It's more like IQ should NOT become a high salience topic since it attracts the worst people on earth. If you're a true one in a million man, you're out and about changing the world, no one's doubting your brilliance. The people who ceaselessly talk about it are midwits who feel the need to compensate
If we really followed the evidence from the whole race and IQ thing, it would tell us that Asians, not Whites, are the master race and should be our natural overlords. Insisting that Black people are dumber does not change the fact that White people would still not be at the top of the pyramid.
Because of this reason alone, it's probably a good idea for White people to just stop talking about IQ and race.
Just because Asians are smarter doesn’t mean whites have to be ruled by them. Nor should we stop talking about IQ if it means we can end DEI, affirmative action, woke, etc.
The biggest problem with the IQ debate is that the IQ scale is very misleading. The difference between an IQ of 130 and 70 looks like the former is 80% smarter than the latter. But someone with an IQ of 70 can speak, drive a car, hold down a simple job. The actual difference in intellect is actually something like a 1-2%. A group getting 1% smarter over 5k to 10k years sounds pretty reasonable and non-offensive. But a group getting say 35% smarter than another, say American Jews and blacks sounds really bad. But also not true. We need an IQ scale in which each point is a standard deviation, and animals and humans are both on the same scale. The difference between Einstein and Forrest Gump should be be like 4 points. No will lose their minds over that.
It's pretty clear that the genetic gulf between Africans and East Asians is not 60 points anyway. The only way you get to that number is assuming that 100% of the variation between groups is due to entirely genetic effects [1], which also is not found in the studies above, since the Koreans don't outperform the Swedes that much. They have almost indistinguishable results from the general population and are about a third of a standard deviation above national adoptees, which would be ~5 IQ points.
[1]: And also whatever insanely low-quality results Lynn threw together are true, rather than representing the average IQ of coal mining orphans or whatever.
Seeing these were adoptees and probably negatively selected/with negative early environment, the average difference between East Asians and ADOS in the US and specifically in math could be a standard deviation or 2/3rds of an SD. (I am not making any assumption about causes, and also not about whether the effect is really a cognitive one rather than largely mediated by behavioral/personality differences, which isn't implausible.) One SD or 2/3 SD does lead to noticeably different representations at the very high and very low end of the distribution.
The comparison group for the five point difference is the national adoptees, who also presumably are negatively selected against/have negative early environment. Compared to genpop, the difference is ~0.
One problem with that is that most people intuitively won't believe that an IQ difference of 1 point or less can possibly explain any seemingly large socioeconomic disparity, even if it's also less than a standard deviation. Any difference less than 1 point on any scale probably gets rounded down to insignificance in the minds of most people.
It would be an interesting experiment for a country to ban reporting of disparities in any unit except standard deviations. For example, Google AI says that "Globally and nationally, women typically earn 82 to 85 cents for every dollar a man earns, creating an unadjusted distance between the two means of about 0.2 to 0.3 standard deviations." Which number is more useful for rabble-rousing?
Maybe. However the idea is that for most things it does get rounded off, Everyone can farm, not everyone can do physics. You make farming managing a drone swarm, and vibe coding updates to their software, now it matters. Like if there is a disparity in taxi driving you might have racism, in applied math not so much. Still, I think we can't have a rational discussion, if we zoom in on the graph and make tiny difference seem giant, everyone will be confused.
This article kind of speaks to that concept. It tries to contend with the wide gulfs in mathematical cognition between people whose brains are not terribly different in terms of material basis-
"Of course, the human brain has some fixed, heritable features, and its morphogenesis is controlled by regulatory genes that vary from one person to another. But, again, this feels more like Snapdragon 7 vs Snapdragon 8 nuances."
A bit shockingly, nobody in either the article or comments has proposed the only reasonable non-genetic explanation: Because adopting families tend to be better off than average, their environment is so awesome that adopted Koreans do well, even if they're adversely selected (as shown by their siblings having the highest uni completion percentages of all). Granted, it does still lead to a conclusion of genetic differences (between East Asian adoptees and non-East Asian adoptees).
I'm confused why you chose to skip over that Korean kids suffer very little for a late age of adoption in the conscript study (adopted >4y get post-secondary 47.2% of the time, versus <6mo getting it 50.7%), while non-Korean adoptees suffer significantly (15.0% versus 28.1%), which DOES suggest that the environment in Korea is better for orphans somehow. We are talking <8yo, here, so something more like better nursing or prenatal nutrition or ICU care or something like that, rather than a top-notch educational environment for a 5 year old.
I guess it's possible that Koreans have some kind of genetic resistance to suffering negative effects from late adoption, but this seems quite contrived and improbable.
"Koreans are smart" is a meme. Some Swedish families value smarts and therefore select Koreans and also invest into making their children smarter. It's this + Pygmalion effect that shows up in the higher intelligence of Korean adoptees and their adopted siblings.
Is there broken-down data for siblings of Korean vs non-Korean international adoptees? If these are equal then that means there is no selection for families that seek Korean kids that makes their kids smarter. But this still doesn't preclude Pygmalion effect.
We have comparisons of parents. Among mothers of non-Korean international adoptees, 51% had a postsecondary degree, compared to 41% of the mothers of Koreans. The evidence suggests that non-Korean international adoptees were if anything adopted by more educated parents.
It doesn't surprise me at all. I made a similar point ages ago about the selection pressures affecting Ashkenazi Jewish populations, which goes a good way to explain observed differences in average cognitive-test performance, and about the self-selection for entrepreneurialism among Europeans, and later others, who emigrated to the US. That goes some way towards explaining the more individualistic and entrepreneurial culture that developed there.
I agree that it's rather sad that we are still debating such basic questions. But the reason for the unease is understandable. People are rightly afraid that if they give an inch on genetics and intelligence, they are stepping onto a slippery slope that historically has led to some truly horrible places, from eugenics to slavery and genocide.
What we need is a debate that clearly separates the science of intelligence, which fascinates us both, from the ethics of how human beings should be treated Whatever population studies reveal about genetic differences should have no bearing on the basic dignity or rights of people.
It would help the case if you addressed that distinction one day. Thanks for this one, though. Really interesting.
What I find fascinating about this discussion is that it makes no reference to the debate over the Great Divergence between Asia and Europe -- that Europe pulled ahead at some point because of a combination of cultural, institutional, and geographic factors. It would be stimulating to reconcile the current discussion with the wider historiographical debate. Because it seems to me that the latter pretty convincingly demolished the HISTORICAL foundation for the former.
Stop talking about race and IQ...I swear I read that somewhere? Good piece, though.
It's more like IQ should NOT become a high salience topic since it attracts the worst people on earth. If you're a true one in a million man, you're out and about changing the world, no one's doubting your brilliance. The people who ceaselessly talk about it are midwits who feel the need to compensate
If we really followed the evidence from the whole race and IQ thing, it would tell us that Asians, not Whites, are the master race and should be our natural overlords. Insisting that Black people are dumber does not change the fact that White people would still not be at the top of the pyramid.
Because of this reason alone, it's probably a good idea for White people to just stop talking about IQ and race.
Europeans are WEIRD, and Asians aren't, that's why we rule the world and they don't.
Just because Asians are smarter doesn’t mean whites have to be ruled by them. Nor should we stop talking about IQ if it means we can end DEI, affirmative action, woke, etc.
Amen.
It really is a brain eating parasite. Even when you say you shouldn't, it draws you into talking about it.
The biggest problem with the IQ debate is that the IQ scale is very misleading. The difference between an IQ of 130 and 70 looks like the former is 80% smarter than the latter. But someone with an IQ of 70 can speak, drive a car, hold down a simple job. The actual difference in intellect is actually something like a 1-2%. A group getting 1% smarter over 5k to 10k years sounds pretty reasonable and non-offensive. But a group getting say 35% smarter than another, say American Jews and blacks sounds really bad. But also not true. We need an IQ scale in which each point is a standard deviation, and animals and humans are both on the same scale. The difference between Einstein and Forrest Gump should be be like 4 points. No will lose their minds over that.
It's pretty clear that the genetic gulf between Africans and East Asians is not 60 points anyway. The only way you get to that number is assuming that 100% of the variation between groups is due to entirely genetic effects [1], which also is not found in the studies above, since the Koreans don't outperform the Swedes that much. They have almost indistinguishable results from the general population and are about a third of a standard deviation above national adoptees, which would be ~5 IQ points.
[1]: And also whatever insanely low-quality results Lynn threw together are true, rather than representing the average IQ of coal mining orphans or whatever.
Seeing these were adoptees and probably negatively selected/with negative early environment, the average difference between East Asians and ADOS in the US and specifically in math could be a standard deviation or 2/3rds of an SD. (I am not making any assumption about causes, and also not about whether the effect is really a cognitive one rather than largely mediated by behavioral/personality differences, which isn't implausible.) One SD or 2/3 SD does lead to noticeably different representations at the very high and very low end of the distribution.
The comparison group for the five point difference is the national adoptees, who also presumably are negatively selected against/have negative early environment. Compared to genpop, the difference is ~0.
One problem with that is that most people intuitively won't believe that an IQ difference of 1 point or less can possibly explain any seemingly large socioeconomic disparity, even if it's also less than a standard deviation. Any difference less than 1 point on any scale probably gets rounded down to insignificance in the minds of most people.
It would be an interesting experiment for a country to ban reporting of disparities in any unit except standard deviations. For example, Google AI says that "Globally and nationally, women typically earn 82 to 85 cents for every dollar a man earns, creating an unadjusted distance between the two means of about 0.2 to 0.3 standard deviations." Which number is more useful for rabble-rousing?
Maybe. However the idea is that for most things it does get rounded off, Everyone can farm, not everyone can do physics. You make farming managing a drone swarm, and vibe coding updates to their software, now it matters. Like if there is a disparity in taxi driving you might have racism, in applied math not so much. Still, I think we can't have a rational discussion, if we zoom in on the graph and make tiny difference seem giant, everyone will be confused.
This article kind of speaks to that concept. It tries to contend with the wide gulfs in mathematical cognition between people whose brains are not terribly different in terms of material basis-
https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/attention-is-all-we-have
"Of course, the human brain has some fixed, heritable features, and its morphogenesis is controlled by regulatory genes that vary from one person to another. But, again, this feels more like Snapdragon 7 vs Snapdragon 8 nuances."
A bit shockingly, nobody in either the article or comments has proposed the only reasonable non-genetic explanation: Because adopting families tend to be better off than average, their environment is so awesome that adopted Koreans do well, even if they're adversely selected (as shown by their siblings having the highest uni completion percentages of all). Granted, it does still lead to a conclusion of genetic differences (between East Asian adoptees and non-East Asian adoptees).
That's a well known fact and the article takes account of it and specifically illustrates it with the siblings.
I'm confused why you chose to skip over that Korean kids suffer very little for a late age of adoption in the conscript study (adopted >4y get post-secondary 47.2% of the time, versus <6mo getting it 50.7%), while non-Korean adoptees suffer significantly (15.0% versus 28.1%), which DOES suggest that the environment in Korea is better for orphans somehow. We are talking <8yo, here, so something more like better nursing or prenatal nutrition or ICU care or something like that, rather than a top-notch educational environment for a 5 year old.
I guess it's possible that Koreans have some kind of genetic resistance to suffering negative effects from late adoption, but this seems quite contrived and improbable.
Another explanation for the Korean data -
"Koreans are smart" is a meme. Some Swedish families value smarts and therefore select Koreans and also invest into making their children smarter. It's this + Pygmalion effect that shows up in the higher intelligence of Korean adoptees and their adopted siblings.
Is there broken-down data for siblings of Korean vs non-Korean international adoptees? If these are equal then that means there is no selection for families that seek Korean kids that makes their kids smarter. But this still doesn't preclude Pygmalion effect.
We have comparisons of parents. Among mothers of non-Korean international adoptees, 51% had a postsecondary degree, compared to 41% of the mothers of Koreans. The evidence suggests that non-Korean international adoptees were if anything adopted by more educated parents.
I’m sure OP will update their beliefs accordingly
Nothing to update because I was already in agreement with the thesis of the post. Why the snark?
Sorry
It doesn't surprise me at all. I made a similar point ages ago about the selection pressures affecting Ashkenazi Jewish populations, which goes a good way to explain observed differences in average cognitive-test performance, and about the self-selection for entrepreneurialism among Europeans, and later others, who emigrated to the US. That goes some way towards explaining the more individualistic and entrepreneurial culture that developed there.
I agree that it's rather sad that we are still debating such basic questions. But the reason for the unease is understandable. People are rightly afraid that if they give an inch on genetics and intelligence, they are stepping onto a slippery slope that historically has led to some truly horrible places, from eugenics to slavery and genocide.
What we need is a debate that clearly separates the science of intelligence, which fascinates us both, from the ethics of how human beings should be treated Whatever population studies reveal about genetic differences should have no bearing on the basic dignity or rights of people.
It would help the case if you addressed that distinction one day. Thanks for this one, though. Really interesting.
What I find fascinating about this discussion is that it makes no reference to the debate over the Great Divergence between Asia and Europe -- that Europe pulled ahead at some point because of a combination of cultural, institutional, and geographic factors. It would be stimulating to reconcile the current discussion with the wider historiographical debate. Because it seems to me that the latter pretty convincingly demolished the HISTORICAL foundation for the former.
Sorry -- got former and latter mixed up.
Finland actually isn't a great outperformer these days. Look up more recent data.
It’s become a lot more predictive as time has gone on, now that ideas, innovations, and capital can travel more easily.
Would you really call East Asian civilizational history and output comparable to sub saharan africa?