IQ Will Put You In Your Place

[russ_watters]

Originally posted by Nachtwolf
Do you mean "the remaining 32 paragraphs of Sowell's discussion are about race?"

Yeah, typo. Fixed now.

 

[Evo]

Originally posted by Carlos Hernadez
After looking at behaviors of various ethnic groups/races, I see that each race has their own strengths and weaknesses; no one race is perfect by themselves. The best thing to do would be for the best specimens of each race to carry out the founder effect: that is, these specimens would form their own sub-society and interbreed in a eugenic way. We can have the best Asians, Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, etc. come together and mix their genes up. This new population would then go on to explore the universe and advance to the Omega Point/Singularity.

I find this a bit disturbing. What traits would be desirable and who would make this decision? What constitutes "best"? What makes you think that the "results" of this selective breeding would have the same desires and goals as the "creators? Will you be breeding free will out of them?

Originally posted by selfAdjoint
The main new thing in the Bell Curve was the research that showed that IQ was much more significant in predicting many sociological variables, including income, than thos old favorites class and wealth. Class and wealth were surrogated in the study by family SES (Socioeconomic status, based on answers to a questionaaire) and father's income. This research, I believe, shot down the purely economic method for remediating low IQ. Simply moving poor families into the middle class won't raise IQs as a block. And indeed this conclusion was confirmed by IQ studies on middle class Blacks.

I agree that IQ is not influenced by income. I would like to hear opinions on something I just posted in another thread on IQ.

Here is my post:

You can't equate IQ to success.

Yes, a person with a high IQ will normally have greater reasoning abilities and may comprehend, retain and utilize information easier than a person with a lower IQ, but, in my opinion, it is motivation, not IQ that determines how successful a person becomes academically or professionally.

A highly motivated person with a normal IQ may have to put more time and effort into learning, but they can still achieve as much or more than a person with a high IQ that is not motivated.

Years ago the TV show "60 Minutes" did a report on special schools for the "Academically Able", (elementary school age children with IQ's in excess of 140).

Although a few of these students went on to be doctors or lawyers, (nothing notable) most never achieved anything significant. Some were housewives, one was a belly dancer, another a short order cook, and so on.

Although they had high IQ's, they had no motivation.

 

[selfAdjoint]

My response is twofold.

First the correlation of success and IQ in the statistics is high, but not 100% (Hackman makes this point in defending intervention in poor communities). So there is plenty of room for other factors like motivation. Remember the Bell Curve results only covered papa's income and social status.

Second, people tend to overevaluate the anecdotes in their own lives, and misevaluate the actual mean and standard deviation that is measured. I would trust measured statistics over anybody's theory, if they couldn't be reconciled. Of course there are bad statistics too, every tool has to be evaluated when you use it. I am talking about clear statistics from good data.

 

[Evo]

Originally posted by selfAdjoint
My response is twofold.

First the correlation of success and IQ in the statistics is high, but not 100% (Hackman makes this point in defending intervention in poor communities). So there is plenty of room for other factors like motivation. Remember the Bell Curve results only covered papa's income and social status.

Second, people tend to overevaluate the anecdotes in their own lives, and misevaluate the actual mean and standard deviation that is measured. I would trust measured statistics over anybody's theory, if they couldn't be reconciled. Of course there are bad statistics too, every tool has to be evaluated when you use it. I am talking about clear statistics from good data.

I totally agree. You might like this link. I found it refreshingly objective.

http://psych.colorado.edu/hgss/hgsschapters/HGSS_Chapter21.pdf

 

[selfAdjoint]

What an excellent overview! Thank you for the link. Since you admire it, and I accept its conclusions too,it might follow that we agree on this contentious issue.

I particularly liked his putdown of the "stratification" fear. And his clever analysis of the two extreme positions, the one saying that IQ is driving us into a caste system, and the other that we are already in a caste system which is driving IQ.

 

[Evo]

I'm glad you liked it. I often have problems expressing what I mean and therefore creating the wrong impression.

Yes, I thought he did an excellent job overall.

 

[Nachtwolf]

I often have problems expressing what I mean and therefore creating the wrong impression.

It's quite common for anyone involved in Physics to have disproportionally high visuospatial ability for their verbal ability. Thus while they have good mathimatical and reasoning skills which give us a good understanding of the world we live in, we tend to have trouble expressing what we know.

Physics majors are also more Field Independent, thus proving beyond any shadow of doubt that we are cooler than Humanities majors.

--Mark

 

[Carlos Hernandez]

Originally posted by Nachtwolf
Physics majors are also more Field Independent

--Mark

What does that mean?

 

[Nachtwolf]

It means read this:

http://www.childrenofmillennium.org/eugenics.htm --> Psychometrics --> Field Dependence

 

[selfAdjoint]

The text that Evo linked to, a couple of posts up in this thread, says that although the lower IQ people have more children per individual, fewer of them tend to have children at all, which keeps the position in rough balance.

The Clinton era welfare reform, the centerpiece of which was jobs for the very poor, even at the cost of subsidy, was found to have greatly reduced the rate of illegitimate births among the poorest women.

 

[Nachtwolf]

although the lower IQ people have more children per individual, fewer of them tend to have children at all, which keeps the position in rough balance

I wish.

While it's true that fertility tends to be somewhat worse in the very lowest IQs than among the generally low IQ, this is a slight difference which doesn't balance anything out. In his book Dysgenics, Richard Lynn reports that there is an inverse correlation of .3 between IQ and fertility which includes all IQ levels.

To give you a better idea of what's going on, I'll give you a table from Jensen's book, The g Factor:



Fertility of American Whites
IQ....... Fertility
<71...... 1.59
71-85.... 1.68
86-100... 1.76
101-115.. 1.44
116-130.. 1.15
>131..... 0.92

So while the <71 and 71-85 groups are slightly lower than the 86-100 group, they are both still higher than any group above 100 and far above the >131 group. Every group with an IQ below 100 has better fertility than any every group above 100 IQ, and the inevitable result is a dysgenic decline to IQ. (The situation is even more stark for blacks.)

Moreover, estimates of the rate of dysgenics using such methods understate the problem because they only look at differential fertility. The Bell Curve states that "the IQ of people born abroad is .4 standard deviation lower than the mean of those born in the United States;" in other words, the average IQ of immigrants is six points below the national average. Since our own fertility rates are low, immigrants represent an important and growing demographic, and their assimilation into America results in a decrease to America's average IQ which only exacerbates the dysgenic threat.

--Mark

 

[Nachtwolf]

in the middle of the 20th century,Higgins,Reed,and Reed (1962)demonstrated a slightly positive fitness effect for IQ —just the opposite of “dysgenesis.”

Ah, yes - it is well known that during the middle of the 20th century the trends were briefly reversed. This is because the intelligent are more responsive to economic trends; when the economy is good, high IQ individuals have more children, and when the economy is bad, they have fewer. But the above circumstance is the exception to a well established long term trend.

--Mark