Occidentalist has updated his survey of surveys. Despite radical social changes and a wide variety of testing regimes, American black IQ always tests out one standard deviation below American white IQ. Similar differences in character and criminal propensities are obvious.
How big is one standard deviation? If you take a random black, and a random white, it means that someone’s race does not tell you a whole lot about which one is smarter, but, in practice, one never meets a random black and a random white.
Suppose blacks are affirmative actioned into a diverse elite group, police, academia, etc. Then, because IQ variance between random white academics is lot less than IQ variance between random whites, almost every black academic will be markedly and strikingly dumber than every white academic, meaning that few black academics (in a non elite university no black academics whatever) will be capable of doing the kind of academic things that academics traditionally do. Similarly, in a police force, all or almost all black cops will be markedly more criminal than all or almost all white cops.
This leads to the one rotten apple problem. In a diverse police force, being honest is racist and disloyal to you fellow cops. In a diverse academia, doing stuff that requires intelligence and ability is racist and anti scientific.
We see a similar result when women are affirmative actioned into jobs requiring upper body physical strength: We get the no lift rule. People, both males and females, are forbidden to use upper body strength. In hospitals, when you need a sick patient lifted up, you cannot call a male nurse, because that would be discrimination. They could not say equal pay for equal work, if some tasks were manifestly unequal. This sometimes results in patients dying. Computer science courses are dumbed down so that females can pass them. The removal of certain aspects of computer science on which men perform markedly better than women makes both male students and female students ignorant, makes them both worse off. Not only the males, but also the females would be better off covering those areas, even if the women performed poorly.
In general, whenever you mingle two groups, you get a leveling down to the worst characteristics of both groups, so that the diverse group is worse in important ways to at least one of the unmingled groups, and usually worse in important ways to both of the unmingled groups, partly because there are few groups so uniformly bad that they do not have at least some virtues, and partly because differences in virtues leads to those virtues being deprecated: The no lift rule denies both men and women the use of their upper body strength, making women effectively weaker than they already are. Similarly, in diverse communities, blacks tend to be more criminal than they already are.
the blacks are a thorn in society’s side, taking up most of our social service money with generational welfare, and fill up our prisons to over-capacity.
blacks arent stupid! there cool , watch Ghana Entertainment and then tell me.
i love black culture
> Because pregnant women and small children are better fed, less stunting of latent IQ occurs.
Check out the Dutch Hunger Winter. The causes of secular change in IQ or g are not as simple as that.
Flynn has an interesting and lengthy discussion of the Flynn effect. “The Flynn effect: Rethinking intelligence”
It is not exactly measurement error, but neither is it exactly real.
Measures that measure brain quality rather directly, IT and RT, have not changed. The problems on which we have improved, are those that are trainable. IQ score has increased on those measures where schooling can raise it. “You have to become the kind of person that takes that kind of problem seriously enough to invest your mental energy. ”
“we are driven to the conclusion that massive IQ gains are not intelligence gains or, indeed, any kind of significant cognitive gains.”
Whoa! You once reproached me for obscure abbrevs. I know what RT is but what’s IT?
I agree that the reaction time thing is a major, major wrinkle — assuming the measurements are right.
The whole thing is basically a mess. Strong conclusions are probably not to be reached.
Would you suppose, for instance, that while adult height increased up thru 1980 births, cranial capacity did not change?
I’m not saying we are 45 clicks north of the 1900 population in IQ let alone /g/, which is absurd on the face of it.
Again, a mess. But as I’ve said before, the rates (per cap) of 24-carat genius look much lower among Whites than they did in 1900. If you believe genius to be nearly unconditioned (I do), this is clearer than many other indicators. I don’t think geniuses generally lack for environments that let them reach full flower, whereas I’ve met someone here who thinks artistic genius can be deeply corrupted by a cultural milieu of decadent artistic taste. I don’t really believe that ; I believe it can be slightly impinged and somewhat maldirected, but not ruined. The truly titanic will ‘make their own oxygen’ as Wittgenstein said. Especially when everyone has cheap access to books, art, music. In 1802 or something, books were more expensive, but any urchin-genius could walk in and study the Elgin Marbles every week if he happened to live in London, as many millions of people did.
Commenter, your hopes for B-W convergence can never be realized, I think, when Blacks have much worse differential fecundity than Whites. Contrariwise, I have a hard time understanding why the gap isn’t getting bigger because of this. It looks pretty steady for a number of decades — before that a little wider, but this could about as easily be an artifact of something, as it could be something we would think of as non-artifactual (the difference can be a little bit subjective).
IT Inspection Time
RT Reaction Time.
“Go ahead and shoot me down for being a racist …”
Er, what? I don’t think anyone who reads this blog would pull the racism card.
I wish you hadn’t posted this. I was getting to like your blog and your independent point of view.
Intelligence is overwhelmingly hereditary. If you had low intelligence, it’s not your fault and certainly not your choice.
Now I’m going to be PINC (politically incorrect) and put forward my theory for intelligence variations between black and white.
From where I sit at this very moment I only have to lift my head and I see the Northcliff mountain where Mzilikazi disposed of his rivals by inviting them to take flying lessons.
This appears to have been a fairly common practice among indigenous African peoples until the middle nineteenth century.
Anyone who stuck his head up above grass level was liable to have it lopped off.
Over many generations the brightest and most ambitious were systematically culled, leading to a drop in mean intelligence.
Naturally my hypothesis could be complete BS because I’m too lazy to write down the heuristics and test them in a model framework such as NetLogo.
Owing to the Secular Effect, average IQ’s have been steadily rising over the last century since the invention of the Binet personality test. Because pregnant women and small children are better fed, less stunting of latent IQ occurs.
In fact the IQ tests have had to be re-normed so that the average still works out at 100.
In fully developed nations, average IQ’s have stopped rising. In fact there is some evidence that their national IQ’s may be falling, for the simple reason that people of lower intelligence tend to have more children.
Nevertheless I predict that in 100 years, the black/white intelligence gap in the US will have narrowed substantially.
I also predict that the reduction in the gap will be due not so much to increases in average black IQ as from a sharp drop in average white IQ.
Go ahead and shoot me down for being a racist, but remember this:
Low intelligence is nobody’s fault and it is not their choice. In today’s complex world, the best outcomes mainly go to the most intelligent. If you refuse to accept that some people are smarter than others, then you refuse to allow action that would make the less intelligent useful members of society and grant them more fulfilling, happier lives. The problem isn’t going to go away just because you wish it didn’t exist.
According to Garnet Wolseley, the typical Ashantee aristocrat was about as smart as the typical English gentleman, while the typical Ashantee commoner was mentally at the level of a small child. This must have caused extremely strong selective pressure for intelligence.
We get selective pressure for intelligence when it requires artifacts and preparation to survive – the Northern winters culled the stupid, particularly on the interior of the eurasian continent, where the winters are more extreme.
We also get selective pressure for intelligence when the ruling elite is selected for administrative ability, for ability to understand orders and give appropriate and understandable orders, and the ruling elite gets superior access to reproductive resources.
A fairly common arrangement, for example the traditional Vietnamese aristocracy, is that the aristocrat has a very large household, comprising his numerous legitimate children and even more numerous “cousins”, the cousins being in substantial part his illegitimate children and illegitimate half brothers and half sisters. His numerous children are subject to brutal selection, the less smart of his children finding their status dropping down to that of a “cousin”, and the more competent “cousins” being raised up to fill the resulting gaps. Large families and arranged marriages result in an aristocracy where every aristocrat has family connections to large numbers of other aristocrats. The aristocracy having massive numbers of children, and an IQ about three standard deviations above the norm. The Vietnamese aristocracy, in my observation, is about three standard deviations smarter than normal Vietnamese, and the Ashantee aristocracy, in Garnet Wolseley’s observation, about three standard deviations smarter than common Ashantee.
Jim,
Averages and distributions tell you plenty about random individuals that you have no other information about. For instance, your prior for a random black person vs a random white person has the following information:
About 12% or so of the black population is smarter than the white mean, the rest is beneath it.
About 12% of the white population is +1 sigma, around 2% of the black population is +1 sigma.
From that information you ought to at least be able to set odds for wagers. If you know more about the specific individuals, you can update these priors. If you’re working with larger groups, you can tighten up your estimates a lot also.
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