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The established correlation between SES and IQ is not proven to be causal. You can't make it up by emphasizing word "empirically". SES is not a confounder because there are genetic differences in SES. Higher IQ allows for person to have upwards mobility and trasmit their higher IQ genotypes to their children. This process has been run many times.
"IQ" of 2 year children in these plots is ludicrous. Certainly it does not measure same thing at 2 yo as it does for 16 yos. People may have different IQ trajectories in childhood and only final thing is what matters.
Blacks mature faster than whites, run faster, have better color vision and immune systems. Maybe smell either.
And the correlation between genetics and IQ has? Nobody's running randomized control trails with polygenically screened embryos. We're at least as confident that SES affects intelligence as we are that any particular gene marker of intelligence does. Sure, SES effects genetics too, but it's not like causality is required to be unidirectional.
Even if these claims are true, and true because of specifically genetic factors, It's not clear to me at all that these things should result in tradeoffs. Faster maturation seems like it would select for greater learning speed; color vision for visual pattern analysis; faster running for spatial intelligence. Maybe I'm wrong-- but either way, it's an empirical question that the current data can't resolve. That's ultimately my big problem with modern race-based intelligence research: that the data is too fuzzy, and that there are too many empirical questions left unanswered. At this point I simply can't reject the null hypothesis and accept that the HBD racial intelligence rankings accurately reflect reality.
IQ obviously doesn't cause genetics, genetics causes IQ. Proven.
So what? Nobody running randomized trials with putting adopted children in lower SES and high SES.
It was already established before The Bell Curve that as given SES, high IQ predicts upwards mobility. Come on, in a society that at least partly meritocratic, it is expected that high-IQ genotypes more common at high SES. (You can hypothetize that high SES is also correlated with greedy or anti-social genotypes but that would be beyond the point).
in prior post, you just started with unfounded assumption that SES->IQ is unidirectional.
that's ludicrous. Evolution didn't find a way for us to be as smart as we are now and mature faster than chimps. We mature a lot slower than chimps, who are already much slower than expected for mammal of its size.
You can find a lot of animals better than humans at all three (e.g. ostrich) but while being dumb AF.
There is no reason for blank slatism to be "null hypothesis". We have null hypotheses where we already have prior experience (i.e. tried multiple medicines, out of which most do not work), in this area we do not have. Also, the point is not that HBD accurately reflects reality, the point is that it's more accurate than blank slatism.
You're arguing against a strawman. I agree that blank slatism is false. But the specific conclusions drawn by HBD about racial intelligence have dramatically insufficient evidence. You've flipped a coin three times, seen HHH, and assumed the coin is biased toward heads. Sure, that's technically more accurate than the people claiming the coin is exactly, perfectly balanced, but not more accurate than the viewpoint that we have insufficient coin-flipping data to figure out its true bias.
A coin is something intentionally made in shape of solid flat cylinder. (and we have priors of seeing coins before). If you see that the coin in the question looks like planoconvex lens, well... There is no mechanism that keeps balancing traits of different populations. Genus Homo underwent some speciations in last 1Mya.
While there is usually not enough information to make about relative intelligence of some groups which inhabit each one's country under one goverment, language and culture, there is a lot of information comparing eurasians vs sub-saharan blacks.
For me to believe the hypothesis that "intra-racial IQ differences are primarily mediated by genetic differences" I would need to see the following data:
Without both those data points, all you can do is try and prove "intra-racial IQ differences look like this" and "IQ differences are primarily mediated by genetic differences" separately. But while that's necessary, it's not sufficient-- to prove the full hypothesis. At least, not without larger effect sizes and better mathematical techniques. Especially because even if you prove that, say, the IQ differences between whites and amerindians and asians is due to genes, that's dramatically insufficient to prove that the IQ differences between those groups and subsaharan africans are due to genes. Nutrition, parasite load, education infrastructure, epigenetics. Look upon my works ye mighty, and despair.
The vast timespan that selection effects have had to act are exactly why I'm so suspicious of modern data. Every human born in the last two hundred years lives a live completely unlike the lives we lived in the last five thousand. And the majority of humans born in the last five thousand years have lived lives completely unlike the lives lived in the last five hundred thousand. And yet, any attempt to argue for the impact of selection pressures on intelligence must explain all three of those periods simultaneously. It has to be true across every subpopulation, and every chronopopulation. It has to explain the differences between the dutch and italians, and the italians and the romans, as well as it explains the differences between the hausa and yoruba.
And also...
Look, I have a bit of a pet theory. A literal pet theory. Because: we know that wolves are smarter than dogs. They do better on problem solving tasks, and of course they're superior at surviving in the wild. But a dog will sit when you tell it to sit, and fetch when you tell it to fetch. And the vast majority of tests we put canids up to aren't "surviving in the wild," they're "doing what we tell you to." So if racial IQ differences are provably genetic... even then, I'll be a little suspicious about the true allocation of racial intelligence. It's worth remembering that while IQ tests try to be as unbiased as they can along as many metrics as possible... they can unbias themselves along the axis of being a test. And tests favor trainability. I'm not going to say that obviously dumb people are just actually "street smart", but I do wonder if IQ tests at the population level are really just measuring which cultural-genetic backgrounds can sit still the longest while wagging their tails. This theory is unfalsifiable, of course, so I won't ask you to falsify it... but it would be fascinating to see what would happen if we rounded up people at random, gave them IQ tests, dropped them off somewhere remote, and then watched to see how long they survived.
You're requiring undue burden of proof. Like some creationists say "show me abiogenesis ab novo". Causal genes for IQ are not established -- currently, GWAS operates with tag SNPs which are just proxies to causal variants near them, but it different populations tag SNP might proxy different variants so there is no easy way to transfer polygenic scores to other population. Actually, Davide Piffer tried that, (and his analysis shows Africans dumber -- check his Substack) -- and got responses "never do that"
So are pro-HBD folks say "we don't need larger sample sizes, we already know the truth" or are anti-HBD folks say "we don't need larger sample sizes, we already know the truth"?
I'd disagree about details, but let's assume it's true. You raise actually a valid point that some genes beneficial in ancient environment might be bad now (i.e. improved food digestion then and causing obesity now, ditto protection against infection vs allergy ). But it looks like most of in-population variation is just slightly broken gene variants of ideal brain devised by evolution for current moment.
But geniuses are still geniuses and dumbs still dumbs.
think that if you were posting this from pro-HBD pespective, someone could write: A Racist Poster Compares Africans To Wolves By Implication.
I think it's possible somehow to separate ability for sitting still the longest from intelligence. Btw, many backward cultures had weird rituals, which might have something like sitting still on anthill for certain amount of hime and our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn't move for 16 hours per day.
You could devise a separate "sitting long" test which would require something less intellectual. Well... Make them sit and use drum. See, no problemo here.
It would make sense to compare teams made of people with similar IQ than than loners.
"Undue" relative to what? Again, I'm not arguing that intelligence isn't mediated by genetics, I'm just arguing that we laack sufficient evidence about specifically race-based genetics. And as per your other comment, while larger sample sized would be nice the problem remain the potential for confounders. At the root of the problem is the fact that races are essentialy pre-confounded; we know for a fact that people of different races lead different lifestyles of consistent but largely non-genetic reasons; any of those things will interfere with any attempt to say a particular trait is caused by genetics. Hell, take skin tone for example. We know unambiguously that genes mediate skin tone, but we also know for a fact that any attempt to survey ethnicities by skin tone and attempt to precisely predict the genetic effect would be confounded by the effect of distribution over latitude and likelyhood to tan.
If you actually believe this, you should be more skeptical of hbd, not less. if there's one perfect brain, and iq is just about how close you are to it, the only selection pressures that would matter would be demerits for isolated populations with tight social structures that allow people with genetic defects to survive and breed. That looks like the exact opposite of the smart-jews HBD hypothesis.
I'm not on the motte because I'm interested in being politically correct.
That we should be testing groups is well taken, but the "similar iq" part i disagree with. Even most nuclear families have significant IQ variation. In particular, I think that when resources (food, parental investment, status) are scarce, groups end up adopting tactics that concentrate iq gains in a few individuals (like by feeding the chief's firstborn son better food and working hard to educate him) while the rest are allowed to be dumber. Also, the "smartest" genes are probably relative to body dimensions... Maybe a gene that causes you to grow more neurons on average is best when combined with genes that predispose you to have a big skull, but actually gives you iq reducing mental illness if poor nutrition or being born female gives you a small head.
Relative to what normal rationalism would say.
The "controversy" is not about what they do in ancestral lifestyles but whether they can function same in WEIRD societes now. So a between-sibling GWAS of persons born in WEIRD society and one or both parents are mixed-races would find answer.
Why? Selection eliminates deleterious alleles from population. What constitutes deleterious depends on current environment. So you may find some population where selection for IQ-lowering alleles intensified but selection for bad running (or immune systems) relaxed.
That was my attempt to make a joke.
Why? I'd agree that non-equal allocation of IQ points can be better, but the premise was to test different IQs. Btw, it might get that you allocated too many IQ points in a person who has no leadership qualities and that might be worse if IQ points were allocated equally.
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