“Race” is a magical category that does not carve the gene pool at its joints. It’s a social categorisation pretending to be a genetic one.
That doesn’t matter so long as people use “race” to refer to “phenotypic” categorizations rather than genetic categorizations. People don’t care if differences between races have a genetic origin, they just care about having roughly correct cached priors for predicting stereotypical behaviors/traits based on skin color, presence or absence of epicanthic folds, et cetera. In practice these priors are roughly as informative as those for clothing choice and the environment of interaction for predicting behaviors. The vast majority of people have no reason to care that Africa has a ton of genetic diversity, it’s practically useless information. Race categorization, on the other hand, is not useless.
(It is very important to note that the above is descriptive and not normative.)
In practice these priors are roughly as informative as those for clothing choice and the environment of interaction for predicting behaviors.
That’s what I meant by it being a social category. A social category with a visible marker! At least the Burakumin can hide in plain sight.
The other problem with the usual question “race and intelligence” (which usually seems to start at “black Americans and intelligence”) is that our tool to measure intelligence is IQ tests. Although a 10-point IQ difference within one social group that e.g. correlates with lead in paint is something to worry about lots, it’s ridiculously easy to get 15 points’ difference between groups for really obviously social and cultural factors (e.g. Burakumin). So if you’re measuring IQ between groups, a difference of 15 points or less may well be cultural. And then there’s the Flynn effect, which could be culture or food.
The x axis is a genetic magical category, the y axis is incredibly shaky and people are way invested in the answers. What could possibly go wrong?
The best evidence available today indicates that this is simply false. A recent systematic literature review of Africans’ performance on IQ tests other than Raven’s Progressive Matrices finds an average IQ of around 82. An analogous review of results from Africans who took the Raven’s Progressive Matrices finds a similar average of about 80.
I think that’s false. African Americans are about 20% European in ancestry if memory serves. Of course if eugenic selection did its work, some high IQ alleles may have escaped the “neutral” baggage from the Native American and European gene pool.
Lynn’s exact numbers, while spot on the general pattern, have been criticized by others. There are a some studies that point to an actual IQ (that try to estimate the effects of things like people being unused to using a pencil or solving the test in a nonnative lanugage) nearer to that of 75 and a handful even something as high as 80.
Regression to the mean of the children of African immigrants in Europe, points to a 80ish IQ once environmental advantages kick in.
Citation? If this were a well established finding without known flaws in its methodology, I would expect it to come up a lot in race/intelligence discussions, but this is the first I’ve heard of it.
This seems extremely implausible. Would a group with intelligence as low as an average IQ of 70 connotes be able to maintain language at the same level as most human groups?
I think you don’t have a clear picture of how highly functional low IQ people can be. This is in sense natural, since I mean how many people with an IQ of 70 do you know? Its silly but I sometimes have to remind myself they are by definition as common as people with an IQ of 130. They hold jobs and they manage to reproduce just fine, so they aren’t exactly the helpless drooling passives that popular imagination paints them as.
Also I think its often underestimated how different low IQ people of different types can be from each other.
Can a 13 year old learn to drive a car safely? Yes. Can he work in a factory? Yes. Can he run a farm? Yes. Can he be a soldier? Yes. Can a group of 13 year old children use lanugage at basically the same level as most human groups? Yes.
But how well would a 13 year old do compared to 18 year old on a IQ test? Not that well I suspect.
If the test got mislabelled as that of a 18 year old, what would be his estimated IQ? In abstract thinking he may not be that better than a 18 year old with a 70ish IQ but in many many other regards the test wouldn’t do him justice by putting him in the same category.
Black job performance is slightly better than what would be expected going just by their IQs. And Blacks with IQs in the 70s are generally on average more functional than Whites or East Asians with the same IQ. This has been the basis of some speculation that low IQ Whites and East Asians do worse on average because the sample contains not only people who are plain dumb, but a greater fraction people who suffer from other disabilities and more general brain damage (and/or underdevelopment) too, than is found in the group of IQ 70 Blacks.
Funnily enough, I recently posted some comments on exactly the IQ 70 Africa claim against the usual view that that is impossible, quoting a LWer’s blog post about working in Haiti:
“It has proven hard for me to appreciate exactly how confused the Haitians are about some things. Gail, our program director, explained that she has a lot of trouble with her Haitian office staff because they don’t understand the concept of sorting numerically. Not just “they don’t want to do it” or “it never occurred to them”, but after months and months of attempted explanation they don’t understand that sorting alphabetically or numerically is even a thing. Not only has this messed up her office work, but it makes dealing with the Haitian bureaucracy—harrowing at the best of times—positively unbearable. Gail told the story of the time she asked a city office for some paperwork regarding Doctors Without Borders. The local official took out a drawer full of paperwork and looked through every single paper individually to see if it was the one she wanted. Then he started looking for the next drawer. After five hours, the official finally said that the paper wasn’t in his office.”
Farming, simple irrigation systems, pottery and other crafts (with objects of great beauty made for the upper class), walled cities, some siege engines, long distance trade, domestication of animals, iron working, sailing, class divisions, chariots and writing.
This they could all eventually develop with no input from the outside in favourable climactic conditions.
Exposed to outside influence I think they can pick up things like clockwork, ocean worthy ships, machine tools, the internal combustion engine, radio and television (and improve it on their own as well). Even basic nuclear technology, computers and some complex medical equipment isn’t completely out of the picture, though don’t expect any refinements. As a society they can probably get clean water, electrification, good roads, decent hospitals, reasonable safety from crime and quality primary school education.
This is what I’d expect of a civilization with an average IQ of 70. But please remember this civilization requires some adaptation, what I wrote goes for a “civilized” people (or at least a people that practised farming for some time) with an IQ of 70. Not all hunter gatherer populations with that IQ would be able to make this work. Self-domestication in humans isn’t really primarily about raising IQ as some people assume it is.
I read this interesting quote today, and I couldn’t help but remember your car example:
Third, Flynn may be overestimating the average population intelligence in past centuries and the amount of g needed to function in an agricultural society. Humans have much genetic programming for normal everyday life tasks (such as propensities to quickly learn a language and social skills) and drawbacks of low g may only become evident with arbitrary, unnatural tasks, such as school learning. The phenomenon of “six hour retardation” mentioned earlier suggests that people diagnosed as retarded by IQ tests may have trouble with school work but function adequately even in a technological society. After school, they “disappear into the population”. Indeed, rightly or wrongly, rulers and political writers in past centuries have expressed contempt for the abilities of the masses. When cars were invented, some stated that few people had the intellectual capacity to learn to drive them. Such comments are rare today.
I think you don’t have a clear picture of how highly functional low IQ people can be.
But how highly functional are low-IQ people on average? Looking at only the most functional low-IQ people wouldn’t give a good idea of what to expect in general.
But how well would a 13 year score compared to 18 year old on a IQ test? Not that well I suspect.
The 13-year-old’s raw score would generally be lower, but their IQ should be about the same as the 18-year-old’s; IQ tests are age-normed nowadays.
But how highly functional are low-IQ people on average? Looking at only the most functional low-IQ people wouldn’t give a good idea of what to expect in general.
My point was that different groups of people that might score low on IQ tests sometimes differ systematically from each other. In my last paragraph I suggest quite directly IQ 70 Black people are different from IQ 70 Whites and East Asians.
The 13-year-old’s raw score would generally be lower, but their IQ should be about the same as the 18-year-old’s; IQ tests are age-normed nowadays.
Well aware of this. Hence:
If the test got mislabelled as that of a 18 year old, what would be his estimated IQ? In abstract thinking he may not be that better than a 18 year old with a 70ish IQ but in many many other regards the test wouldn’t do him justice by putting him in the same category.
That doesn’t matter so long as people use “race” to refer to “phenotypic” categorizations rather than genetic categorizations. People don’t care if differences between races have a genetic origin, they just care about having roughly correct cached priors for predicting stereotypical behaviors/traits based on skin color, presence or absence of epicanthic folds, et cetera. In practice these priors are roughly as informative as those for clothing choice and the environment of interaction for predicting behaviors. The vast majority of people have no reason to care that Africa has a ton of genetic diversity, it’s practically useless information. Race categorization, on the other hand, is not useless.
(It is very important to note that the above is descriptive and not normative.)
That’s what I meant by it being a social category. A social category with a visible marker! At least the Burakumin can hide in plain sight.
The other problem with the usual question “race and intelligence” (which usually seems to start at “black Americans and intelligence”) is that our tool to measure intelligence is IQ tests. Although a 10-point IQ difference within one social group that e.g. correlates with lead in paint is something to worry about lots, it’s ridiculously easy to get 15 points’ difference between groups for really obviously social and cultural factors (e.g. Burakumin). So if you’re measuring IQ between groups, a difference of 15 points or less may well be cultural. And then there’s the Flynn effect, which could be culture or food.
The x axis is a genetic magical category, the y axis is incredibly shaky and people are way invested in the answers. What could possibly go wrong?
But, American “blacks” have a 15 point difference because they’re [EDIT] about 20% European. Africans have average IQs of 70.
[EDIT]: Citation (see also), though I should note that it is questioned.
The best evidence available today indicates that this is simply false. A recent systematic literature review of Africans’ performance on IQ tests other than Raven’s Progressive Matrices finds an average IQ of around 82. An analogous review of results from Africans who took the Raven’s Progressive Matrices finds a similar average of about 80.
I think that’s false. African Americans are about 20% European in ancestry if memory serves. Of course if eugenic selection did its work, some high IQ alleles may have escaped the “neutral” baggage from the Native American and European gene pool.
Lynn’s exact numbers, while spot on the general pattern, have been criticized by others. There are a some studies that point to an actual IQ (that try to estimate the effects of things like people being unused to using a pencil or solving the test in a nonnative lanugage) nearer to that of 75 and a handful even something as high as 80.
Regression to the mean of the children of African immigrants in Europe, points to a 80ish IQ once environmental advantages kick in.
Citation? If this were a well established finding without known flaws in its methodology, I would expect it to come up a lot in race/intelligence discussions, but this is the first I’ve heard of it.
American “blacks” aren’t about half European anyway, they’re less than 20% European on average.
This seems extremely implausible. Would a group with intelligence as low as an average IQ of 70 connotes be able to maintain language at the same level as most human groups?
I think you don’t have a clear picture of how highly functional low IQ people can be. This is in sense natural, since I mean how many people with an IQ of 70 do you know? Its silly but I sometimes have to remind myself they are by definition as common as people with an IQ of 130. They hold jobs and they manage to reproduce just fine, so they aren’t exactly the helpless drooling passives that popular imagination paints them as.
Also I think its often underestimated how different low IQ people of different types can be from each other.
Can a 13 year old learn to drive a car safely? Yes. Can he work in a factory? Yes. Can he run a farm? Yes. Can he be a soldier? Yes. Can a group of 13 year old children use lanugage at basically the same level as most human groups? Yes.
But how well would a 13 year old do compared to 18 year old on a IQ test? Not that well I suspect.
If the test got mislabelled as that of a 18 year old, what would be his estimated IQ? In abstract thinking he may not be that better than a 18 year old with a 70ish IQ but in many many other regards the test wouldn’t do him justice by putting him in the same category.
Black job performance is slightly better than what would be expected going just by their IQs. And Blacks with IQs in the 70s are generally on average more functional than Whites or East Asians with the same IQ. This has been the basis of some speculation that low IQ Whites and East Asians do worse on average because the sample contains not only people who are plain dumb, but a greater fraction people who suffer from other disabilities and more general brain damage (and/or underdevelopment) too, than is found in the group of IQ 70 Blacks.
Funnily enough, I recently posted some comments on exactly the IQ 70 Africa claim against the usual view that that is impossible, quoting a LWer’s blog post about working in Haiti:
You’re right. I was posting from a position of considerable ignorance about what low IQs might mean in practice.
What would you expect to see from a civilization with an average IQ of 70?
Farming, simple irrigation systems, pottery and other crafts (with objects of great beauty made for the upper class), walled cities, some siege engines, long distance trade, domestication of animals, iron working, sailing, class divisions, chariots and writing.
This they could all eventually develop with no input from the outside in favourable climactic conditions.
Exposed to outside influence I think they can pick up things like clockwork, ocean worthy ships, machine tools, the internal combustion engine, radio and television (and improve it on their own as well). Even basic nuclear technology, computers and some complex medical equipment isn’t completely out of the picture, though don’t expect any refinements. As a society they can probably get clean water, electrification, good roads, decent hospitals, reasonable safety from crime and quality primary school education.
This is what I’d expect of a civilization with an average IQ of 70. But please remember this civilization requires some adaptation, what I wrote goes for a “civilized” people (or at least a people that practised farming for some time) with an IQ of 70. Not all hunter gatherer populations with that IQ would be able to make this work. Self-domestication in humans isn’t really primarily about raising IQ as some people assume it is.
I read this interesting quote today, and I couldn’t help but remember your car example:
--Howard 2001 Searching the Real World for Signs of Rising Population Intelligence
(This leads to a provocative thesis which I find amusing just to contemplate.)
But how highly functional are low-IQ people on average? Looking at only the most functional low-IQ people wouldn’t give a good idea of what to expect in general.
The 13-year-old’s raw score would generally be lower, but their IQ should be about the same as the 18-year-old’s; IQ tests are age-normed nowadays.
My point was that different groups of people that might score low on IQ tests sometimes differ systematically from each other. In my last paragraph I suggest quite directly IQ 70 Black people are different from IQ 70 Whites and East Asians.
Well aware of this. Hence:
Fair enough. I misread the bolded part of your post as just amplifying a more general point about younger people scoring lower on IQ tests.
Didn’t the eggheads say back in 1994 that it wasn’t due to cultural bias?
Wow its sounds dumber when I quote them.
Heck, what do I know? I can’t be bothered to read more than one page on this stuff. Got my info from this flyer.