In my experience, if someone is claiming that a test is racially biased, they are claiming that properly understanding the question requires cultural context which is more or less common in one race than another.
In my experience if someone is claiming that a test is racially biased, they just don’t like the test results. Not always, of course, but often enough.
is more common among rich caucasians
Then the fact that East Asian people show mean IQ noticeably higher than that of caucasians would be a bit inconvenient, wouldn’t it?
In my experience if someone is claiming that a test is racially biased, they just don’t like the test results. Not always, of course, but often enough.
and
Steelman this.
What exactly do you mean by “often enough”? Do you mean to say that there is such a large number of false positives in claims of racial bias that none of them should be investigated? I am confused by your dismissal of this phenomenon.
Regarding the fact that East Asians tend to score higher than Caucasians on IQ tests (I am familiar with this difference in the US; I do not know if it applies to comparison between East Asian and majority-Caucasian countries), I would attribute it to culture and self-selection.
In the case of the United States, it is my understanding that immigration from Europe dominated immigration to the US during the Industrial Revolution—when the US was looking for, and presumably attracting, manual laborers—while recently, immigrants from Asia have made up a far larger share of the total immigrants to the US. I would guess that relative to European-Americans*, Asian-Americans’ immigrant ancestors are more likely to have self-selected for the ability to compete in an intelligence-based trade. This selection bias, propagating through to descendants (intelligent people tend to have intelligent children), would seem to at least partially explain why Asian-Americans score higher.
I do not have any information on Caucasians in their ancestral homelands vs. East Asians in their ancestral homelands.
*Based on recollection of stories told to me and verified only by a quick check online, so if others could chime in with supporting/opposing evidence, that would be appreciated.
I mean that a large number of different studies over several decades using different methodologies in various countries came up with the same results: the average IQ of people belonging to different gene pools (some of which match the usual idea of race and some do not) is not the same.
That finding happens to be ideologically or morally unacceptable to a large number of people. Normally they just ignore it, but when when they have to confront it the typical reaction—one that happens “often enough”—is denial: the test is racially biased and so invalid. Example: you.
Do you mean to say that there is such a large number of false positives in claims of racial bias that none of them should be investigated?
I do not believe I have said anything even remotely resembling this.
I am familiar with this difference in the US; I do not know if it applies to comparison between East Asian and majority-Caucasian countries
Yes, it does apply.
I would attribute it to culture and self-selection
Before you commit to defending a position, it’s useful to do a quick check to see whether it’s defensible. You think no one ran any IQ studies in China?
Thank you for clarifying your points. I mistakenly interpreted “often enough” as indicating some threshold of frequency of false positives beyond which it would not be appropriate to take the problem seriously. I apologize for arguing a straw man.
I was considering mostly the difference among people of different races in the United States, as I assumed that would minimize the effects of cultural difference (though not eliminate it) on the intelligence of the participants and their test results. I would anticipate that cultural influences do affect a person’s intelligence—the hypothetical quality which we imperfectly measure, not the impact that quality leaves on a test—as it can motivate certain avenues of self-improvement through its values, or simply allow access to different resources.
I am not surprised that there are IQ differences among racial groups. In fact, I would be shocked to learn that every culture and every natural environment and every historical happening in the entirety of human civilization happened to produce the exact same level of average intelligence. I would be surprised, but not shocked, to learn that there existed a strong, direct causation between race (as a genetic difference rather than a social phenomenon) and intelligence.
I did not mean to imply that because a test outputs different results for different racial groups, that it must be biased. I merely meant to say that bias can exist, though I am not certain whether or not it does, or to what degree. All in all, I seem to have made rather a fool of myself, jumping at shadows, and for that I am sorry.
In my experience if someone is claiming that a test is racially biased, they just don’t like the test results. Not always, of course, but often enough.
Then the fact that East Asian people show mean IQ noticeably higher than that of caucasians would be a bit inconvenient, wouldn’t it?
I’d like to quote you twice:
and
What exactly do you mean by “often enough”? Do you mean to say that there is such a large number of false positives in claims of racial bias that none of them should be investigated? I am confused by your dismissal of this phenomenon.
Regarding the fact that East Asians tend to score higher than Caucasians on IQ tests (I am familiar with this difference in the US; I do not know if it applies to comparison between East Asian and majority-Caucasian countries), I would attribute it to culture and self-selection.
In the case of the United States, it is my understanding that immigration from Europe dominated immigration to the US during the Industrial Revolution—when the US was looking for, and presumably attracting, manual laborers—while recently, immigrants from Asia have made up a far larger share of the total immigrants to the US. I would guess that relative to European-Americans*, Asian-Americans’ immigrant ancestors are more likely to have self-selected for the ability to compete in an intelligence-based trade. This selection bias, propagating through to descendants (intelligent people tend to have intelligent children), would seem to at least partially explain why Asian-Americans score higher.
I do not have any information on Caucasians in their ancestral homelands vs. East Asians in their ancestral homelands.
*Based on recollection of stories told to me and verified only by a quick check online, so if others could chime in with supporting/opposing evidence, that would be appreciated.
I mean that a large number of different studies over several decades using different methodologies in various countries came up with the same results: the average IQ of people belonging to different gene pools (some of which match the usual idea of race and some do not) is not the same.
That finding happens to be ideologically or morally unacceptable to a large number of people. Normally they just ignore it, but when when they have to confront it the typical reaction—one that happens “often enough”—is denial: the test is racially biased and so invalid. Example: you.
I do not believe I have said anything even remotely resembling this.
Yes, it does apply.
Before you commit to defending a position, it’s useful to do a quick check to see whether it’s defensible. You think no one ran any IQ studies in China?
Thank you for clarifying your points. I mistakenly interpreted “often enough” as indicating some threshold of frequency of false positives beyond which it would not be appropriate to take the problem seriously. I apologize for arguing a straw man.
I was considering mostly the difference among people of different races in the United States, as I assumed that would minimize the effects of cultural difference (though not eliminate it) on the intelligence of the participants and their test results. I would anticipate that cultural influences do affect a person’s intelligence—the hypothetical quality which we imperfectly measure, not the impact that quality leaves on a test—as it can motivate certain avenues of self-improvement through its values, or simply allow access to different resources.
I am not surprised that there are IQ differences among racial groups. In fact, I would be shocked to learn that every culture and every natural environment and every historical happening in the entirety of human civilization happened to produce the exact same level of average intelligence. I would be surprised, but not shocked, to learn that there existed a strong, direct causation between race (as a genetic difference rather than a social phenomenon) and intelligence.
I did not mean to imply that because a test outputs different results for different racial groups, that it must be biased. I merely meant to say that bias can exist, though I am not certain whether or not it does, or to what degree. All in all, I seem to have made rather a fool of myself, jumping at shadows, and for that I am sorry.