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I started writing a post for the culture war thread, and it got longer than I thought it would so I ended up just posting it as its own thread. I know some people don't always see those threads, so I thought I'd post a link here. I'm open to discussing it in either location:
https://www.themotte.org/post/604/the-case-for-ignoring-race
Adding to what I've said in the thread.
I think @Amadan has written on this a few times; I objected to his normative conclusions, but on facts it's true. You can't have a major European nation's worth of ethnically distinct people – and at that proud, self-assured, suspicious, confident in having been historically slighted, often outright ferocious people (whose self-perception of being Main Characters and moral core of the country is artificially inflated by the media) – with strong common identity, who disproportionately cannot compete in your economy, and expect them to buy the White/Asian "git gud" ethos. They may cope somehow, they may come to fear the punishment for insubordination and value rewards of cooperation, but they won't take it to heart. It's not as stable a form of race relations as the status quo. The whole system needs to be revamped into a drastically smarter thing to make it viable.
P.S. The issue with race comes from tail effects. I think you're underplaying just how bad the crime statistics are for prime age Black men. I'm wary of lily-white gopniks due to several violent encounters, but for most prime age White guys who look kinda sus it's fair to assume more or less good faith. With equivalent Black guys the odds are, like, 10X higher and that's probably an underestimate. I am positive that this one bit weighs too much to realistically discard.
You're correct, but at the same time I also suspect that you know what I'm about to say. The issue you describe here is not the sort of thing that shows up on a blood test. It's cultural through and through. The problem is not whether one is "black" "white" or "asian". The problem is one of moral and philosophical bankruptcy.
I don't expect an intersectional feminist to react positively to being told she needs to "git gud" if she wants to compete with the boys just because she's white. Do you? If not why not?
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This is, as far was I can tell, the crux of the matter. It’s fine as far as it goes to mathematically prove via HBD that black under representation in intellectual fields and poor achievement in general is largely the fault of them having worse genes, but it’s not an explanation that a population with an average IQ of 100 would accept, much less 85. You can repress sporadic violent outbursts, you can pay them to shut up and come down with maximum force on defectors, you can use affirmative action until they get taken care of, but ‘just letting them fail’ is not a way to deal with an unassimilable ethnic group with a population of 40 million dispersed throughout your country, which has a ready made excuse for failure that blames you.
I see no reason why a racial group's lack of ability should get them preferential treatment. And there are harsher options than "repress sporadic violent outbursts".
Yes, in justice affirmative action is not morally obligatory. But given the facts(that is, a distinctive sub population which on average will never be able to compete with the white majority and which already has an ethnonarcisistic messiah complex and which can’t be fully assimilated for structural reasons) at hand it’s certainly preferable to bringing back Jim Crow.
"Affirmative action", being racial discrimination, is not just "not morally obligatory" but morally disfavored.
Jim Crow was also racial discrimination.
As for the subpopulation, if they want to cause trouble, I'm all for treating them as any troublemakers would be, by repressing any violent outbursts. That they are intransigent does not mean everyone else is obliged to yield; a contest of force is a reasonable and IMO superior alternative.
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Can you point me to a name, link that does the genetic proof for HBD. Most of the content I see here already assumes this axiomatically or is low resolution. What id like is something where I can start to 'cleave the arguments at their bones'
Eg, I'm curious what interpretation people have for the Flynn effect, or what the evidence base is for isolated genetic pools over long history..
Is what you are looking for, an analysis of a large number of genes that shows that certain genes are associated with high IQs and these genes are more common in certain populations? There are studies. I can't speak to their reliability. Alternately, are you looking for twin studies that show that identical twins are more common than non-identical twins in IQ?
The achievement gap/IQ gap between white and black people in the US is accepted by all sides. The argument is whether or not IQ is genetic, whether it is a meaningful measure, and whether the tests are fair. The arguments for each of these are many.
HBDers, whether they are right or wrong, have put in quite a lot of work.
The evidence that some populations were isolated (genetically and otherwise) is pretty strong. We can trace DNA and know that Australia and the New World were cut off for quite a while. Similarly, we can tell that Europe and North Africa were cut off from Sub-Saharan Africa almost entirely. There is almost no Neanderthal genes in Sub-Saharan Africa, etc.
Yep that's the level of analysis I'm thinking, and how each piece scaffolds to the broader claims around G intelligence over broad groups of lineages. I've read some Charles Murray and I'm underwhelmed by some of the aggregate data presented. I had thought by now a lot of interesting work on phylogenetic trees would be informing the conversation with some controlled natural experiments available.
But even then, 'some populations' being isolated limits representativeness and relevance for other populations.
Also there are different distributional considerations- perhaps some data is a group at the tail, ie Asian Americans. The analysis is very sensitive to what we consider our population and who were measuring etc.
People talk about Koreans being smarter but are they really genetically all that different from other Asians in the region?
I guess I want to learn from conversations on here so they have to actually have substance. I don't get that from the HBD enquiry here. Whereas a recent series of comments on the US and French revolutions gave me a lot.
The Neanderthal gene discovery is pretty fascinating. And aboriginals clearly have had time to become somewhat different. But is this a shorter term phenomenon akin to adaptation rather than a longer evolutionary time. I guess it does get into the overly complex here but I'm suspicious that any group over long enough time wouldn't select for intelligence in some form. When is G not useful in an environment. Similarly there's cultural/environmental factors that can lead to homogeneous populations but over long time the advantage is genetic mixing, so how long do homogeneous populations exist. Can we really assume that much about our current race categorisation around genetic similarity, or are we arguing that early divergence was the key differentiator.
I think ‘g is useful but not always that useful so the opportunity costs from it sometimes select against higher IQ’s’ is a reasonable explanation. And it seems pretty apparent that high IQ people start having sex later and sleep around less when they do, so you already have an evolutionarily-relevant opportunity cost built in.
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No offense but there is just too much material too readily available to go through this again. look it up on /r/heredity
How long? What do you mean by "isolated"? And why would it matter, like, how do you infer the plausible rate of genetic divergence in relevant traits to say whether it's been long and isolated enough? Your questions and implicit objections carry assumptions which would be quite laborious to justify, yet you do not feel the need to do it. You should, just for curiosity's sake. Consider the issue with identical ancestors point. It is often brought up by blank slatists as evidence that genetic pools could not have been all that isolated.
Okay, so over the last ≈180 generations, the Japanese human has been overwhelmingly molded by selection pressures peculiar to Japan. Is that a lot or not? Suppose that over that time the Japanese have improved their genotypic cognitive ability over baseline by 1/3rd of a standard deviation (5 IQ points), 36 generations per point. Assume intelligence is only 50% heritable (this is a very modest model) and intelligence in that environment over that time span has an average +0.1 correlation with number of surviving offspring. Is that too little or not? Is it plausible that in Siberia there was only a +0.05 correlation?
If you think about it, there are many traits apparently useful in all environments – perfect immune system, height, muscle power, running ability and so on. Yet we do not have invincible immune systems nor are we all maximally tall and strong, and there are clear differences between groups (when was the last time a Japanese bested an Icelander in a competition of strongmen?). The most important drawback for all such traits is opportunity cost; and most differences in human phenotypes are not due to evolving new adaptations but simply due to different tradeoffs when preserving beneficial alleles across traits.
I am happy to profess quite a lot of ignorance, but given the scale of the subject matter I think it's something other people should be admitting to as well.
I just think when someone claims superiority based on genetics we should expect a very sophisticated evidence base with all the causal parts in place, and most importantly, acknowledgement of uncertainty and gaps in understanding.
Being wary of our history on 'science proves this about X race' is one of the very few things I align with woke anti-colonials about.
The question of how much isolation is needed is a good one, also how quickly evolutionary adaptation can take place. I take the points about evolutionary trade-offs, these seem very relevant.
I may be applying a critical lens to HBD but I'm open minded about enquiry. But jeez there's an awful lot of stuff I'd want to know about before I came down on one side or another.
First, HBD is usually not a «claim of superiority» in some global sense. I find it extremely wrong that White hereditarians aren't cut any slack for admitting that they are, in terms of genotypic cognitive potential, middling relative to Jews (who are massively dominant per capita) and East Asians (who are even more numerous than White people; nitpicking about muh creative European geniuses has bearing on historical prestige and such, but is largely irrelevant to aggregate population quality). This fact is more crucial to understanding the world than 13/51 type stuff, but gets just dismissed out of hand as some bad faith gotcha. The relative advantage of those groups is also not scrutinized as problematic, but just attributed to virtues like hard work and «culture of learning» (though Asians were covertly discriminated against in higher ed). This shows that the discourse is captured by special interests which only care to assert that «underperforming minorities» in the US are the Main Characters of history, and if they underperform Whites, it can only be for external reasons.
Second, I do not agree that claims of genetic superiority are more inherently suspicious than the alternative hypothesis, which is more or less «hateful conspiracy in plain sight spanning hundreds of millions of people», that is, moral inferiority; vague theorizing about «systemic racism» and «implicit bias» can only go so far to downplay the inescapable claim that White people are, in the current year, acting in an ethnocentric manner to abuse their non-White countrymen. I think people who promote this view do not defend or caveat its wildly libellous implications nearly enough, and must be pressed to do so.
In short, I disagree with the mainstream evaluation of which hypothesis is null, which claim is more extraordinary, and accordingly the assessment of the appropriate burden of proof. And if «'science proves this about X race'» is generally problematic, we must at the very least normalize agnosticism about causes of differences – not say that Science Has Spoken and all races have equal aptitude (ergo race Y is just oppressive, since differences remain).
Of course I'm not agnostic; IMO this horse is very dead. It's been dead since 2012 at the latest. You can just search HBD on this site and get this thread or this comment. Or go through these sources.
I'm not sure you realize how annoying it is to see that the response to HBD «facts that need to be explained» has been to simply make laypeople more confused. For example you ask «what about Flynn effect». What about Flynn effect, indeed? We don't have a reason to think it's relevant to the problem of between-group differences, it happens for everyone at basically the same rate. Likewise for isolated genetic pools; it's not relevant, virtually nothing depends on their existence. How did you arrive at the contrary prior, can you carefully try to trace it? My guess: you think that intelligence, in the HBD model, is mostly dependent on some specific adaptive variants that have emerged among the «superior stock» and failed to spread (in reality, it seems that the same core set of variants is present in all major groups; lower predictive power of European-derived PGS should be due to linkage disequilibrium, as usual). But where did you get that idea from in the first place? Probably just osmosis.
I don't hold it against you, getting reasonable priors would take purposeful work. It's just a thankless job to argue a scientifically nontrivial point against priors that have not been reflected upon. I hope you skim some of the links above.
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Human brains are massive energy sinks which can best be used elsewhere in many many different environments. Consider the size of our muscles vs those of similarly sized chimpanzees and there is a huge difference. Basically as our brains evolved to grow larger our muscles atrophied because the energy required to support both large muscles and large brains was just not present in the environments available to our ancestors. There are plenty of situations where the marginal unit of strength is more useful than the marginal unit of intelligence (e.g. gazelles running from a hungry lion, being smart + slow gets you eaten, being stupid + fast makes you live another day as the lion instead eats the smart + slow members of your herd).
It's a miracle we ever evolved intelligence in the first place. Current theories are not that this happened so that we could better manipulate our physical environments by making tools etc. for personal gain, but rather so that we could get better at manipulating our social environment (i.e. relations with other members of our tribe) by currying favour with the powerful better than other individuals for personal gain instead and then underwent Fischerian Runaway to get to where we are now.
This assumes that IQ is correlated with energy expenditure of the brain, which is not obvious. Especially when we can easily observe that in times where energy is not of concern, high IQ is negatively correlated with fertility.
You extrapolate this correlation between IQ and brain calory expenditure from the fact that human brains are comparatively more energy intensive. But the difference in intelligence between an ape and a human is orders of magnitude larger than between the smartest and dumbest human currently alive. It is entirely plausible that our increased cost is mostly from qualitative difference that sets us apart from animals, not by the microoptimizations that distinguish humans from each other.
But even this relationship between intelligence and metabolic cost of the brain is not as straightforward as is popularly assumed, some animals which are much dumber than us devote a similar percentage of their total energy expenditure to their brains. Excerpt from the article:
For many other animals, it holds true though. That said, I can think of an alternative explanation why we devote so much energy to our brain: Maybe this isn't a tradeoff between intelligence and strength, instead the reason is that enough intelligence makes muscles partially redundant, allowing weak humans to outcompete strong humans at a certain IQ level. At this point it's not about feasibility of acquiring the necessary resources, just intra-species competition.
Of course this would raise the question why humans are the only animal on earth that became this intelligent, since the expensive brain-capabilities theory wouldn't explain it anymore. Maybe the path towards human-level cognition is not straight up the fitness curve and requires some unsusual environment to make it that way, like the Fischerian Runaway you mentioned. I have trouble to imagine other costs that higher intelligence would impose besides energy, maybe it takes longer for animals to mature, but this seems far fetched. Maybe intelligence isn't that useful, especially if you don't have the appendages to use tools. It didn't seem to help humanity very much until we discovered some key technologies a few hundred thousands years later until it really started to pay off.
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Aboriginals have been isolated for 50k years. That is a few thousand generations which is long enough for fairly drastic changes. Whether or not there was enough difference in selective pressure is unclear to me.
The homo floresiensis had tiny brains and it is possible that they traded size for more calorie efficiency. I see claims that they used stone tools, but my sense is that people think they were much dumber than regular humans. A very calorie-restricted location, like an island, can lead to miniaturization of a species, and this can make them trade off seemingly useful talents, like intelligence, for reasons of efficiency.
I think that there will always be clines, and this is visible in England for example, where the East Coast is noticeably blonder than the West. On the other hand, the longer the separation the bigger the differences will be. Some chance is involved, as the difference between Celts and Scandanvians shows. Both are obviously selected for very pale skin over the last 5 to 10 thousand years, but one group became uniformly blonde while the other got quite a bit of red hair. Selecting for less pigment, presumably to absorb enough vitamin D not to have horrible rickets, can be done by many mutations. Some claim that blonde hair spread by sexual selection as well, which is obviously culturally bound.
The major categorization, sub Saharan, New World, Aboriginal, Asian, EMEA is based on large geographical features that blocked population flow. It looks from DNA results that people in the past were more similar than they are now. For example, early Celts were brown-skinned. Once we collect more DNA, this will be obvious, I suppose. As far as I know, there are good reasons to believe that much of the differences in genetics between Asia and Europe are due to selection after leaving Africa. I think that groups in Africa have more diversity and some of this is due to Africa bing inhabited longer. The San and the Pygmies separated very 110kya ago, before humans left Africa. The other splits are earlier.
Humans left Africa 60 to 90k years ago, so these split predate that quite a bit.
There are arguments that claim to distinguish when divergence occurred and to be able to tell whether it was due to the founding population or not. I skipped that part.
I don’t think this is true- there’s no shortage of either red haired Scandinavians or blonde Irishmen. And in fact phenotypically Norwegians and Irish are very difficult to distinguish.
Finland has 2% red hair, while Ireland has 10% and Scotland 13%. This is not quite as big a difference as I expected and presumably comes down to judging what counts as red hair. To have red hair in Ireland requires a lot, while the Finns might have a weaker threshold. With a weaker threshold, Ireland increases to 30%, with this being more common across the Shannon.
80% of Finns are blonde, while "A range of 27%-30% of Irish females have blonde hair, while for males it is much lower: 20%".
I would guess these numbers have changed significantly recently due to immigration. In the past, Ireland had essentially no people with brown eyes. Growing up, I knew two who I met in college. Van Morrison wrote a song "Brown Eyed Girl" when he met one on a train in London, as he was struck by how unusual it was. (Actually, this is the story Van told me, but it seems he has reneged on it, so whatever). In 1952, 0.43% of Irish people had brown eyes, and these were obviously immigrants.
The blondes in Ireland are probably partially from Viking invasions (or immigration, if you like) or related sexual tourism.
I would guess you are neither. There was a time I could reliably tell a Cavan man from someone from the King's County (the king in question was Phillip II of Spain). I doubt I could still do that, unless they both were farmers.
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Ah ha, excellent - you're very modest in your appraisal. Plenty to digest here..
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Why would that be suspicious at all? g is not an unalloyed good, and there's a reason that evolution hasn't turbocharged it beyond what we have now. Even in modern societies the effect of IQ on reproductive success is complicated, to say the least.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797612473119
Higher IQ people are more sensitive to the environment while growing up, and that "extended sensitive period" actually represents a serious trade-off in some places. If you're growing up in subsaharan Africa, the combination of a longer development period, larger cranium (cranium size is weakly correlated with IQ) causing potential issues during childbirth, social issues that emerge from difficulties relating to people several SDs away from you in IQ and the (potential, haven't found a good study yet but seems plausible) higher nutrition requirements of higher IQ brains means that a lot of mutations which would lead to an increase in g actually decrease reproductive fitness in many contexts, especially ones where physical violence is a daily reality. Modern societies where you can live in an extended adolescent period until your 20s and then transform a high IQ into vast amounts of financial resources/reproductive success are incredibly new, evolutionarily speaking, and it takes at least two generations for changes in selective pressure like that to start being noticeable.
Lots of good stuff here to think about. Among different isolated niches one can imagine different things playing off and there are always trade-off relationships.
There's plenty to check out, re nutrition requirements but I suppose not having the research base some of it feels a bit 'just so' to me, not to say that it's definitively wrong.
Some of the things you point out re brains and the hip, brain-size, plasticity trade-off could be argued either way. These are the key evolutionary advantages of humans in the first place. This is what allowed cognition, communication, cooperation and group cognition/culture. My understanding of lineage arguments is that advantages in group cooperation were key in strategic specialisation that were advantage in circumstances of resource competition and violence/warfare. The group/culture interacts then with evolutionary adaptation so that specialisation and cognitive, group niches could develop, presumably with systems of caring for young, which it should be noted for humans are universally vulnerable irrespective of intelligence.
G is a measure of cognition and at first blush should confer strategic advantages even in times of violence.
If you can find someone willing to back a study on this topic I'd be more than happy to quit my day-job and put on a lab-coat, but in the modern west I'd probably have more luck funding a study on the unconventional feminism of Adolf Hitler than one which could be uncharitably described as explaining the precise mechanisms behind African stupidity and violence (that's not how I view it but it is absolutely how an academic review board would).
You're right here when you view g in a vacuum. But what happens when that higher g means that you're developmentally behind all of your peers when it comes to physical instrumentality during extremely important stages of your life and development? Sure you might be a much better leader for the tribe in the long run, but good luck convincing the chief that he should abdicate to this weird nerd who isn't even that great at stealing cattle from the neighbouring tribes. That's the point of bringing up those trade-offs - while there are definitely environments and culture that select for higher g, there are also environments and cultures that select against the trade-offs required for that higher g. It is my contention that some of the same mutations and alleles which lead towards higher g impose handicaps during development which impose significant penalties on reproductive success in the kind of brutal Hobbesian environments that you find in a lot of prehistory, and hence evolution will not simply turbocharge g at the cost of everything else.
Of course in the long run optimising for g wins out and societies which select for it eventually acquire overwhelming asymmetrical advantages over those that prioritise nothing but personal, physical violence and charisma, but the nature of the problem means that low g human societies aren't really going to select for g until the environment forces them to. It isn't like our modern society is immune to these pressures either - go look up the data on the correlation between IQ and the number of children/sexual partners one has in the modern day.
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You’re barking up the wrong tree there brother. I am convinced by our other regular HBD posters of the unfortunate truth that blacks are much lower IQ and this is not fixable, but I couldn’t point out specifically the case for it. Daseindustries or hoffmeister might have a better ability to answer your questions.
I come from a Socratic mindset. It pays not to believe anyone unless you have travelled sufficiently on your own journey to confirm them. This is hard work mind you.
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HBD has been done to death in this forum. It's kinda like going on to an atheist sub and asking for a proof of evolution when everyone knows that God created the world in 6 days. They're probably not going to answer this question for the millionth time.
Start from here. Do you believe that genetics play a role in sprinting speed? Why wouldn't they also play a role in intelligence?
HBD can never be proven correct, nor can blank slate theory. But the overwhelming preponderance of evidence is on the side of HBD, as is basic common sense.
Yes, absolutely - a range of physical talents have genetic basis. And why shouldn't different kinds of intelligence have genetic elements. Fine, it is the coarse theory I'm critiquing which ends up with some people in a Victorian hierarchy of being argument l. Human intelligence is multifaceted and overlaps with culture. Why has IQ gone up over time, why is it I can increase my IQ from practice? What is the genetics of a mixed race person in HBD, what level of mixing do different groups have, how much is adaptation to environment over shorter timescales, how well does the tail reflect mean behaviour.
Do you really believe common sense is a reliable scientific guide. Phrenology was once accepted. I'm open to inquiry in this space but I've noticed people prefer the axiomatic assumptions than thinking about it.
In reference to a previous conversation Im not race blind but I don't get the hate boner people carry, sometimes over their lifetimes, around race. If you're going to make a strong claim, you need strong evidence.
I'm not going to give the case for HBD because it's been done to death here and I'm not the best person to do.
So let's talk about phrenology instead!
Phrenology, of course, is mostly wrong. But is it common sense? Not in the slightest. In fact, it's the furthest thing from common sense. Why would the bumps on someone's head make them evil. That's not common sense.
Phrenology is instead a pseudoscience, meaning that it uses the trappings of science without the actual scientific method. It's worth pointing out that a lot of modern research, especially in psychology, is so poor as to fall under the realm of pseudoscience as well. Remember "stereotype threat"?
But here's something a phrenologist might say which is common sense: "People with bigger brains are smarter". As it turns, out this is actually true. Brain volume has about a 0.3 correlation with intelligence, explaining about 10% of variance in intelligence. Note how bad the media reporting was on this topic as well.
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/brain-size-and-intelligence-2022
Incidentally, just in: Century-Old Paradigm Overturned – Brain Shape Matters More Than Neural Connectivity
Huh! The more you know! I guess phrenologists just had to sound it a little with some sticks or something, to tell the shape of the drum under the skull. Or maybe make some sacrifices… for science! They were so close…
Oh, those functional connectomics researchers with their contrived mathematical mumbo-jumbo must be getting real uncomfortable now, the silly geese!
Check this out @ShariaHeap @orca-covenant
(I haven't actually verified if the paper makes sense, but the writing is just hilarious with all those repeated metaphors, it reads like a GPT-generated shitpost for Sneerclub)
That's a wild concept, phrenology indeed, perhaps skull transplants or 'brain moulding' could be the way to go... The link up to phrenology is indeed quite hilarious given the recent discussions..! Everything in circles perhaps
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That's a nice philosophic distinction and I actually think there is a common sense we can moor to. I don't know how people, scientists actually thought of phrenology, perhaps it was more in the not-obvious science can tell us realm. What tends to happen I would guess is that established ideas can become 'common sense' over time, even if wrong.
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It's not common sense now, because everyone now knows that phrenology is balderdash. But once you know that intelligence and personality reside in the brain, but don't know exactly what the anatomy and function of each part of the brain is, it seems quite natural to believe different personalities are due to different brains → differences in the physical shape of the brain correspond to differences in personality → differences in a particular area of the brain correspond to differences in a particular aspect of personality, e.g. time preference or empathy → differences in the shape of the brain correspond to visible differences in the shape of the braincase → observing the shape of the skull allows one to make specific inferences about its owner's personality.
Thinking you can predict someone's propensity to, say, alcoholism, by the shape of their skull is not inherently less commonsensical than thinking you can predict it from their genes. A priori, there's a perfectly plausible causal path either way. That's why you need to proceed with actual scientific research instead of stopping at common sense.
It sounds like we agree for the most part. Knowing that thought originates in the brain, common sense would indicate that statistical analysis of human brains would yield insights. And indeed it has! Larger brains are correlated with higher IQ.
But phrenology was not that! There was no rigor. There was no analysis. It was just making shit up, similar to astrology. It's not common sense to make wild conclusions based on tiny shreds of evidence.
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The scores on some tests have increased, but the major figures seem to believe that this is due to cultural change, and that in other tests, scores have not increased. The scores with less cultural influence have seen no increase, for example.
Supposedly, practice can increase the IQ score on one test but will not have an effect on a test that you have not studied for. For example, reaction time is a measure of IQ and learning more vocabulary does not increase your reaction time (citation needed).
HBDers spend a lot of time showing that mixed-race people have the IQs that are the weighted sum of their constituent races. The more white admixture, the high the IQ, etc. They look at this at the gene level rather than relying on physical features. I have no idea how valid this work is.
African Americans are about 15% white admixture, for example. This is fairly easy to measure.
Given the population size, the distribution is fairly normal. The standard deviations may vary, of course.
These seem all a bit rote, and again don't really address much complexity. If I can practice and improve on a test then there is a cultural element. You mention speed reaction can't be trained for, but I'm assuming elite black athletes have superior scores on these, does this imply that blacks have superior native intelligence on aspects of intelligence?
Populations at the level of black v white v mixed are mixed of genetic lineages. This means tail genetics doesn't have to relate to median genetics.
Your genetic pot analogy seems a bit naive scientifically. To infer a causal relationship I'm going to need a bit more in terms of genetics.
My beef isn't that there's 'nothing there', just that the complexity is not engaged with, which implies a dunning-kruger potential. I am a scientist so I'm actually interested in the complexity and science. Others aren't interested in this but in making blanket statements about groups of people (with immense intragroup genetic variation), which overindexes on skin attributes.
Why do you assume this? I will look up the results. Lynn claims that black children have slower choice time but faster movement times. IQ is related to choice time (I am told, but I have not seen anyone doubt this.).
Lynn concludes:
I don't understand what you mean. Sorry.
The idea that there would be a linear relationship comes from the assumption (or observation?) that intelligence is influenced by many genes. This is fairly well accepted in other areas. I don't know any arguments why it would not apply to intelligence, but that might be my failure.
If you were around a few years ago, there was a lot of complexity, but I did not pay that much attention, and the major proponents don't post anymore.
For an example of engaging with the question, have a look at this paper. I have not checked the data, the analysis, or even if the study they are using ever happened, but it shows the kind of reasoning that HBDers do. They take seriously the kind of questions you ask.
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No.. SOMETHING IS MISSING FROM THIS ENTIRE CONVERSATION.
@self_made_human
Yes agreed. But you mean being in a situation where you have to pass a black man late at night on a spooky street, and I mean living in a universe where black people are scary. (I mean, you in particular probably agree with me on that too but- this popped to me when you said that.)
@hanikrummihundursvin
Ok. Then how do we get better DNA?
I'm going somewhere with this I swear. This isn't just transhumanism- this is-
Yes! This is so close to what I want to say! You can't just shove the unfit in random places and expect magic to happen... But as long as you still pressure them to do well in the places you shove them (->this might be a good place to attack<-), you can expect magic to happen. Giraffes didn't get long necks by magic or genetic drift. They got them by breeding with Giraffes with long necks!
My point- what this whole conversation is missing- SEXUAL SELECTION IS METALEMARKIAN On a species-wide level, giraffes DID get longer necks by trying to have longer necks!!! So there is good reason to give races opportunity to aspire towards one another's greatness.
Also, memetic selection is Lemarkian even faster. But that's somewhat evened out by the fact that you and competitors both have a whole planet of well developed memes already at your fingertips when you decide to do something- And is already present in this thread implicitly (cultural differences are memetic.) And- its already factored in. A lot of G seems to be the ability to select the correct memetics from those available.
But this seems to suggest to get to a better answer we need to mate the less smart with the more smart instead of the more smart with the more smart. Why isn’t the latter preferred?
This only presents a problem if you're trying to use inductive reason to model an anti-inductive phenomenon.
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Eh? I admit I'm not an expert on giraffe evolution, but I've never heard that they had any sexual selection for long necks. The story I heard was that it was a Red Queen's race with trees, which began growing ever taller so their leaves were out of reach of herbivores, so giraffe ancestors grew taller to compensate.
This is distinct from say, peacock tails, which have no other practical utility.
I'm not sure how sure we are WRT giraffes, or what current consensus is. But there have been some contesting the Red queens race with trees hypothesis, in favor of a sexual selection hypothesis. Centered around their neck based mating battles. Those females just can't get enough of that longneck.
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That's kinda of the naive theory, but it's now thought that long necks are also about fighting sexual rivals. Giraffes literally batter each other with their long necks.
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I'm not wholly sure what you're trying to say.
Giraffes got longer necks because the ones with necks too short to reach the treetops died of starvation. In short, sexual selection is meta-Lamarckian (i.e. not Lamarckian) to the extent that successful variants reproduce and unsuccessful variants don't. Creating these conditions artificially was the core of classical eugenics, but I don't think it's what you're advocating?
Yeah maybe I should have chosen a species with less contested evolutionary causation.
from Wikipedia:
There are several hypotheses regarding the evolutionary origin and maintenance of elongation in giraffe necks.[57] Charles Darwin originally suggested the "competing browsers hypothesis", which has been challenged only recently. It suggests that competitive pressure from smaller browsers, like kudu, steenbok and impala, encouraged the elongation of the neck, as it enabled giraffes to reach food that competitors could not. This advantage is real, as giraffes can and do feed up to 4.5 m (15 ft) high, while even quite large competitors, such as kudu, can feed up to only about 2 m (6 ft 7 in) high.[63] There is also research suggesting that browsing competition is intense at lower levels, and giraffes feed more efficiently (gaining more leaf biomass with each mouthful) high in the canopy.[64][65] However, scientists disagree about just how much time giraffes spend feeding at levels beyond the reach of other browsers,[12][57][63][66] and a 2010 study found that adult giraffes with longer necks actually suffered higher mortality rates under drought conditions than their shorter-necked counterparts. This study suggests that maintaining a longer neck requires more nutrients, which puts longer-necked giraffes at risk during a food shortage.[67]
Another theory, the sexual selection hypothesis, proposes the long necks evolved as a secondary sexual characteristic, giving males an advantage in "necking" contests (see below) to establish dominance and obtain access to sexually receptive females.[12] In support of this theory, necks are longer and heavier for males than females of the same age,[12][57] and males do not employ other forms of combat.[12] However, one objection is it fails to explain why female giraffes also have long necks.[68] It has also been proposed that the neck serves to give the animal greater vigilance.[69][70]
The point really isn't about Giraffes. The point is that you can argue for affirmative action as a sort of eugenics through social integration into a specific environment.
Appreciate it, and it's interesting to hear about the sexual selection theory.
I think my point about sexual selection still stands, though. The core of sexual selection, and of classical eugenics, is that the fit breed and the unfit die. As a method of group improvement this probably works but is ethically dubious.
I can think of two things you might be arguing for, and I'm not sure which of them you're going for:
If you introduce a fitness 0.5 individual into a fitness 1.0 environment, that individual's children are more likely to have high fitness. Unfortunately that's balanced out by their partner having less fit children, so from a population perspective it's a wash.
If you introduce people into a more stringent environment and force them to live up to new standards, they'll improve. This is what I think you mean, but there are many issues. It doesn't change the underlying genetics, and also if the affirmative action'd people can't live up to your standards then you will either have to lower your standards (fail) or try harder to force them to do something they can't do (fail + induce unnecessary suffering). In cases where residential schools and the like got really nasty, I suspect the latter was a big part of the problem.
Am I totally off here?
I read his post as
I think there are some problems with this theory. It obviously still allows for an underclass, disfavored by almost all mates. Is this “racist?” Either way, it kind of imports all the usual hazards of conventional eugenics.
When you aren't subsidising and heavily encouraging reproduction in said underclass, from a HBD perspective the problem solves itself after a few generations. You don't have to do anything particularly evil to make a population that can't reproduce fast enough to sustain itself go away - and the ones that do survive are going to be better matches for whatever you're actually selecting for to boot.
How does one actually encourage reproduction? If you know any tricks, please share them and save the west.
The way you phrased it, the only way I can think of to stop encouraging the reproduction of an underclass is to literally let them starve. Humans will breed in incredibly destitute circumstances, I suspect the worse their lot the more fecund they become.
Or are you actually suggesting to make them so rich as to voluntarily stop breeding, the Gates gambit?
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For a tl;dr: you make a lot of fine points, but for some reason tie them to 'race'. Most of these anti-racist arguments therefor end up not being anti-racist at all. They seem more like general individual based introspection arguments. For what it's worth I'm not against any of them specifically, I'm just not sure what they have to do with typical 'racist' thinking which, most of the time, deals with groups and averages.
As an example, from "Taking Responsibility":
Deterministic thinking is not specific to 'racist' thinking. Typical 'I can't' most often heard from children doing homework is a great example of this. On top of that the argument falls over itself when you flip it around. Believing yourself to be destined to lose is bad. But believing yourself to be destined to win is good. It's obvious from this that the 'bad' here is not determinism but self defeatism.
As for your personal maximum capacity for achievement, the argument you make falls to similar issues. The point about 'maximum genetic capacity'(my paraphrasing) is not about you personally, it's about you in relation to others. The reason Usain Bolt could become the world's fastest sprinter is not because of his magic training or the sand in Jamaica. The guy started training very late at 17 and his diet consisted mostly of McNuggets straight from McDonalds. It was his DNA. If you thought you had a genuine chance in competing against him, you were stupid. But if you liked running track, why let that stop you? Just run to see what you can do. The problem here is not 'race' and minimizing it changes nothing. It's our lizard brain competitive spirit trying to outcompete Dunbar's number when in reality it is competing against 7 billion people.
As for "Information and Stereotyping"
Making conceptual arguments about this seems rather pointless. We don't need conceptual arguments to figure out that blacks commit more crime than do whites. On top of that, making the argument individualized further leads us astray from the utility of 'race'. Since 'race and crime' generally refers to populations, not an individual instance in someones life.
To meet your conceptualized argument head on: If I am walking alone at night and there is a guy in a hoody and worn out jeans walking towards me, I'm not going to think he is mugging me. Ever. Because that sort of thing has never happened where I live. Ever. But if you live in the USA in an average black neighborhood, my instincts would be potentially dangerously wrong because the chances are no longer 0. Because average white Scandinavian town and average black USA town are not the same. To that end race is useful. One town is average USA black, the other is average Scandinavian white. You can comb through the finer details but race is still there as a fact of life. Ignoring it would be stupid.
As for "Policy"
The reason affirmative action is bad is because it is trying to fit an unfit population. There is nothing wrong with affirmatively actioning a bunch of otherwise neurotypical 140 IQ people into colleges. They would probably do very well and better the school and society. The problem arises when the population is on average at 85 IQ and demand for 'diversity' outstrips supply of college material people.
If you want 'diversity' there is no magic process that can fix your problem with blacks. Without a mechanism that selects unfit people to meet your 'diversity' quota, you will not meet the quota. Without a program that is designed to cater to these unfit people, you will not see many of them graduate. Without unfair you get less than 1% black at the elite level. With those kind of numbers you will be seeing 'calls to action' against your racist policies.
As for "Immigration"
We are again using conceptual arguments. Why make those arguments imprecise? Here's one: lets have an immigration system that only imports good people we will all personally like who will also benefit the economy and save a child and/or pet in need.
OK, we don't have that. What do we have? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/S00148-017-0636-1
We have information. For some reason, despite race being allegedly irrelevant, geographically isolated population groups perform differently when placed in the same environment. We can theorize a system of import that weeds out the 'bad'. But that still leaves the fact that there are so many bads that they need extensive weeding out when compared to 'Western' people.
What I don't understand is, why do you care so much to ignore this sort of information? You could make a similar case for ignoring anything. Just figure out some proxy for it and voila. But that doesn't change the reality behind it. The kind of systems that functionally racially discriminate against blacks are conducive to healthy and happy western societies. You can dress them up how you want, it doesn't change the fact that people notice. And it's not the white identitarians.
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It doesn't take very many changes, nor does it take rare or unusual changes to make race highly salient. Let's take it outside of the dark street in a bad section of town; should I be more concerned by a black guy than a white guy that fits this description on Michigan Avenue in Chicago? I think so. Let's remove the demeanor and neighborhood, but hold all else constant - would you feel more threatened by a young black man than a young Asian man in a hoodie? Let's keep everything the same, but flip the gender - are black women more threatening than women of Hmong descent? Let's change almost everything and update to a guy in his 40s approaching me in a grocery store parking lot - surely you'd think race is at least somewhat informative on how this interaction is likely to go?
Basically, I think you stacked the deck to be as substantially bad of a situation as possible and followed up with, "well, a white guy that fits all of the worst characteristics you can think of is bad too". Sure. Fair. I would definitely avoid a threatening looking Chinese guy with a weapon in a neighborhood known for Triad gang activity. I'm also a lot less likely to encounter that than the various black permutations, to the point where 6.6% my state is black and they account for 67% of my state's murders. On the grocery store example above, where I'm unlikely to be targeted for violence, I can guess with a high degree of certainty that the black guy is going to be asking me for money.
Now, perhaps morally I should elect to hear that guy out either way, maybe he really does just need $10 for a can of gas, but it surely informs my decision-making process.
I think in most situations there are other pieces of information that tell you a lot more than race. Certainly it is possible to construct a hypothetical scenario where you remove a bunch of those other pieces of information and race becomes more and more important. I think focusing on race to the detriment of other pieces of information is the wrong direction to go.
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I don't know that any of what you said really changes based on race, though, at least from a practical perspective. Yeah, black guy approaching me in a grocery store parking lot is probably going to ask me for money. But I can't think of many situations where I white guy doing the same thing doesn't end the same way.
Even the canonical example of an urban looking black guy being treated suspiciously for walking around a white suburban neighborhood at night doesn't make sense when you think about it. Yeah, black people commit more crime in general. But most of that crime isn't committed in white suburbs. Disaffected urban youth who want to rob houses aren't likely to drive 45 minutes to an unfamiliar neighborhood where they'd be about as inconspicuous as a brontosaurus at a time when the home is all but guaranteed to be occupied. The modal burglary takes place in the middle of a weekday by a guy driving a panel van who doesn't linger too long. But no one ever reports those guys as suspicious because they're so inconspicuous.
Yeah, my priors are that a black guy approaching me in a parking lot wants money for a gas can and a white guy could be doing that, or could be trying to sell me amway, with a distant possibility he’s a jehova’s witness. Not a huge difference either way.
Or he's me, and he wasn't paying attention on the way in and has been wandering around for the last ten minutes trying to find the entrance to the shops, and since you have shopping he assumes you can point him in the right direction.
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That's measuring things the wrong way around. The amount of crime black people commit in black neighborhoods is irrelevant to the white suburbanite in a white neighborhood trying to decide whether the black person is a criminal. The relevant probability is P(black person is a criminal | he's in my neighborhood), not P(black person is in my neighborhood | he's committing a crime)
They do exactly this in my area, though less "disaffected urban youth" and more "organized bands of thieves". Granted, my area is not lily-white so they're less conspicuous than they would be in some places, but they hit towns with fewer black people too.
That is happening near me as well. My area isn’t white, but it is upper class with a mix of white and so called model minorities (eg successful South and East Asians)
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I can't speak for Chicago. But for Ireland? The US Department of State has recently issued a travel advisory to tourists coming to Ireland about being wary, and it's because of this incident.
A bunch of our own home-grown little scumbags, all teenagers, at least one of them a minor - and nobody is black. So if the argument is "black people are inherently stupider/more violent than white people", that may or may not be - but whether they're white or black or brown, avoiding guys in hoodies is a good idea.
It isn't. I've read enough history to be confident that there's plenty of white-on-white violence. Nothing in my post even hints in the direction of whether behavior is substantially innate to a group or not, and whether it's innate or learned isn't relevant to my assessment of risk. My objection in the context of the few hundred miles around me is that race absolutely has substantial predictive value with regard to random crime or semi-random interpersonal violence. Again, if you stack the deck sufficiently, you can make that particular risk factor negligible. Yes, I'm well aware that if I'm wearing a shirt that says, "United Ireland" on it, I should regard a white guy with a Red Hand tattoo as plausibly threatening. Likewise, I'm not going to go to the bank and freak out when there's a black guy helping me set up my account. There are, however, plenty of situations in the middle where the information is relevant and I'm disinclined to pretend otherwise for the sake of social improvement.
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This is basically a fog of war type argument of using bayesian logic. If you have limited information then race can be extremely important. But as you add more information race becomes less important.
The problem with stereotyping is when you can’t update your priors to new information to properly find outliers like Stephon Curry.
Race of course can be quite important for public policy. You will get group level effects if you say choose between taking a million immigrants from an African Country versus a million Cuban refugees or a million Han Chinese fleeing communists. But if instead you IQ test then it wouldn’t matter.
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Race is far too predictive for me to give this real credence. I'm only racist because I seek to understand reality, and unfortunately reality is racist as hell.
It's rare indeed that a rational agent is worse off with additional Bayesian evidence, and as mentioned, race is very strong evidence.
It's certainly not everything, as even most HBD-ers would accept, but goddamn do theories for why the world looks the way it does fail utterly without considering it.
As far as I'm concerned, the policy of acknowledging both race and additional information you have about a person is strictly superior to doing the same but ignoring race. I'd be more concerned if a black doctor was treating me since I know about how much AA they receive, I'd be less concerned if the doctor publicized his SAT score or had other objective markers for performance like a specialization in a field where his race counts for nothing (I doubt that's the case in the US, but I could be wrong). This is where AA in general taints by association, said doctor could absolutely be someone who managed to get in without not so subtle nudges, but since they usually lack a way to prove it, they're automatically discounted in the eyes of a rational agent with no additional information.
To use your example of running into a young male in a hoody at night, yes you should be significantly more concerned if he was black, the stats don't lie. Certainly you should avoid being in that situation in the first place, but feel no shame about crossing the street well in advance.
A study on obstetric patient outcomes found that the residency program the doctor attended had a significant effect on patient outcomes. The best residency programs had a 10% chance of complications, vs 13% for the worst.
Adjusting for medical exam scores didn't change the results.
Your reasoning is backwards here. If you believe a black doctor is receiving preferential treatment (such as better residency placement, despite having lower exam scores), you should choose the black doctor.
I have great idea then! Let's let everybody into the best residency program, without any tests, or regard how well they do there. We'll have a whole society full of great doctors!
I don’t think OP implies that at all.
The point is not that exam scores can be disregarded. It’s that they don’t matter conditional on the good residency. Whatever combination of test scores and AA and resume-padding gets you into that residency—that’s still important.
The question becomes how much AA is practiced in getting into residencies. If there is AA practiced at medical school but much less at residency, then it may be that residencies themselves aren’t that skill building but are separating the wheat from the chaff.
Right.
No idea what the demographics look like among these residencies, though.
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I'm not really sure what your "gotcha" is. You only get into a residency program after you've passed the USMLE and per the paper:
If we could feasibly let everybody who passed their exams into the best residency programs - we would. It would probably lead to better patient outcomes.
It's magical thinking, refuted by Goodhart's Law.
The first problem is that the idea that the residency programs themselves act as filters doesn't even occur them. It shows how much these people are stuck in a bubble.
The second problem is this:
If passing the exam is a pre-filter that residency programs rely on, and you'll give people of a particular race a boost that let them pass an exam they otherwise wouldn't, that's going to mess the pre-filter.
A hypothesis that is very easy to check - find some of the worst doctors that managed to hang on to a licence, send them to the best residency programs, and see what happens. I have no patience for people who fish for correlations (or lack therefor) anymore.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by filter here. They pretty explicitly call this out as a possibility - which is why they account for exam scores.
Why bother with testing the residency program at all in this scenario? You should see doctors from the best medical schools performing considerably better than those from lower ranked ones - but that isn’t really true either.
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The case of AA is actually one of the reasons why I would advise people to not go looking for racial spoils. It doesn't help in the long-term because people re-adjust their expectations (as you have done). The personal narratives involved in receiving that kind of help also seem very toxic to self-achievement. AA is a case where social enforcement of race based beliefs has lead to race based information being more salient, which is one of the caveats I talked about above. The more we make race matter, the more it will matter. The less we make it matter, the less it will matter. And as I said you are not in traffic, you are traffic. Same applies to society.
For understanding the overall world, and its history, it is quite possible that race and genetics are helpful pieces of additional information. I didn't want to commit to race never being useful information. I just don't think most people are engaged in sweeping attempts to understand history.
The stats in many ways do lie. Put someone in poverty. Add violence to their upbringing. Have them be young and male. You have a recipe for ciminality. Many of the people in this position in certain countries happen to be black. It is not them being black that is causing them to be criminal. Being able to identify a white person that was raised in these circumstances is purely advantageous.
The clothes and the context are still doing most of the work for you. Change the clothes to a business suit, and be in a nice area of town. Suddenly you being worried about being mugged by the black business man is an absurd level of paranoia and fear on your part.
You are wrong here three ways, I think. First, even if we assume that only poverty, violence (which came from where, I wonder?), and average age are the only factors that predict criminality, you can't know someone's upbringing, income level, and actual age just by looking at them for a moment. You can know their race. And if it just so happens that there's so much poverty, violence, and demographic distortion in the black community that they do 60% of the murdering, then no, the stats don't lie, you should avoid black people, because when you see black skin you see an indicator of possible violence.
Second, you are simply directly wrong. Go ahead, dig up the stats of people of various races by income level. Let's look at whether the generation of Jews immediately after the holocaust jumped up to black-like levels of violence and criminality. Compare the actual cohorts by age and sex, and show me what those stats look like. Being black doesn't make you a criminal, any more than being drunk makes you get into traffic accidents. Some people can drive drunk just fine, and some people who are perfectly sober kill themselves and others, and you can absolutely find someone who is a better driver drunk that most people are sober. But just like the population of drunk people are much worse drivers overall, the population of black people is much more criminal overall.
Black people are in poverty not because they are discriminated against, but because they're black (and everything that entails on the collective level), just like Jewish people are prospering not because of the protocols of their Zionish elders, but because they're Jewish. The violence in their upbringing is because they are raised by and around other black people, who do that violence, because they are black. They are disproportionately young because they have higher death rates, due both to violence and to poor health outcomes, frequently caused by poor diet and general health maintenance, because they are black.
Well sure. If you don't know everything else about the person you're looking at. But the goal- is to be able to know everything about each person you're looking at so that you don't have to make non-causal inferences. Not just for equity, but because they make you wrong more.
And the counterargument- to what I just said- is that it's hard to do that right? But ultimately I'm right. Right? We'd be right more if we had the resources to just see more layers of the life of the black dude in the alley?
So I'ma go make a social inference AI and get back to you.
I think "presume we still lack access to an AI with near-omniscience in the realm of [x]" is implicit in most discussions. Once your social inference AI exists and we have free access to it, the entire social landscape would transform so much that it's hard to even predict what problems might exist, much less how we'd fix them. How to treat race in that landscape is a very different question than how to treat race in the landscape in which we find ourselves. And without the ability to instantly or even quickly switch from one landscape to the other, we still have to figure out how to interact with each other in this current crude landscape where we lack access to this social inference AI.
Actually, coming back to this. I would like to get your thoughts. I believe in myself and my ability to make this AI. It will be very tough to get it to the point where it can see a face in a hoodie at night on a dark street and tell you about that guy- But I expect to be able to do a fairly comprehensive background/shared-values/personal-info/interaction-styles/preferences check on all internet figures with consistent usernames that frequently post in servers/sites/subs I visit by year's end.
What I want your thoughts on is- I know you litterally just said "it's hard to even predict what problems might exist, much less how we'd fix them." But this is important. If I succeed I need to be aware that of disruption I cause by distributing this to anyone who wants it and making it simple and easy to one click install on desktop and query via LLM....
I want to know what problems you think I'll be creating as I move forward. I want to be able to solve issues I help create by spreading this level of social awareness. Brainstormed hypotheses are fine here if you don't have strong predictions. It's all worth at least considering. Especially as I begin to automate the consideration and processing of such possibilities.
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Yes. Very understandable. I will not begrudge you that. I am going to keep sitting in my privileged small town and never walking down streets at night and making my social inference AI though. You keep doing you but heads up.
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Tragedy of the commons - those racial spoils come from the rest of society, which means that if you do not secure some of those racial spoils for yourself you are actually going to be paying for them in all likelihood. I agree that your message would be good if it was a society-wide rule, but it is bad advice if you're in a system where people are already looking for and finding those spoils.
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I'm not sure the "don't pursue AA because people will adjust their expectations" argument holds, since it fails a simple reversal test: would you also be neutral to discrimination? By your logic, discrimination wouldn't hurt a group once people's expectations adjust to be extra-impressed that they managed to overcome it.
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Assuming aptitude is normally distributed and doesn't contain any ceilings for some races, if you filter you applicants beforehand with a threshhold, race loses its predictive power. Of course this only works without concepts like affirmative action:
If the threshhold is 130 IQ, than the share of <140 IQ and >140 IQ will the same for blacks as for whites. The only difference willl be that whites will have a big positive multiplies for both sets.
Or phrased differently, P(130<IQ<135) / P(135<IQ) should be equal regardless of race
This would be true for an exponential distrubution but it is false for a normal distribution
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The notion that conditioning on a threshold can wash away differences in mean is wrong intuitively and its wrongness can be expressed formulaically and precisely, but I also did a quick simulation to confirm because why not.
Suppose we have a population with a mean of 100 (stand-in for white) and a second population with a mean of 85 (stand-in for black) for a given trait (e.g., IQ), both with standard deviations of 15. (1 - normcdf(140, 100, 15))/(1 - normcdf(130, 100, 15)) is about 16.8%. (1 - normcdf(140, 85, 15))/(1 - normcdf(130, 85, 15)) is about 9.1%. So whites have almost twice as much of those over 140 than blacks.
I generated 10 million hypothetical individuals for each population as a check, and got the same figures out to the digits shown in the percentages.
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This is incorrect. Even with a cutoff, whites would have a higher average IQ.
With a standard distribution, group differences will be amplified among outliers.
About 5.9% of people who are above +2 deviations will also be above +3.
Only about 2.3% of people who are above +3 deviations will also be above +4.
I encourage you to calculate these numbers yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rule
Should've just done it in advance. Lesson learned, thanks for the correction
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Suppose that Pop A has mean 100, sigma 15 and Pop B has mean 85, sigma 15.
The ratio shown above is not the same for the two populations. If the cutoff is 85 and the high mark is 100 instead, this is obvious without computing Z-scores.
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Is that really true? Consider a threshold of 0 IQ (so 6 std dev below the mean). No-one (well, 1 in a billion) is excluded by this, but as the sets are the same, if there was predictive power before, there is after.
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All doctors still have to pass the requirements don't they, regardless of how they get into medical school? Also I don't think it's necessarily linear between SAT and being a good doctor. My guess is you would want a minimum (higher than average) threshold and people at the top would probably specialise in any case. In between hard working, curious, empathetic, life-long learning could circumvent a lot- I don't know how these characteristics distribute but I don't think the average white doctor is that high a bar in the 10 min pharmaceutical dispensing slot I experience them in. Mostly they're just passing on the received wisdom of the medical model.
There was the somewhat recent change in the exam that leads to placements in residencies specifically to address racial differences in test outcomes.
But does it affect the baseline competence test? As far as I can tell, med school does the gating for competence, and residencies were further gatekeeping intended to drive up doctor salaries that weren’t awarded strictly meritocratically to begin with.
Medicine is not so rigorous that there isn't a glaring difference in quality of treatment and outcomes between the a 10th percentile and 90th percentile doctor.
I do still think US doctors are among the best in the world, but you shouldn't settle if you can help it.
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