Great, back into the masochistic world of debunking the manic diatribes of White Nationalists. At least I get to flex on someone who deserves it this time.
Dachshund wrote: ↑November 29th, 2018, 5:00 pm
ktz wrote: ↑November 28th, 2018, 9:03 pm
There's plenty of evidence that contradicts the kind of denigration of black intelligence in the original post -- consider for example census data from the year 2000 that indicates African immigrants as the group achieving the highest educational attainment on average -- not Asian immigrants or Ashkenazi Jews any other group.
Dear KTZ,
Could you please provide a link/s to solid evidence of any kind in the scientific literature, that contradicts my noting in the OP that Black Sub- Saharan African as a group have a markedly low average IQ ( around 70 points). I would also be particularly interested to see with my own eyes the data from the US Census for the year 2000 you refer to showing that Black African immigrants as a group had attained the highest educational average on average relative to any other racial/ethnic grouping.
Here's the original source for the claim in scientific literature:
http://mumford.albany.edu/census/BlackW ... _final.pdf
Journalistic coverage of the same information:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct- ... story.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/artic ... n-the-u-s-
Besides historical oppression, Sub-Saharan Africa has been the home of some of the worst political turmoil and unrest in the world, as well as infectious diseases that drag down the collective average. Jared Diamond of Guns, Germs, and Steel is famously credited for the correlation national IQ with the presence of infectious diseases. I'd like to see how your IQ would fare if you spent the 90s fighting off malaria, genocide, corrupt governments, the impacts of predatory lending by the IMF, and exploitative appropriation of your natural resources.
https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/p ... er20120307
Note that it's also widely accepted that traditional IQ testing is intrinsically biased towards Western culture.
https://www.apa.org/monitor/feb03/intelligence.aspx
I realise that differences in racial intelligence is an unpleasant subject to discuss, in particular for Liberals like yourself. Even if different races have different average IQs why talk about it? Well, my position is that White Americans have to talk about it, if only in self defense. As things stand, both in the US, and in every other nation in the Anglosphere ( the UK, Australia, Canda, etc.) if non-Whites, and in particular Black Africans and Hispanics do not perform at the same level as Whites, the inevitable explanation is White racism, i.e; its our fault. But what if, on average, people of different races do not have the same IQ; differences in intelligence are well known to play a major role in why it is that some people do better in life than others. Could it be that Black Africans do poorly in school, for example, not because schools are racist, but because they are on average not as smart as Whites ? If that's true, it may not make much sense to try to narrow the racial gap in achievement, instead maybe we should simply be trying to improve the performance of all children and not worry about the gap ?
I realize that white privilege is an unpleasant subject to discuss, in particular for White Nationalists like yourself. Even if different races have different average IQs why talk about it? Well, your position is predicated on totally ignoring historical persecution against minorities. As things stand, both in the US, and in every other nation in the Anglosphere ( the UK, Australia, Canda, etc.) non-Whites, and in particular Black Africans and Hispanics have been subjected to systematic discrimination and restriction in opportunity. Only within the last fifty years has civil rights for minorities been edified into law, and minorities still face a constant battle to achieve anything that even resembles a level socioeconomic and educational playing field. Could it be that Black Africans do poorly in school, for example, because they face exorbitant racially correlated prenatal stress, chilling effects from implicit racism, and additional socioeconomic challenges at home? If that's true, it may make sense to try to narrow the racial gap in achievement, when in America they faced more than 200 years of enslavement, lynching, and systematic discrimination.
So, what's the evidence for racial differences in intelligence ? No...actually, that's the wrong question. The right question is why would anyone think that Blacks and Whites, for example, have the same average level of intelligence ? There are certainly smart Blacks and stupid Whites, but why would anyone think that people who live in the Congo are just as smart as people who live in Sweden?
As you now acknowledge by admitting the existence of smart Blacks and stupid Whites -- the first self-aware comment I've heard from you this whole time -- variations within populations exceed variations between populations. Systematically offering or withholding opportunities on the basis of a biologically arbitrary distinction (
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... sts-argue/ also see Harvard geneticist David Reich's book), or resistance to initiatives to level the playing field, would potentially methodically limit the achievement of high potential individuals and place undue emphasis on average values when the broad spread trumps the deviation between populations. As a society, creating policies reflective of differences between populations would effectively lead to a much more inefficient distribution of resources than a commitment to equal opportunity across the board.
The difference in educational infrastructure in Sweden and the Congo precludes the opportunity for a true comparison of intelligence. Besides the Congo, Sweden outperforms the UK in every educational category. Do you feel it is fair to say that Swedish people are on average more intelligent than stupid Brits? South Korea has the highest result. Would you agree that because whites are on average less intelligent than Asians, it is morally correct to discriminate against whites and devote to Asians more resources?
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Before Sub-Saharan Black Africans had contact with outsiders, no African society had invented the wheel, no Blacks had a written language or a calendar, no Blacks had built a two-storey building or mechanical device or had domesticated ant beast of burden. All this suggests a low average level of intelligence. Black Africa has been in contact with the outside world for 100s of years, but it is still where you find the countries with the most poverty, the shortest life expectancies and the lowest levels of economic development. "Multi-culti", egalitarian forum intellectuals, like the erudite Dr Fool, (and our beloved "Aristotatlan" Moderator, Miss Greta /"Funky-G") will tell you that Africa is poor because it was colonised and exploited by wicked, White Supremacist Europeans ( for example,the Belgians in the Congo, the British in Zululand and so on), but it's not so. The most extensively colonised parts such as South Africa, Ivory Coast and Nigeria are now the most advanced parts of Africa. Ethiopia and Liberia, which were never colonised are among the poorest places in Africa. Moreover, do you know which country in the Western hemisphere was the first to become independent after the US freed itself from Britain? It was Haiti; Haiti which has an almost entirely African population has been independent for almost 200 years, but it has a profile of poverty, disease, corruption and underdevelopment that make it a perfect match for Black Africa. Its history is very different from that of African countries and it is 4000 miles away across an ocean, but African people have brought a typically African society to the "New World."
There's a couple confounding variables I can think of off the top of my head that you don't even consider before jumping to racial conclusions. For example, modern research reveals that there is an inverse correlation between intellectual performance and hot weather.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... -straight/ Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the hottest climates in the world. Another confounding non-racial explanation is the primarily land-locked nature of Sub-Saharan Africa. In conjunction with the hot climate, this makes it extremely difficult to establish trade routes. Not to mention the infectious disease issue previously mentioned. Let's go back and test the average IQ of Europeans during the Black Plague for comparison, shall we?
The discussion of the wheel seems like an entirely arbitrary occurrence that, among other things, discounts the telescopic nature of evolution. Furthermore, due to the plentiful nature of wild game and berries, African hunter gatherers, like Native Americans, experienced little incentive for conflict or the development of agricultural methods that would lead to wide adoption of such technology. Rapid technological development is correlated with organized military conflict, so it's not a wonder that militaristic Eurasian populations eventually outpaced with no incentive for conflict based on resource scarcity. It's not a surprise that Sub-Saharan Africa had little use for the wheel due to their lack of animal domesticates -- I'd like to see you try to tame a zebra or Cape buffalo to pull a cart with wheels and axles.
South Africa, Ivory Coast, and Nigeria are all coastal countries with a long and regular history of established trade routes and relatively lower rates of political turmoil and corruption, at least considering post-Apartheid history. Ethiopia has a history of famine and civil war in the 90's, but has recovered and actually Ethiopia is currently listed as one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Liberia is recovering from a 14-year civil war where child soldiers were forced to enlist, so it's not exactly a surprise that their economy is still not doing so hot. What a strange and ignorant set of cherry-picked data.
Haiti has been a systematic target of foreign interference -- more than 18 regime changes in the last century, most recently the CIA's involvement in deposing the democratically elected president to preserve American interests in the region. Economic exploitation by the IMF's predatory lending practices did not miss Haiti -- the book Confessions of an Economic Hitman is a good introduction to that world. Not to mention Haiti has been victim of one of the worst natural disasters in modern history -- 300000 Haitians died in the earthquake in 2010, and thousands more from the subsequent infrastructure issues.
It's understandable to be ignorant about the exploitative nature of our world and the deep suffering it has caused in the last few centuries, but trying to shoehorn complex historical phenomena into your flimsy, ignorant, racially-motivated logical construction is something you ought to seriously be ashamed of. I'd expect anyone reading this thread is vicariously ashamed for you, anyway.
Wherever Blacks live outside of Africa but among people of other races, they show the same patterns of generally less successful behaviour. This is true of Canada and Britain, for example, which never had a history of slavery or Jim Crow. Does this mean that White people brutally mistreat Black people all over the world wherever they go, or it it the case that Blacks and Whites simply have different levels of ability ? In the US there are about 16,000 different school Districts and there isn't ONE in which Black students perform at the same level as Whites. Is every one of those 16,000 school Districts run by racists trying to keep Black people down, or, are there simply racial differences in intelligence ?
Britain, Canada, and Australia all participated in the slave trade and systematic exploitation of blacks. The suggestion that Britain and Canada have no slave trade is a too easy demonstration of your ignorance, are you serious? For over 200 years, slavery was the dominant condition of life for blacks in Canada and Britain until slavery was outlawed in Britain in 1807 and Canada in 1833.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Canada
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Blacks and Whites separated from their last common ancestor at least 60,000 years ago. Since that time, the two groups have evolved the dramatically different physical appearances that we see between today's Europeans and Africans. The brain is an organ just like other organs. What are the chances that during the time it took for the rest of their body to become so different that the brain remained exactly the same ? As Professor Geoffrey Cockran and Henry Harpending explain in their book, "The Ten Thousand Year Explosion" (quote)... "The biological equality of human races is about as likely as a fistful of silver dollars all landing on edge when dropped." In other words, it's impossible.
Therefore, just on the basis of what we can see around us and what we know of history, there is no reason at all to think on average that people of different races have the same intelligence. But what does the science say about this ? Ever since large-scale IQ testing began at the time of the First World War, Whites have achieved higher scores than Blacks. The 15 point difference in averages: around 100 points for Whites and 85 points for American Blacks have not changed for nearly 100 years. To date here have been literally hundreds of studies and meta-studies and they all give the same results. Critics of IQ testing claim that (A): it doesn't test intelligence and (B): testing is biased against Blacks. Such critics are, however, completely outside the mainstream of of academic consensus on the subject, which is that IQ test scores reliably predict the ability to do well at things that take brains: success in school; making money and learning complicated skills, etc. Nor is their any cultural bias against Blacks; there are now IQ tests that are completely independent of culture. Raven's Progressive Matrices, for example, is one of the most reliable tests of intelligence available today and doesn't even use language. People are scored on how well they find patterns, you can even use gestures to explain how the test works and give it to people who don't speak English. Another simple test of intelligence that could hardly be biased is the reverse digit span test. If I ask you to repeat back to me the numbers : 8, 4, 6, 7 2, 5 you can probably do it easily, if I keep adding to the number of digits though , at some point you probably wont be able to remember them all. This is a memory test and Blacks and Whites do equally well. If, however, I recite the digits : 8,4, 7,3,5,6,2 and ask you to repeat them back to me in reverse order, that's a lot harder, that's an intelligence test, and White do significantly better on it than Blacks. How could such a test be biased ? Moreover, those people ( like "Funky-G") who persistently complain about bias never explain why North East ASians do better than Whites on IQ tests like Raven' Progressive Matrices and the reverse digit span tests ? Would they argue are that the tests are biased in favour of Asians, or would they accept the obvious explanation, that Asian are, on average more intelligent than Whites. It is, of course, their higher average IQ that explains why Asians get better grades than Whites in school, get into better colleges and have a higher per capita income than Whites.
What's the deal with low to average IQ individuals obsessing over the value of the metric, anyway? I see this all the time. First of all, there's a large body of recent scientific literature indicating that there's no clear distinction between innate and acquired traits. This is demonstrated by the fact that IQ can be altered by interventions, see
https://www.nber.org/papers/w21766 for a study of early childhood intervention. IQ regardless of heritability is modifiable, and not a strict intrinsic property -- even with fadeout effects later in life, the effect on educational attainment from early childhood persist into adulthood. Furthermore, the correlation between academic and job performance is not strict, either. There is an easy case that IQ tests are fundamentally flawed and using them alone to measure intelligence is a fallacy.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/scie ... 25911.html
The digit span test is for working memory, which is distinguished from g-factor, and the interaction between working memory and IQ is not well understood. Working memory is highly susceptible to pressures of stress and differences in socioeconomic environment.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4263265/ Though I'll take note that any of your policy suggestions favoring whites over blacks by your logic should also favor Asians over whites. If you continue to try to make any future claims of racial superiority based on intelligence, I'll be sure to remind you to prepare yourself for kowtowing to your future East Asian overlords.
It may seem harsh to say so, but people of different races get different scores on IQ tests because they do not have the same average intelligence. Anyone who studies the evidence with an open mind will see this. Some people ( like the learned Dr Fool) argue that that the reasons for this are "environmental", that Blacks live in disadvantaged circumstances that depress their IQ. Environment does have some effect on IQ, especially on children, but that effect is pretty much eliminated once people have grown up.
I'm not sure what experience someone like you has about studying evidence with an open mind, seeing how you just cherry-pick evidence to support a long-time predetermined and needlessly provocative conclusion.
Regardless of IQ fadeout effects, work by the Nobel Prize–winning economist James Heckman has demonstrated that the best early childhood interventions have a benefit-cost ratio of somewhere between 3:1 and 9:1 by virtue of their effect on such things as lifelong earnings, health costs, crime, and dependence on welfare.
The real test would be to see what would happen to the IQ of Blacks if they were raised in a White environment. As it happens, two scientists: Sandra Scarr and Richard Wienberg decided to to study this precise question. They found Black children who had been adopted as babies by upper middle-class Whites and they tested their IQs at various ages. When the children were small they had IQs that were as high as White children, but by the time they were 17 or 18 their IQs had dropped to just 2 or 3 points above the average Black score. Maybe having spent all that time in White families did raise their IQs a little, but it certainly did not eliminate the 15 point Black-White difference.
Scarr and Wienberg in their own words: "Results from the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study provide little or no conclusive evidence for genetic influences underlying racial differences in intelligence and achievement, " and "We think that it is exceedingly implausible that these differences are either entirely genetically based or entirely environmentally based. The true causes of racial-group differences in IQ, or in any other characteristic, are likely to be too complex to be captured by locating them on a single hereditarianism-environmentalism dimension."
Confounding factors that you need to account for include pre and post-natal factors in the style of Sapolski's findings, the depressive effects of racial discrimination, and most egregiously the Flynn effect again, which a 2016 paper by Drew Thomas concludes: Once corrected for attrition in the low IQ white adoptees, once corrected for the Flynn effect since none of the Asian adoptee studies had a white control sample, mixed and white adoptees score the same, black adoptees score a little lower with a gap of 2.5pt, which can be explained by their pre-adoption characteristics. See his paper, Racial IQ Differences among Transracial Adoptees: Fact or Artifact?
https://www.mdpi.com/2079-3200/5/1/1
There is something else that suggests environment does not count for that much. In 2009, Black students from families that had an income of more than $160,000 per annum got lower SAT scores than Whites from families with incomes of less than $ 20,000. That is a pretty stunning refutation of the idea that a deprived environment is what explains low Black IQ and poor academic performance.
One of the most pernicious effects of racial discrimination is the effect it can have on motivation, self-esteem, and stress coping mechanisms. Those who feel like they are in a system rigged against them face both internal and external barriers to achievement. Significant racial and class inequalities much earlier in life explain persistent obstacles to upward mobility and opportunity. The extensive racial gaps in academic achievement and college preparation across high school seniors are symptomatic of those deeper drivers of inequality.
There are, as well, strictly biological data that are pretty hard to argue with. In 2005, "Science" magazine published a report by a geneticist, Bruce Lahn of the University of Chicago in which he announced the discovery of gene variants associated with brain growth. Professor Lahn suggested that these variants, which appeared relatively recently in humans, could have played a direct role in the development of human civilisation. The University of Chicago even used Professor Lahn's research to apply for a patent for a DNA-based intelligence test. It turned out however, that these gene variants are common in Europeans but rare in Africans. Pressure began to build on Professor Lahn and he stopped his research (quote)... "It's getting too controversial" he said, and he explained that he was beginning to think that some knowledge just isn't worth having. The University dropped its patent application for an IQ test based on DNA.
You know why Lahn chose to stop his research? Because racists like you co-opt their work to support claims of racial superiority. David Reich's position is of interest:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opin ... -race.html and I hope you understand that when he talk about racist misuse of genetic data he is talking very specifically about White Nationalists like you. Try having some self-awareness.
One scientist who never backed down was Phillipe Rushton of the University of West Ontario. He pointed out that there is a well-known correlation between brain size and intelligence. In general, the bigger your brain, the smarter you are, and indeed Professor Rushton showed, using MRI and CAT scan neuro-imaging studies that Asians and Europeans have considerably larger brains than Africans and Australian aborigines. Chinese people, for example, have 200 cc more of brains than Kenyans - that's nearly a cup, that's a lot of brain tissue, and brain size is known to have a solid correlation of almost 0.5 with intelligence.
Again, Rushton is highly controversial, debunked once in a televised debate with geneticist David Suzuki, and more comprehensively by Robert Graves's testing of Rushton's r/K selection theory with Drosophilia flies:
"Rushton's application of r/K selection theory to explain differences among racial groups has been widely criticised. One of his many critics is the evolutionary biologist Joseph L. Graves, who has done extensive testing of the r/K selection theory with species of Drosophila flies. Graves argues that not only is r/K selection theory considered to be virtually useless when applied to human life history evolution, but Rushton does not apply the theory correctly, and displays a lack of understanding of evolutionary theory in general. Graves also says that Rushton misrepresented the sources for the biological data he gathered in support of his hypothesis, and that much of his social science data was collected by dubious means. Other scholars have argued against Rushton's hypothesis on the basis that the concept of race is not supported by genetic evidence about the diversity of human populations, and that his research was based on folk taxonomies. A number of later studies by Rushton and other researchers have argued that there is empirical support for the theory, though these studies have been criticized."
In sum, there is simply no room for doubt that there are substantial racial differences in average intelligence, and the evidence we have to to date is very strong that there is a biological basis to these differences. In a paper by Professor Linda Godfordsen of the University of Delaware, robust evidence was presented of racial differences in intelligence confirming that Blacks are 4x more likely than Whites to have IQs of less than 75 and Hispanics are 3x more likely. At the same time Whites were twice as likely as Asians to have IQs that low. Whites, she discovered are 30x more likely than Blacks to have an IQ over 125 and 5x more likely than Hispanics. Professor Godfordson cited examples of professions that generally require an IQ of 125 like : lawyer, chemist and Executive, and pointed out that on a per capita basis we would expect to see 30x as many Whites as Blacks with enough intelligence for career of this kind and it is simply unrealistic to demand that there be proportionately as many Whites as Blacks in these professions and in others that require high intelligence. The fact is that equal outcomes in life are just not possible when different groups have different abilities.
Science is making steady progress all the time and pretty soon , given the current rate that the relevant biogenetic research is proceeding, we will find the genes for intelligence. And you can bet the farm it will be found that these genes are not distributed equally in all racial groups. The eventual acceptance of the truth will be a very good thing. Society today is constantly telling Blacks and Hispanics that they are just as smart as White people and that the only reason they fail in school and don't make as much money is because of White oppression. This, of course, is the best possible way to teach Blacks and Hispanics to hate White people. Wouldn't you hate a group of people if you were always being told that group is keeping you down?
I notice you don't mention the fact that by the same logic you would expect to see 20x more Asians than Whites in an occupation. Like a broken record I could reiterate the fallacy of a direct correlation of IQ with job performance, ignoring the fact that educational attainment is not constrained by IQ and has a higher correlation with certain personality traits than IQ. There is a reason why no job makes you take an IQ test before -- it tells you nothing about whether the person can acquire and apply the specialized knowledge to get the job done.
Gottfredson is supported by the Pioneer fund and has a political agenda, not to mention she is generally considered to be in the same camp of pseudoscientific race realists as Jensen and Wade. Former APA president Diane Halpern via Skeptic magazine has reasonable coverage:
https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/sk ... ped-curve/
You actually might be onto something in terms of the reification of oppression by Whites. I suppose a broken clock can be right two times a day, although once again we are back to ignoring the variations within populations being much more significant than variations between populations -- like the Murray quote in my previous post, policy conversations ought to happen at the individual level, and discussion of average IQ totally ignores the entire right half of the bell curve and the correct interpretation of differences between populations is, "So what?". If we could find the political will to improve the socioeconomic challenges, implement effective interventions, and figure out how to get cops to stop shooting innocent members of their race, we might be able to make a dent in the problem.
I conclusion, America will be a far better and more just society if it is one built on truth rather than ignorance, and the sooner Americans accept the truth about race and IQ the better. Don't you agree, Dr Fool !
In conclusion, you have no idea what you're talking about, and I'm glad that this community ostracizes you and considers you a joke. If it weren't for people like you, sane conversations about cognitive variations across varying ancestral backgrounds could exist without calls for tribalism and systematic discrimination. Can we get a moderator to rename this topic, "Highly controversial assertions about race and why they don't matter"? When can I expect your followup work on eugenics?
You may have a heart of gold, but so does a hard-boiled egg.