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Comment by dmbche | Hacker News Reader

You got some of those edgy papers near? I keep hearing things like this, but at every turn the science being published is hot trash.

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You're probably not searching with a genuine effort to find the good ones.

There's the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study. The authors found a politically incorrect result and tried to cover it up by inventing a new hypothesis (which they hadn't tested) after they'd collected their data.

I also read a fairly comprehensive secondary research paper trying to support the no-biological-differences theory and when it came to Ashkenazi Jews, they admitted the only plausible explanation was genetic superiority.

This is an area where the science all points in one direction but popular opinion is in the other direction. People don't look at the research. Probably because they don't want to understand, they just want to spread their political ideology. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever shown that no races are inferior.

What's the conclusion everyone is missing?

I'm sure you know how unscientific IQ tests are, I'm surprised that's what you're bringing up here as being "good science" being shut down politically. Just trying to correlatw the two tests they used is absolutely subjective, I would take a step back and reexamine the parts of those studies that convinced you of whatever beliefs you have - it seems like a shoddy foundation.

IQ test have genuine predictive power when applied to large groups. So no, they're not unscientific. In fact, the idea of IQ tests being useless or culturally biased is a now-outdated excuse that people used to use to justify the different results between ethic groups. It's now well accepted that different ethnic groups have different average IQs, and that IQ is a useful predictor of various life outcomes. What the politically-motivated researchers don't agree on is whether that's entirely environmental or partly genetic. Everyone agrees that it's at least partly environmental.

There's honestly no evidence for the environmental-only theory of intelligence. That's the popular politically correct belief but every study I've ever seen or heard of either fails to support it or supports the opposite.

In general the thing people find obnoxious about this kind of argument is that both 'race' and 'IQ' have their origin in eugenics, but are meaningless in genetics. The genetic variation across one race (say black) is much greater than the variation between races. There are no well-established genetic predictors of IQ. So, even if you do find evidence that there is a statistical correlation between these two unscientific and essentially meaningless concepts, your correlation is equally unscientific and meaningless.

Thank you

Can't you train a predictor on skull shape/bone length and IQ and go from there? Yeah there's no causation there, but you should be able to give a percentage that someone's IQ is above a certain number depending on high-rez MRI scan input of skull and bone length measurements.

Or make asset worth a predictor.

You can train a predictor on anything: that's how the famous cases of 'racist AI' came about. The point is, you can't establish a causal relationship without accounting for confounders. If you're starting with a question established by racists, with 'race' and 'IQ' as your two poles, and human populations as your data, good luck managing that.

This guy clearly is just trying to bang on about racial superiority but coaxing it in terms of "they won't let us say the thing". Your response neatly shuts him down. Well done.

Shut me down by saying false things? Why do you believe IQ is unscientific? It's routinely used by scientists for science and has falsifiable predictive power, which distinguishes it from unscientific things like astrology and homeopathy. Race isn't unscientific either - even if we're talking about the classic 3 races (which is not actually how people use the word anyway), they do in fact correspond to broad common genetic histories. Yes, they're an artificial classification people invented, but species are also an artificial classification. Neither is capable of classifying every individual and neither is unscientific because both are well enough defined to be useful to make predictions from.

> There are no well-established genetic predictors of IQ

Common misconception, sadly untrue. There are known genetic predictors of intelligence, they're just not simple genes that the layman can wrap his head around.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104

I think you'd have to be a bit of an expert to understand these results, just because of words like 'intelligence', that could mean anything, really, and I think accounting for 20% of the 50% heritability of intelligence is not exactly blowing the question out of the water.

All the same, I guess I am out of date (in 2017, they were getting 1% - perhaps in 2030, they will be up to 50%? Or back down to 2%?)

In general, I don't think there's any problem with saying some traits we call intelligence are heritable and that has a genetic component. I'm less sympathetic to the idea that intelligence is a simple scalar (the Q in IQ) or a quantity that should be used to prejudge candidates for given technical or social tasks. I mean, if somebody is good, does it matter that they are dumb as hell? I certainly would rather a talented dumbass than a useless genius as a coworker.

True, intelligence is not simple. But no matter how complex it is, the difference between an IQ of 100 and an IQ of 70 is undeniably a difference in intelligence.

The difference between a society with an average IQ of 100 and a society with an average IQ of 70 is one of intelligence. That's why, for example, any policy that allows emigrations from IQ 70 societies to to Western countries, which usually average around 100 IQ, is a bad policy for those Western countries.

It would be a bad policy... If the people of those western countries were having children. They aren't. They need those immigrants.

There is no nation without natalism.

I mean, nationality is obviously an enviromental factor, right? There's no 'german gene'. Ethnicities like 'French' don't actually exist in genes. So even if there is this nation-by-nation IQ variation, it shouldn't matter if you let people live where they want.

> The difference between a society with an average IQ of 100 and a society with an average IQ of 70 is one of intelligence.

Strong claim, hard no.

In 20th century scientific records that's about the difference between pre WW German country schools and the same regions in the later part of WWII under siege and under supplied.

That large difference has been attributed to nutrition rather than intelligence given the same genes, the same schools, the same society, etc.

> True, intelligence is not simple.

At yet there you are, mere sentences later, over simplying it and ignoring significant confounding factors. Deliberate malfeasance, oblivious blind ignorance, ... ?

Finding evidence to be obnoxious because of political associations is anti-science. You could make a moral argument that humans shouldn't be allowed to know certain things because we can't be trusted with that knowledge, but that's separate from trying to understand reality.

> The genetic variation across one race (say black) is much greater than the variation between races.

Why did you say that? Are you implying that there must be a wider range of IQs among various ethnicities within a race than between races? That's not a logical conclusion. Do you have some other chain of logic in mind?

By the way, I only use the word race loosely. I really mean ethnicity. Although the findings do still broadly apply to the classic 3-ish races.

So IQ is a word used to describe the results of a bunch of tests first established by eugenicists in the late 19th century, and has no scientific extraction whatsoever. Genetics is a field of science, and you can identify groups that carry particular genes. However, the 'races' don't map to distinct genetic groups, which is very unsurprising: the 'races' or 'ethnicities' are just administrative or cultural groupings from the 19th century.

The origin isn't relevant to whether it's valid or not.

No, ethnicities are absolutely not just administrative or cultural groupings. You've clearly done no research into this topic whatsoever and are just repeating some misinformation you got fooled by. Even the classic races which are unnecessarily crude by modern standards do actually partly correspond to distinct genetic groups. We can now classify ethnicities at a much finer level of detail and they're still distinct genetic groups.

Ironically given the article this is under, IQ was considered to be dirty Jewish science by the Nazis, probably because it showed Jews to be superior.

... That's just nonsense. Normal scientists working in genetics don't believe in race. The field has moved on from the 40s. It's not a conspiracy, there's just no evidence, because why should there be? It would be very surprising if a bunch of 19th century racists had accidentally discovered a deep truth about genetics before anybody had even discovered DNA.

Honestly, you just sound like you're a racist. Which is sad, but it's also indicative of a lack of common sense that you expect the universe to conform to your prejudices.

I can't understand how you can say that when it's transparently false. There's an enormous quantity of research on ethnicity and genetics. Researchers have found all sorts of correlations. Even common sense tells you things about eye color, hair color, etc. but it goes far deeper than that. It's more precise than classic race but both are still valid classifications.

You must also think scientists don't believe in the distinction between planets and dwarf planets, or even stars. Yes it's an arbitrary classification, but it's still useful.

You're thinking is just like the people in TFA. Rejecting some science for arbitrary and nonsensical political reasons. You've replaces dirty Jewish science with dirty racist's science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption...

where the bulk of scientists agreed in various ways that the confounding problems made it exceedingly implausible that differences were either entirely genetically based or entirely environmentally based?

> This is an area where the science all points in one direction but popular opinion is in the other direction.

Or maybe an area where the science is inconclusive but personal opinion shades the reading and subsequent presentation?

> exceedingly implausible that differences were [...] or entirely environmentally based

"entirely environmentally based" is the popular and un-scientific belief that I disagree with. So you agree with me?

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