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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Low effort but CW so it goes here. Its the end of the week anyways.

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/115vdud/looking_for_recommendations_on_sources_for_why/

It seems to me the slatestarcodex subreddit has been fully normified. Of all those comments only 1 mention (hint) of group average IQ on why sub saharan Africa is poor??

Then theres the "woah how did you get here, you dont belong here" as a response to the guy who hinted at IQ. Does that guy even know whose blog he is in the subreddit of.

All I am saying is for those of you who still say /r/ssc is "smart", update your priors, this post is not an isolated case.

E: Ill remove if consensus building.

If you're going to argue something outside the mainstream, you're going to have to do the work in explaining yourself. None of the "It's IQ" comments are doing that, even the ones that were removed. They're simply attributing the entire reason to IQ and leaving it at that, as if you can reduce all of SSA's failure to develop strictly on their national IQs.

Even if that were the case, you'd have to do a great deal more to explain that position. The comment about institutions cited multiple published books by respected researchers to illustrate its case.

Is this outside the mainstream? It’s not something acceptable to talk about but my gut is most people believe it is a primary contributor. Just the whole getting branded racists and talking about differences is a taboo. I put this ideas is the taboo but everyone basically believes them camp.

Is this outside the mainstream?

Yes. Whatever you want to attribute it to, the prevailing sentiments are like this one:

“Is it really likely that the average person of African ancestry is cognitively impaired when compared to the average white person?” David S. Jones, a Harvard historian and medical ethicist, told Vox. “I can’t think of how that could actually be true. And the assumption that it is true just sounds like white supremacist racism to me. We need to subject any claims like this to really strict scrutiny.”

Not just, "well, that's one explanation" or "I doubt it, that's improbable", but "I can't think of how that could actually be true". Stating that you can't even think of how it could be true that people of different ancestries differ in average cognitive ability is Harvard medical ethicist thinking. Whether he's stating that cynically or honestly, that's where we're at. Do you want to be subject to really strict scrutiny on whether you're a white supremacist?

I don’t know that ‘people with differing ancestries have different IQ’s’ is the sentiment objected to so much as ‘it just doesn’t seem within the realm of possibility that entire countries are made up mostly of actually literally retarded people’ is the objection.

Sigh. A Harvard medical ethicist of all people ought to know the nosological difference between «actually literally retarded» and «very low IQ», because those are, in fact, different conditions.

Then again, maybe it's the opposite and his job is to not know the difference – who am I to tell, not being Harvard material myself? Like the Chinese say,

“We need to teach machines not only how to speak, but also how not to speak.”

And more is expected of experts.

If some people have cognitive impairment and low IQ and some have just low IQ and can function in society, I don't see why the cognitive impairment shouldn't be considered to be part of IQ in the first place. A meaningful measure of IQ would consider the person with cognitive impairment to have a lower IQ, because he has cognitive impairment.

You can also look at it from another angle: "Can learn the skills needed to function in society" should be most of IQ. If a 60 IQ person can function as well as an 80 IQ person but doesn't understand analogies, he should, by definition, have a 80 IQ, especially if the 80 IQ person barely understands analogies either. "Understands analogies slightly worse, but neither of them understands analogies well enough to use them" is not a large IQ gap under any useful definition of IQ.

(I'm not convinced that the whole distinction is even real. Are there studies that show that it's possible to have 60-IQ-with-impairment and 60-IQ-without-impairment for people who are otherwise under similar cultures and circumstances?)

That would defeat the premise of what an IQ score is, a metric trying to capture the latent g factor.

Why not just have a "societal functioning quotient"? The SFQ so to speak. It might even gain popularity over IQ and become the de facto "intelligence" metric (because that will be gameable unlike IQ). Be warned, it's not that easy to make what you are proposing, not to speak on will it be even useful for research or as a signal. There is a reason Academia gave so much weight to the SAT and GRE up until the recent past (It was a useful signal), Half the job openings for ETS (the company that makes the GRE) is for Psychometrics and Psychology PhDs.. I wonder why they need so many psychologists for a primarily Math and English test.