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Notes -
Does anyone know of a good overview of the Race and IQ debate for someone who's completely ducked the topic until now and is basically ignorant?
EDIT: Thanks for the responses everyone!
People who are see-no-evil-pilled typically need a quick introduction of why anyone would even think races might have varied intelligence. A quick (outdated by now) copypasta that used to get posted:
And now for refutations. The most common response to the above syllogism is that whites in America have a shared environment. As such, things like twin studies and adoption studies which purport to show IQ as genetic, actually only show that a smart white child adopted by dumb white parents still benefits from a community and culture that cultivates their intelligence. (Systemic Racism).
For the most interesting refutation of a black-white intelligence gap, read the series of articles Chisala Chanda wrote for the Unz Review. A large part of his argument is that modern transplant populations from Africa to the UK and USA, as opposed to the descendants of slaves, do not show an achievement gap with the native populations.
EDIT: I should clarify that I'm not versed in the latest state of the art in this debate -- I made my conclusions about ten years ago now and don't find the topic that interesting, except as an example of ideological constraints causing otherwise rational societies to act in incredibly stupid ways.
There's an old meme that the best way to get help for Linux is not to ask for help on X, but to publish an overly-confident flawed diatribe about how Linux sucks because it can't do X. I suspect Race IQ debates work the same way.
The most obvious refutation of that refutation would be that those populations are highly selected for intelligence. I am sure if someone like me who knows next to nothing about the topic can thing of this caveat, Chanda can think of it too. Does he address it?
I thought the same thing. Half-way through the series, I recall Chisala citing a black refugee population that settled in California (rather than skllled educated immigrants) where their children achieved average results in school. My assumption is that this example was cherry picked from many hundreds of refugee communities that did poorly, but there it is.
Where in California? East LA or the Central Valley, or someplace where average results aren’t ‘shows up about half the time and can spell own name, with assistance’?
Sorry, it was Seattle rather than California. He was writing about refugees from the Horn of Africa (ethiopians, somalians, oromo), whose children performed above the domestic black average test scores depite not speaking English at home. The results weren't collected for intelligence research but as part of the city government's report on refugee education. Here is the exact part
Thank you! I am very happy to finally see someone earnestly attempting to refute HBD arguments. For completeness' sake, here is an archive of the blog post, the source article and the presentation Chisala got his numbers from.
I remain unconvinced. There is no indication that the Somali sample is in any way representative of the source population. Here is Chisala's argument:
Chisala seems to assume that most of the Somali sample comes from refugee camps. But the source article only mentions that "[The Somali children's] families came to the U.S. to escape their war-torn country, many by way of refugee camps.". Chisala puts this aside by saying that "It is not necessarily all who were from these camps, but that doesn’t matter since even those who were from there are performing above native black Americans". But I didn't get that from a cursory glance of the data, which only seems to report aggregate data. Even so, there are a whole host of different selection effects with those coming from refugee camps. As one commenter puts it:
Chisala did, as far as I can see, not respond to this concern.
I have not yet looked at the UK data Chisala mentions.
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