of pattern recognition that is more culture fair than Raven’s, but would love to hear of one if you’re familiar with one
It’s an interesting and very common form of an entirely irrational argument. (Hypothetical) absence of a better test in no way implies that it is a good enough test for a select purpose. Especially when no one really tried to quantify the error you might get.
and I would be rightfully suspicious of the intellectual capabilities of a tribe that has not invented arithmetic.
I said, “doesn’t do much arithmetic”. You can look at the whites 1000 or 2000 years ago and vast majority don’t do much arithmetic. “Haven’t invented arithmetic” is your invention.
It’s an interesting and very common form of an entirely irrational argument. (Hypothetical) absence of a better test in no way implies that it is a good enough test for a select purpose. Especially when no one really tried to quantify the error you might get.
I prefer quantitative arguments to qualitative arguments; relatedly, I prefer certainty as a number to certainty as a word. I think it’s better to make the most of mediocre data (and figure out which additional data is highest EV) than to throw out the best data available.
It is not true that people haven’t tried to quantify the error they might get; this is actually a major concern of psychometricians. They’ve figured out several ways that a test can go wrong, and have come up with quantitative measures on how much those seem to have happened. For example, a problem with WWI-era IQ tests was that the modal number of correct questions was 0, which suggests that a large number of test-takers did not understand the instructions, which dropped the uncorrected mean significantly. Now they look for this problem.
For example, here’s a paper about Raven’s in Africa, which goes through the various ways that Raven’s could underestimate African intelligence. It’s full of quantative statements like “the correlation with other intellectual tests is generally about .6 in Western studies, but is .33 in African studies, suggesting it is less g-loaded for Africans.”*
If you wanted, you could figure out what an individual Raven’s score of 80 implies for any other cognitive test in Westerners and Africans respectively. Like any Bayesian exercise, this relies pretty heavily on the priors you choose: if you assume the score is accurate but not precise, then you have a mean centered on 80 but a difference variance for the two groups, with a larger African variance because your test is less precise. If you assume both groups have the Western mean, then the regression to the mean (i.e. upwards) is higher for the African than the Westerner, again because the test was less precise.
*I should point out that there are other, competing interpretations of this finding, and it seems that the correlation is lower for the more rural and less educated, suggesting the left half of Fig 4 is due to culture. But from the studies on the right half of Fig 4, we would end up with an estimate for African intelligence given Western culture that’s about 80-85, which is a bit lower than African American intelligence.
I said, “doesn’t do much arithmetic”. You can look at the whites 1000 or 2000 years ago and vast majority don’t do much arithmetic. “Haven’t invented arithmetic” is your invention.
I was thinking of anumeric tribes, which are rare enough that we’re not quite sure whether or not they exist. But many tribes seem at least partially anumeric, and I would be surprised if that were not predictive of the mean IQ of people currently in the tribe (setting aside the question of ‘genetic IQ capability’).
That most Romans did not do much arithmetic over the course of their lives doesn’t say all that much about their ability to do arithmetic or their general intellectual capability; most modern Americans don’t do much arithmetic (and, actually, they probably do less because they have more machines to do it for them).
Well, there’s a correlation between race and height, too, no doubt, but such correlation is utterly insignificant comparing to variance within either race—you don’t say whites are taller or blacks are taller, there’s very short black populations and very tall ones, and ditto for the whites whose variance is smaller.
The quantitative differences make a qualitative difference here.
Racists believe the correlation to be of greater significance than that of correlation between the height and intelligence. Based on fairly poor evidence—Raven’s matrices are not this culture fair, they’re culture fair in the sense that you can test British, Germans, French, Russian, and Chinese and Japanese with it, not in the sense that you can go and test some tribe that doesn’t do much arithmetic nor is exposed to similar visual stimuli.
By the way given the diversity of blacks it would be utterly surprising if there is not a single ethnicity there with an average IQ greater than 100, as well as IQ with greater or smaller variance. (I would expect blacks to have larger variance than whites because they’re plain more diverse, and mixed to have greater variance still)
Then the “rational” racists also object to use or even the existence of correlation between such racism and intelligence, conscientiousness, education, and other factors.
Notice I said nothing at all about racism or our policy responses to race. Of course intra-group variation is more important, that’s obvious and applies to height too. This much is well known and irrelevant to my point.
The thing I’m interested here is why it’s commonly accepted that there ought (in a strong moral sense) to be no correlation. Not our response to the actual existence of that correlation.
I am not aware of any test of pattern recognition that is more culture fair than Raven’s, but would love to hear of one if you’re familiar with one, and I would be rightfully suspicious of the intellectual capabilities of a tribe that has not invented arithmetic.
I’m not aware of many ethnicity-level studies; I think the best we have are nationality-level studies. The highest country mean in all of Africa that I’m aware of is Morocco, with 85.
It’s an interesting and very common form of an entirely irrational argument. (Hypothetical) absence of a better test in no way implies that it is a good enough test for a select purpose. Especially when no one really tried to quantify the error you might get.
I said, “doesn’t do much arithmetic”. You can look at the whites 1000 or 2000 years ago and vast majority don’t do much arithmetic. “Haven’t invented arithmetic” is your invention.
I prefer quantitative arguments to qualitative arguments; relatedly, I prefer certainty as a number to certainty as a word. I think it’s better to make the most of mediocre data (and figure out which additional data is highest EV) than to throw out the best data available.
It is not true that people haven’t tried to quantify the error they might get; this is actually a major concern of psychometricians. They’ve figured out several ways that a test can go wrong, and have come up with quantitative measures on how much those seem to have happened. For example, a problem with WWI-era IQ tests was that the modal number of correct questions was 0, which suggests that a large number of test-takers did not understand the instructions, which dropped the uncorrected mean significantly. Now they look for this problem.
For example, here’s a paper about Raven’s in Africa, which goes through the various ways that Raven’s could underestimate African intelligence. It’s full of quantative statements like “the correlation with other intellectual tests is generally about .6 in Western studies, but is .33 in African studies, suggesting it is less g-loaded for Africans.”*
If you wanted, you could figure out what an individual Raven’s score of 80 implies for any other cognitive test in Westerners and Africans respectively. Like any Bayesian exercise, this relies pretty heavily on the priors you choose: if you assume the score is accurate but not precise, then you have a mean centered on 80 but a difference variance for the two groups, with a larger African variance because your test is less precise. If you assume both groups have the Western mean, then the regression to the mean (i.e. upwards) is higher for the African than the Westerner, again because the test was less precise.
*I should point out that there are other, competing interpretations of this finding, and it seems that the correlation is lower for the more rural and less educated, suggesting the left half of Fig 4 is due to culture. But from the studies on the right half of Fig 4, we would end up with an estimate for African intelligence given Western culture that’s about 80-85, which is a bit lower than African American intelligence.
I was thinking of anumeric tribes, which are rare enough that we’re not quite sure whether or not they exist. But many tribes seem at least partially anumeric, and I would be surprised if that were not predictive of the mean IQ of people currently in the tribe (setting aside the question of ‘genetic IQ capability’).
That most Romans did not do much arithmetic over the course of their lives doesn’t say all that much about their ability to do arithmetic or their general intellectual capability; most modern Americans don’t do much arithmetic (and, actually, they probably do less because they have more machines to do it for them).