By and large, I tend to err on the side of respecting the current scientific consensus, and it appears to have been “differences in IQ are attribute to nurture factors mostly” since about the 1930-ies. Besides that, my guess is that people who had a vested interest in the maintenance of a racist, sexist, etc. worldview (namely, rich white men) had more wealth and power at their disposal than those who had the opposite vested interest, which means they have some influence over funding and publication, publicity, acclaim and awarding, etc. If racism were provably right beyond reasonable doubt, I assume they would have made damn sure everyone knew it. If the alternative hypothesis has prevailed in spite of these odds, I would assume that it had a very strong appearance of being provably less wrong.
Of course, if white-rich-men funded and influenced research concluded that these rich white dudes were not the smartest bunch overall, and, say, arab women were instead, and that this racist view prevailed and became the scientific consensus against these controlling interests’ … interests, I would assume it to be true.
In short, if most scientists agree on a paradigm in spite of the fact that it’s inconvenient to those scientis’ bosses, I believe that that paradigm is more likely to be true.
This is of course assuming that the studies are done rigorously and faithfully, with good experiment design, good analysis of the statistic, intelligent and pertinent drawing of conclusions, etc etc.; that scientists aren’t being stupid and aren’t screwing with the results. As someone who used to believe what he’d read in Talent Is Overrated, and whose views on nutrition and the science thereof have been badly unsettled by Good Calories, Bad Calories, I can guarantee that I for one wouldn’t be able to tell the difference without help.
Ashkenazi Jews are something like slightly less than one standard deviation above whites, so in the 110-115 range. East Asians (Han Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, etc) score a little higher, about 103-106. The size of the standard deviations within groups also varies between groups.
Also if you look into the sub-factors that g measures, you’ll find variation. Some groups have higher Verbal than Visuospatial for example, though I don’t remember which ones have which at the moment.
Thank you. Those are some interesting results. Due to my limited capacity to compile and properly evaluate research (call it laziness), I’ll just take your word for it and accept them.
So, if I understand you right, some demographics are proven, beyond reasonable doubt, to have a higher IQ than others, by and large and with some idiosyncrasies in distribution and aspects. Said IQ actuallhy reliably measures something, and that something is well-defined and resembles what is commonly thought of as “intelligence”. Okay. Well, what now?
To clarify, that bit is clear, but one should understand that the evidence that that correlation is genetic is much weaker. There are a lot of other possible explanations, including early childhood education, cultural correlates at a young age, nutrition levels, parasite load, stereotype threat, and everything else sometimes put under a catchall of socioeconomic factors. Ashenazi Jews for example are one of the best performing groups, but there are some massive confounding factors since there’s a heavily intellectual culture that emphasizes learning.
It means that any political argument, any social policy, any philosophy, predicated on the cognitive abilities of groups being equal, needs to be re-evaluated. A lot of things have it as a hidden assumption. Here are a few examples:
Immigration. In order to make a proper analysis of what X number of migrants per year will do to the country, it’s not enough to assume that each potential migrant has the same cognitive capacity relative to both other migrants and to the natives. If migrants from ethnic group A have a higher IQ than ethnic group B, is it a good idea to let a lot of Bs into the country?
School performance. Though it has closed a little over the decades, the gap between Black and White achievement in schools remains persistent and large. All manner of interventions have been tried to try to close the gap. If it is due to a real genetic difference between the two groups, much of this may have been pointless. Given what we also know about the drawbacks of mixed-ability classrooms, segregation comes back on the table as a plausible candidate.
Fertility. In the US, the White total fertility rate is below replacement (1.84), while Blacks are just above (2.11). Hispanics are even higher, at 2.99. What implications does this have for the intellectual capital of the USA in the coming decades?
International competition. China does not have the same taboos on group differences in cognitive ability that the Western world does. They are also quite happy and capable to do immense social engineering programs. Putting the two together …
These individuals would have an incentive to cheat the tests to get into the country.
The better way of course, is just to limit immigration to high-skilled workers, or with qualifications above a certain threshold. A lot of countries already do this. The only thing we’d need to change is our response to noticing that the ethnicities that tend to meet the requirements aren’t representative of those that apply.
These individuals would have an incentive to cheat the tests to get into the country.
The incentive is there, but how much cheating would follow? Teenagers taking GCSE & A-level exams have incentives to cheat too, but the observed rate of exam malpractice is nonetheless very low, about 0.02%. No doubt some cheating isn’t caught, but even if all malpractice were cheating, and 99% of cheating went undetected, the cheat rate would be a scant 2%.
More generally, is the potential for cheating the true objection here? (It seems worth asking that rather than silently downvoting, troll toll be damned.) Unless cheating were really pervasive, raising the IQ threshold for entry could maintain the average IQ of immigrants granted entry.
It’s very easy to inflate your score on an IQ test by prepping. They’re designed to be taken without any familiarity of the material or context. I don’t know exactly how much you can eke out by studying say, Raven’s Matrices, but it’s large enough that the predictive value of the tests would drop like a stone. In contrast, GCSE/A-Level exams are designed knowing that students spend a great deal of effort studying and revising for them.
If an IQ test were developed that had the retest effect as a feature rather than a bug, I’d be more in favor of using them for immigrants.
Ah, I’d interpreted “cheating” to mean nefarious activity taking place during or after the test, not pre-test coaching or preparation.
It’s very easy to inflate your score on an IQ test by prepping.
This much is true. But
I don’t know exactly how much you can eke out by studying say, Raven’s Matrices, it’s large enough that the predictive value of the tests would drop like a stone.
is probably false. There’re three reasons why I say that.
In the real world, IQ & IQ-like tests appear to work as usual, even when taken by thousands of people who can prep as much as they like. The US Armed Forces are content to test a million people a year with the ASVAB, despite the proliferation of ASVAB prepping resources. As another example, standardized tests like the GRE predict graduate students’ GPA, faculty ratings, and even the number of citations to their publications; this is all the more impressive considering the range restriction of ability among the prospective students taking the tests!
Logically, prep-induced score boosts don’t necessarily imply a drop in predictive validity. If people who started with high scores gained more from prepping than people who started with low scores, a test’s predictive validity could go up, because widening the gap between high- & low-scorers can improve the test’s ability to distinguish the two groups. And there are cases where high-scorers gainedmore from practising, although the effect on predictive validity as such doesn’t look like it was measured in those studies.
One can also look at how much practice reduces the g loading of IQ tests. It looks like the reduction in g loading is typically small. This review article gives various examples:
Neubauer and Freudenthaler (1994) showed that after 9 h of practice the g loading of a modestly complex intelligence test dropped from .46 to .39. Te Nijenhuis, Voskuijl, and Schijve (2001) showed that after various forms of test preparation the g loadedness of their test battery decreased from .53 to .49. [pages 284-285]
Using the combined experimental and control group, a principle axis factor analysis on the pretest and posttest scores, respectively, resulted in a first unrotated factor explaining 22% of the variance in the pretest scores and 18% of the variance in the posttest scores. [page 294]
That last result comes from a study of South African psychology students, mostly non-white, some of whom were randomly assigned to “mediated learning” training; all of them were tested twice with none other than Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices.
As my stats professor used to say “data costs money.”
For every IQ test you need to pay a psychologist trained in using that test to administer and score it. And since this is supposed to be scaled up for millions of people that means paying full-time trainers, scoring committees, not to mention buying large amounts of testing materials from whichever company winds up winning the bidding process.
Race is a weak measure but it also happens to be a very cheap one. Setting quotas based on race and providing exceptions by educational/professional merit would let in most of the high-IQ workers we want while preventing dysgenic and culturally destabilizing mass immigration.
(This ignores, of course, the massive numbers of illegal immigrants who would still be free to come in at will and stay as long as they care to. That is a serious issue as well, and one unlikely to be resolved by psychometric testing.)
For most people, moving to a country that’s better for them creates orders of magnitude more value than any plausible cost of an IQ test that would need to be covered, so it’s an irrelevant consideration.
It looks like there are roughly one million legal immigrants a year plus another eight million visa seekers, just looking at the US numbers. A professionally administered IQ test can go for anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars; it’s hard to find a good number, but I’ve seen everything from $300 on the low end to $4000 on the high end. So it’s not hyperbole to say that this is easily a multi-billion dollar a year commitment, just on the basis of the testing alone without thinking about administrative costs or government waste.
Now you’re right to say that any individual tested would be worth more than that; either avoiding a burden or gaining a productive worker would more than make up the difference. But it seems that in most cases you could get the same decision with a resume and a color swatch; the value of the whole program dpeends on the corner cases where casual observation and psychometric tests disagree, and the shape of the normal curve implies that this region is a fairly small one to carry such a large price tag.
In other words, why not use the data we have rather than going through an expensive data collection process if that data is unlikely to change our decisions to a degree which would justify the costs?
It is interesting to look at how the US already handles IQ testing on this scale. The United States Military Entrance Processing Command administered the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery to 460,000 people “during fiscal year 2011” at exam sites around the country, plus “658,000 high school students [...] under the Department of Defense Student ASVAB Testing Program during the 2010-11 school year.”
So it’s not hyperbole to say that this is easily a multi-billion dollar a year commitment, just on the basis of the testing alone
I can’t find quotes for how much administering the ASVAB costs nowadays, but a 2002 report from the National Research Council’s Board on Testing and Assessment quotes a cost of “about $20 per administration”. There’s also a 1976 report to Congress by the Comptroller General of the US, which says on p. ii that the DoD “spent about $4.7 million during fiscal year 1974 to support its high school recruiting and testing program, testing about 1.1 million students for enlistment eligibility”, or $4.27ish per testee. The former estimate is $25.96 after inflation, the latter $20.23. Pessimistically rounding up the bigger estimate to $26, and multiplying by 9 million, suggests a total cost of $234 million.
It occurs to me that this cost could be defrayed by charging potential immigrants. The US charges hundreds of dollars in visa fees as things stand, so adding a $25 testing surcharge ought not prove unduly punishing to the huddled masses.
By and large, I tend to err on the side of respecting the current scientific consensus, and it appears to have been “differences in IQ are attribute to nurture factors mostly” since about the 1930-ies.
And how did you actually gain your view of what the current scientific consensus is? Remember, the popular media hasn’t managed to get its head around the fact that IQ even measures anything, when the scientific consensus says it does. If you only read what the New York Times says about IQ, you’d be much more likely to consider hypotheses that are empirically garbage, like Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. If the press can’t wrap its head around the validity of IQ, how can you even expect it to report faithfully on something that is both predicated on that fact, and ginormously controversial in its own right?
We know that IQ differences aren’t mostly nurture, and that has been quietly accepted by psychometricians for decades.
Also, I believe you’re starting with a false assumption about just how much power “rich white men” actually have in academia. The people that grant funding in these fields aren’t rich white businessmen, they’re mild-mannered scholars with tenure. Remember that this is at the cross-section between sociology and psychology, both of which tend to be populated by people with the cluster of political leanings variously called “leftist”, “liberal”, “progressive” or “socialist”, depending on who you ask. You must have read about the blank-slatist dogma of psychology that still persists in diminished form up to the present day.
(And FYI, the data suggests that rich white men are in 3rd place, behind East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews, and there are probably other ethnic groups that outperform WASPs that we haven’t managed to get good data for yet, the Parsis of India for example.)
EDIT
I’m pleased that you recognize that we’re circling dangerously close to the Noncentral Fallacy when using the term “racist” in these kinds of discussions. It can lead to Denotation/Connotation confusions that just drag down the quality of debate. I appreciate the irony in asking, but it would make things go smoother if we taboo it.
By and large, I tend to err on the side of respecting the current scientific consensus, and it appears to have been “differences in IQ are attribute to nurture factors mostly” since about the 1930-ies. Besides that, my guess is that people who had a vested interest in the maintenance of a racist, sexist, etc. worldview (namely, rich white men) had more wealth and power at their disposal than those who had the opposite vested interest, which means they have some influence over funding and publication, publicity, acclaim and awarding, etc. If racism were provably right beyond reasonable doubt, I assume they would have made damn sure everyone knew it. If the alternative hypothesis has prevailed in spite of these odds, I would assume that it had a very strong appearance of being provably less wrong.
Of course, if white-rich-men funded and influenced research concluded that these rich white dudes were not the smartest bunch overall, and, say, arab women were instead, and that this racist view prevailed and became the scientific consensus against these controlling interests’ … interests, I would assume it to be true.
In short, if most scientists agree on a paradigm in spite of the fact that it’s inconvenient to those scientis’ bosses, I believe that that paradigm is more likely to be true.
This is of course assuming that the studies are done rigorously and faithfully, with good experiment design, good analysis of the statistic, intelligent and pertinent drawing of conclusions, etc etc.; that scientists aren’t being stupid and aren’t screwing with the results. As someone who used to believe what he’d read in Talent Is Overrated, and whose views on nutrition and the science thereof have been badly unsettled by Good Calories, Bad Calories, I can guarantee that I for one wouldn’t be able to tell the difference without help.
Why don’t you, um, educate yourself a bit?
IQ studies do show that rich white dudes are not the smartest bunch overall.
Who are, then, the smartest bunch overall?
Ashkenazi Jews are something like slightly less than one standard deviation above whites, so in the 110-115 range. East Asians (Han Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, etc) score a little higher, about 103-106. The size of the standard deviations within groups also varies between groups.
Also if you look into the sub-factors that g measures, you’ll find variation. Some groups have higher Verbal than Visuospatial for example, though I don’t remember which ones have which at the moment.
Thank you. Those are some interesting results. Due to my limited capacity to compile and properly evaluate research (call it laziness), I’ll just take your word for it and accept them.
So, if I understand you right, some demographics are proven, beyond reasonable doubt, to have a higher IQ than others, by and large and with some idiosyncrasies in distribution and aspects. Said IQ actuallhy reliably measures something, and that something is well-defined and resembles what is commonly thought of as “intelligence”. Okay. Well, what now?
To clarify, that bit is clear, but one should understand that the evidence that that correlation is genetic is much weaker. There are a lot of other possible explanations, including early childhood education, cultural correlates at a young age, nutrition levels, parasite load, stereotype threat, and everything else sometimes put under a catchall of socioeconomic factors. Ashenazi Jews for example are one of the best performing groups, but there are some massive confounding factors since there’s a heavily intellectual culture that emphasizes learning.
Thank you for clarifying that.
It means that any political argument, any social policy, any philosophy, predicated on the cognitive abilities of groups being equal, needs to be re-evaluated. A lot of things have it as a hidden assumption. Here are a few examples:
Immigration. In order to make a proper analysis of what X number of migrants per year will do to the country, it’s not enough to assume that each potential migrant has the same cognitive capacity relative to both other migrants and to the natives. If migrants from ethnic group A have a higher IQ than ethnic group B, is it a good idea to let a lot of Bs into the country?
School performance. Though it has closed a little over the decades, the gap between Black and White achievement in schools remains persistent and large. All manner of interventions have been tried to try to close the gap. If it is due to a real genetic difference between the two groups, much of this may have been pointless. Given what we also know about the drawbacks of mixed-ability classrooms, segregation comes back on the table as a plausible candidate.
Fertility. In the US, the White total fertility rate is below replacement (1.84), while Blacks are just above (2.11). Hispanics are even higher, at 2.99. What implications does this have for the intellectual capital of the USA in the coming decades?
International competition. China does not have the same taboos on group differences in cognitive ability that the Western world does. They are also quite happy and capable to do immense social engineering programs. Putting the two together …
It is much more effective to give individuals IQ tests rather than try to divine the results based on weakly correlated features such as ethnic group.
These individuals would have an incentive to cheat the tests to get into the country.
The better way of course, is just to limit immigration to high-skilled workers, or with qualifications above a certain threshold. A lot of countries already do this. The only thing we’d need to change is our response to noticing that the ethnicities that tend to meet the requirements aren’t representative of those that apply.
The incentive is there, but how much cheating would follow? Teenagers taking GCSE & A-level exams have incentives to cheat too, but the observed rate of exam malpractice is nonetheless very low, about 0.02%. No doubt some cheating isn’t caught, but even if all malpractice were cheating, and 99% of cheating went undetected, the cheat rate would be a scant 2%.
More generally, is the potential for cheating the true objection here? (It seems worth asking that rather than silently downvoting, troll toll be damned.) Unless cheating were really pervasive, raising the IQ threshold for entry could maintain the average IQ of immigrants granted entry.
It’s very easy to inflate your score on an IQ test by prepping. They’re designed to be taken without any familiarity of the material or context. I don’t know exactly how much you can eke out by studying say, Raven’s Matrices, but it’s large enough that the predictive value of the tests would drop like a stone. In contrast, GCSE/A-Level exams are designed knowing that students spend a great deal of effort studying and revising for them.
If an IQ test were developed that had the retest effect as a feature rather than a bug, I’d be more in favor of using them for immigrants.
Ah, I’d interpreted “cheating” to mean nefarious activity taking place during or after the test, not pre-test coaching or preparation.
This much is true. But
is probably false. There’re three reasons why I say that.
In the real world, IQ & IQ-like tests appear to work as usual, even when taken by thousands of people who can prep as much as they like. The US Armed Forces are content to test a million people a year with the ASVAB, despite the proliferation of ASVAB prepping resources. As another example, standardized tests like the GRE predict graduate students’ GPA, faculty ratings, and even the number of citations to their publications; this is all the more impressive considering the range restriction of ability among the prospective students taking the tests!
Logically, prep-induced score boosts don’t necessarily imply a drop in predictive validity. If people who started with high scores gained more from prepping than people who started with low scores, a test’s predictive validity could go up, because widening the gap between high- & low-scorers can improve the test’s ability to distinguish the two groups. And there are cases where high-scorers gained more from practising, although the effect on predictive validity as such doesn’t look like it was measured in those studies.
One can also look at how much practice reduces the g loading of IQ tests. It looks like the reduction in g loading is typically small. This review article gives various examples:
That last result comes from a study of South African psychology students, mostly non-white, some of whom were randomly assigned to “mediated learning” training; all of them were tested twice with none other than Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices.
I stand corrected, thanks for the links!
As my stats professor used to say “data costs money.”
For every IQ test you need to pay a psychologist trained in using that test to administer and score it. And since this is supposed to be scaled up for millions of people that means paying full-time trainers, scoring committees, not to mention buying large amounts of testing materials from whichever company winds up winning the bidding process.
Race is a weak measure but it also happens to be a very cheap one. Setting quotas based on race and providing exceptions by educational/professional merit would let in most of the high-IQ workers we want while preventing dysgenic and culturally destabilizing mass immigration.
(This ignores, of course, the massive numbers of illegal immigrants who would still be free to come in at will and stay as long as they care to. That is a serious issue as well, and one unlikely to be resolved by psychometric testing.)
For most people, moving to a country that’s better for them creates orders of magnitude more value than any plausible cost of an IQ test that would need to be covered, so it’s an irrelevant consideration.
It looks like there are roughly one million legal immigrants a year plus another eight million visa seekers, just looking at the US numbers. A professionally administered IQ test can go for anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars; it’s hard to find a good number, but I’ve seen everything from $300 on the low end to $4000 on the high end. So it’s not hyperbole to say that this is easily a multi-billion dollar a year commitment, just on the basis of the testing alone without thinking about administrative costs or government waste.
Now you’re right to say that any individual tested would be worth more than that; either avoiding a burden or gaining a productive worker would more than make up the difference. But it seems that in most cases you could get the same decision with a resume and a color swatch; the value of the whole program dpeends on the corner cases where casual observation and psychometric tests disagree, and the shape of the normal curve implies that this region is a fairly small one to carry such a large price tag.
In other words, why not use the data we have rather than going through an expensive data collection process if that data is unlikely to change our decisions to a degree which would justify the costs?
It is interesting to look at how the US already handles IQ testing on this scale. The United States Military Entrance Processing Command administered the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery to 460,000 people “during fiscal year 2011” at exam sites around the country, plus “658,000 high school students [...] under the Department of Defense Student ASVAB Testing Program during the 2010-11 school year.”
I can’t find quotes for how much administering the ASVAB costs nowadays, but a 2002 report from the National Research Council’s Board on Testing and Assessment quotes a cost of “about $20 per administration”. There’s also a 1976 report to Congress by the Comptroller General of the US, which says on p. ii that the DoD “spent about $4.7 million during fiscal year 1974 to support its high school recruiting and testing program, testing about 1.1 million students for enlistment eligibility”, or $4.27ish per testee. The former estimate is $25.96 after inflation, the latter $20.23. Pessimistically rounding up the bigger estimate to $26, and multiplying by 9 million, suggests a total cost of $234 million.
It occurs to me that this cost could be defrayed by charging potential immigrants. The US charges hundreds of dollars in visa fees as things stand, so adding a $25 testing surcharge ought not prove unduly punishing to the huddled masses.
Please ignore my many typos; my computer is riddled with viruses and my smartphone appears to be possessed by some sort of evil text-eating demon.
103-106 is higher than 110-115?
Yeah I worded that poorly. I meant slightly higher in relation to whites, not jews.
East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews (and possibly Indian Parsis) routinely achieve higher scores on IQ tests than do Europeans.
I see you didn’t like my suggestion...
What suggestion?
The suggestion in the post to which you were replying.
Make your suggestion explicit, because I can’t tell what it is.
Sure, I’ll quote myself:
“Why don’t you, um, educate yourself a bit?”
Note, particularly, that this suggestion implies the necessity of some effort on your part—maybe, I don’t know, even googling up something...
Downvoted for rudeness.
And how did you actually gain your view of what the current scientific consensus is? Remember, the popular media hasn’t managed to get its head around the fact that IQ even measures anything, when the scientific consensus says it does. If you only read what the New York Times says about IQ, you’d be much more likely to consider hypotheses that are empirically garbage, like Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. If the press can’t wrap its head around the validity of IQ, how can you even expect it to report faithfully on something that is both predicated on that fact, and ginormously controversial in its own right?
We know that IQ differences aren’t mostly nurture, and that has been quietly accepted by psychometricians for decades.
Also, I believe you’re starting with a false assumption about just how much power “rich white men” actually have in academia. The people that grant funding in these fields aren’t rich white businessmen, they’re mild-mannered scholars with tenure. Remember that this is at the cross-section between sociology and psychology, both of which tend to be populated by people with the cluster of political leanings variously called “leftist”, “liberal”, “progressive” or “socialist”, depending on who you ask. You must have read about the blank-slatist dogma of psychology that still persists in diminished form up to the present day.
(And FYI, the data suggests that rich white men are in 3rd place, behind East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews, and there are probably other ethnic groups that outperform WASPs that we haven’t managed to get good data for yet, the Parsis of India for example.)
EDIT
I’m pleased that you recognize that we’re circling dangerously close to the Noncentral Fallacy when using the term “racist” in these kinds of discussions. It can lead to Denotation/Connotation confusions that just drag down the quality of debate. I appreciate the irony in asking, but it would make things go smoother if we taboo it.