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The metric of IQ was invented in 1905. Around the 1970's we measured Irish IQ, and it seemed low. In the late 1980's Ireland became a banking hub and in the decades that followed we measured their IQ's and they weren't low. Those are the facts as I roughly understand them, without causal links added.
I do agree that the banking hub explanation is only one possible explanation for the observed changes in IQ. It's not as certain as the conservation of momentum, to be sure. It is just a balance of probabilities.
We have seen Irish IQ go up to around the White European average. We have also seen black IQ go up, but it does not match White IQ (today it averages around 85 in the US.) I don't think we have definitive evidence that this is as high as it will ever go. I guess my question would be, would it surprise you if in 100 years, people with similar genetics to today's African Americans ended up having average IQ's that were equivalent to a 90 or a 95 today and no medical interventions were responsible for the measured rise in IQ? Would it surprise you if in 100 years the black murder rate fell 10%-20%? What about if the rise in IQ was larger, or the fall in the murder rate even greater? What do you consider unrealistic for us to observe in the future?
Sure. I was just defending American culture as a whole there. You were the one who said it was on life support.
‘ it’s ok you’re dead now, in the future these people will be 30% less likely to murder, still bout 40% more likely than everyone else ‘ is worse than anything I can imagine.
I was asking to get a sense of how people were thinking about the genetic proclivities of African Americans for IQ and criminality. Like, I'm willing to entertain that the difference is genetic, but just as I think that differences in genetics probably explain differences in sporting ability (say, height in basketball to name just one factor), and yet I also believe that a clone of Lebron James who was half-starved his whole life and kept in a dark cave with no human contact would not be a good basketball player, I also think it is reasonable to speculate that there might be environmental factors exacerbating whatever genetic differences are there.
For example, a quick search shows that the following vitamin deficiencies are common in African Americans: vitamin D (likely due to their darker skin), iron, vitamin B12, magnesium, and vitamin B2. Now, I don't have a causal story for how any of those interact with IQ or criminality, but if we imagine the US making an intervention similar to iodine in salt or vitamins A and D in milk, would it be totally crazy if that led to some positive outcomes for criminality?
I also think the focus on relative rates is a little silly. It would be one thing if every black person was a genetic monstrosity with a 50/50 chance of turning on you and killing you dead in the streets every time you encountered them, but because America has a relatively low murder rate (high for a rich developed country, but still lower than most of the developing world), the practical effect of a statement like "black people are around eight times more likely to commit murder than the rest of the US population on a per-capita basis" is that in a year like 2023 around 6,405 black Americans committed murder out of a population of 48.3 million black people (and most of their victims were other black people, so it's not like they're mostly making it everyone else's problem.)
That is, even if black criminality is 100% genetic, it cashes out to a level where we should still treat the remaining 99.99+% of blacks with a strong presumption that they are not murderers, if we want to be well-calibrated to the statistics. It would almost be hysterical to do otherwise. Certainly it is statistically illiterate to make a big deal out of such a tiny number of bad apples, even if it is relatively higher than other groups.
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