The only explanation I've seen is "well, retarded people do poorly for reasons other than IQ" which is also a violation of common sense.
Here is a blog post by Kirgegaard arguing this:
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2022/10/african-iqs-and-mental-retardation/
When people think of retarded people, they mostly have in mind someone who has Down syndrome, or a similar severe genetic disorder. … They usually suffer from some kind of syndrome, which is why it’s usually called syndromic retardation. But the more important point is that Down syndrome does not just make your intelligence very low, it also causes other behavioral defects. As such, people with Down syndrome are not representative of people with <70 IQ.
It was noted by Jensen:
Many of the latter [minority lower-class children], despite IQs below 75 and markedly poor scholastic performance, did not seem nearly as retarded as the white middle-class children with comparable IQs and scholastic records. […] EMR [educationally mentally retarded] children who were called ‘culturally disadvantaged’, as contrasted with middle-class EMR children, appeared much brighter socially and on the playground, often being quite indistinguishable in every way from children of normal IQ except in their scholastic performance and in their scores on a variety of standard IQ tests. Middle-class white children diagnosed as EMR, on the other hand, though they constituted a much smaller percentage of the EMR classes, usually appeared to be more mentally retarded all round and not just in their performance in scholastic subjects and IQ tests. I asked myself, how could one devise a testing procedure that would reveal this distinction so that it could be brought under closer study and not depend upon casual observations and impressions.
So in a sense HBD is exaggerated, because we have a (mis)conception of what a person 25 IQ points below the norm is like, which is skewed by those with quite heavy mental problems. Thought experiment: Imagine you are the person 2 standard deviations below the norm, simply because you are a 100 IQ person who stumbled into a neighborhood full of extremely bright Caltech/MIT students. There are things in which you notice a difference, like everyone seems to do math in their head quicker than you can tap on your phone to open the calculator app. Maybe you browse funny Instagram stories, instead of wasting your free time in obscure internet boards where users post walls of text about arcane topics. But in most ways you wouldn't seem "retarded" to the genius egg-heads, but them and you would socially interact quite normal.
Blueberry
10d ago
The deniers are just coping or contrarians.
It is very easy:
A) CO2 absorbs infrared radiation.
B) Industrialization increased its percentage in the atmosphere.
Preindustrial CO2 rate was under 300 parts per million.
2000 it was 370 ppm
2024 it reached 420 ppm
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-region
It is skewing to the last decades: half of the emmissions from 1750 to now were emitted in the last 30 years.
The amount of coal and oil we burned and will burn is stunningly large. A hundred times more every year than all vulcanism. HOW could that NOT have an effect?
Blueberry
29d ago
Italy’s birth rate is decreasing further to 1,2:
Financial Times: Italy’s births drop to historic low
Just 379,000 babies were born in 2023, despite PM Giorgia Meloni’s efforts to reverse demographic decline
Meloni has continued a child allowance scheme introduced by the previous government in 2021 and slightly increased the monthly sums families receive for small children, but her rightwing government has also experimented with other incentives.
After coming to power in late 2022, the coalition government halved VAT on infant products such as baby formula and nappies, but it has since scrapped those tax cuts. This year, Italy has allocated €1bn in other measures aimed at supporting mothers, including temporarily making pension contributions on behalf of working women who have at least two young children.
But Maria Rita Testa, a demographer at Rome’s Luiss university, said policymakers needed to address other factors, including parents’ economic stability and access to affordable childcare, now in acutely short supply. “They should try to tackle the problem of reconciliation of family and work tasks,” Testa said.
Italy had planned to use some of the €200bn in EU recovery funds it receives to build new childcare facilities for 260,000 infants and pre-school aged children, but Rome has now cut that target to 160,000.
The article notes that Meloni is herself a single child, but fails to mention that she also only has a single daughter. Still the low birth rate is a core issue for her and her right-wing coalition, but as in leftwing governments elsewhere they can’t find policies to reverse course.
Blueberry
25d ago
Yes, because their (now grown up) kids defend Allen & Soon Yi:
Whatever one can sneer at the marriage, it held better than many others. They will stay together until Woody dies.
Even with regard to Ronan Farrow
I bet good money that Allen doesn’t have any biological children. I subscribe to the Frank Sinatra’s theory.
That's a messed-up family dynamic.
True.
It is even more strange when they stay principled! There are people in the worldnews subreddit arguing that Ukraine should draft women.
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