Comment by fliglr
6 hours ago
IQ differences between the racial groups is one of the most, if not the most, replicated findings in psychology.
6 hours ago
IQ differences between the racial groups is one of the most, if not the most, replicated findings in psychology.
Are they consistent across time and cultures? Are they corrected for differences in health, education, culture, wealth, etc? How big are racial differences compared to differences between people from different social classes?
How do you define racial groups? its something that constantly shifts. I have an encyclopedia for the 1950s that defines South Asians as "Caucasoid" which is not how most people now think.
You can do a dimensionality reduction on genetic variants and certain recognisable groups fall pretty clearly out of the data.
Do those groups relate closely to what people generally mean by race? Race as defined in which culture? I know from personal experience that its not the same definitions across cultures. How big are those differences compared to differences within racial groups?
2 replies →
Based almost entirely on racist studies, including some famous ones that were comparing white and black school children in apartheid South Africa. I wonder if there may have been some confounding variables there, but surely this is just my bias.
Plus, none of these studies actually spend the money to do any genetic testing, they simply assign people to "white" or "black" race based almost always on skin color (which, since the gene for dark skin is dominant, is a very poor marker of actual genetic similarity - the great grandchild of a dark-skinned person with otherwise only white-skinned relatives can still be dark-skinned).
Edit: and I'm not even mentioning the obvious publication bias, as essentially only racists care about this race vs intelligence discussion, at least enough to invest in creating studies about it. Plus the fact that IQ itself is actually a very problematic measure, when applied beyond its actual medical use (quantifying mental disability).
We care about racial differences in outcomes that are correlated to IQ, such as employment and imprisonment.
What if some of the observed racial differences were caused by a lack of vitimin D, due to darker skin photosynthesising less of it? Then we could fix the prison crisis with a pill!
If we block all research into a problem then we can’t solve it.
If you actually care about fixing a problem then we should bring all available tools to fix and solve it.
> correlated to
Correlation measures whether Y=mX+c holds with small error. I sometimes think that many people unknowingly assume that all dependencies are somehow straight-line ones. This is distinct however from "linear approximations" in physics, which can at least be justified sometimes.
I also suspect that correlations of 0.5 or lower are often just statistical noise.