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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.
My issue right now is that debating these facts seems a bit futile, because you explicitly said you wouldn't change your mind until we came up with an atomic-level simulation of society. Why shouldn't I hold you to the same standard?
I think you misinterpreted my statement, so I will try to make my position more clear.
I believe I have a decent layman's understanding of the study of genetics and life outcomes. I believe that IQ is genetic (though with some influence from environment), and I believe that groups could have different average IQ's due to a different prevalence of genes being common within those groups. All of that I am perfectly on board with.
However, I think we are still in a pretty primitive place when it comes to the relationship between DNA and life outcomes. We have a better understanding than the behaviorists (who were true blank slatists), or the era of single gene studies (which produced a lot of good insights, and also a lot of junk science with low-N studies that didn't have enough power to show anything statistically significant), but right now what we're doing is just genome-wide association studies with various life outcomes. And that is a powerful tool, because it means that we can narrow our search space tremendously when we are looking for causal explanations.
But even if we find candidate genes, they might not produce low IQ in so straightforward a way as, "the blueprint of your brain down to the DNA is just dumber." The most trivial example of this might be a causal story along the lines of:
Now, to be clear, I don't think that that causal story is true. But hopefully it helps illustrates that it kind of matters what a gene actually does, not just whether it correlates with life outcomes. If we do GWAS, and find that the genes related to black external physical features are correlated with less success in life or lower educational attainment, then that doesn't really tell us anything new (unless there are unexpected double effects, similar to the findings that people with red hair supposedly have less pain tolerance than people with other hair colors due to the red hair genes having other downstream effects.)
If I grant that low black IQ in the modern day is primarily explained by genetics, there's still a lot of hypotheses that need to be investigated for the how and why. For example, could any of the following be an explanation:
Hopefully with those illustrations it becomes clear why I was saying we would definitively know when we can fully simulate the environment. I am not resistant to a simple explanation like, "black people's brains are just structurally dumber across the board", but I don't think that's the "null hypothesis" even if we do rigorous, high-N GWAS studies and find some good candidate genes for black life outcomes in America. Once we find the genes, we have to explain how they are affecting IQ, and there is no law of the universe requiring it to be something as simple as Mendelian inheritance in peas.
It is possible we'll know with a high degree of confidence much sooner than that. I can be convinced without a full biological simulation that low black IQ is best explained by genes, and we know approximately what those genes are and what they are doing to cause lower IQ. But I don't think anyone has such an explanation yet. I would be happy to be pointed at the rigorously conducted studies that say otherwise, though. I'd rather believe what is true, than suspend my judgement awaiting a better explanation.
I'm sorry, but it hasn't.
My issue isn't with your particular reasons for not buying into the differences between groups being genetic, my issue is with your broad support for multiculturalism on the basis that it worked out fine with the Irish. I'm saying that your particular version of multiculturalism, liberalism, etc., requires at least as much evidence as you demand of HBD, and arguably more, since it's an actual set of policy prescriptions, not just an abstract theory explaining the performance of groups. It should also explain failure to integrate, despite explicit promises of future success, and again provide the same level of evidence that you demand of HBD that these explanations are correct. Otherwise, you are privileging your theories to the status of the null hypothesis, despite your assurances in the other comment that you don't.
Yeah, neither do I. I'm not even that much of a hardcore HBDer, I've repeatedly pushed back against blanket condemnation of racial groups, but I think your claim that HBDers are treating their theory as the null hypothesis is a strawman.
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‘ 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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