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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

Politicization of science is never good.

The "pots aren't people" wave wouldn't be problematic per se (e.g. obviously a lot of non-Latin ethnicities adapted Roman way of life), rather because it sought to be the dominant theory.

We have a very similar "intelligence and nature-vs-nurture" situation in biology, caused by the very same thing - defeat of the Nazis, which made some ideas extremely dirty and other ideas very attractive.

This has an interesting consequence in that we do not know much about natural human intelligence today, which is coming back to bite us in the age of emerging artificial intelligence. The topic of human intelligence has been a political minefield for nearly a century now. It is probably safer and easier to study intelligence of octopuses and crows than that of humans. You're definitely freer from political repercussions there.

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> We have a very similar "intelligence and nature-vs-nurture" situation in biology, caused by the very same thing

no we don't. intelligence isn't racial..

I say intelligence is ideas, so it isn't physiological* and doesn't have a quotient.

* except in that being beaten around the head can make a person stupid.

Suggesting that intelligence might be (partially) inheritable always causes backlash.

I just got a downvote for an opposing opinion, so at least one person feels keenly that intelligence is genetic and is unable to say why.

Probably because it correlates with some genes. It is not so implausible that the functionality of some body parts is regulated by genes. Neither it is implausible that brain is a body part. Only when you put those two facts together, people on the internet start freaking out.

It causes backlash because there are huge fields of modern academia built around the implicit assumption that everyone has the same IQ and hence the worse outcomes encountered by black and brown people are due to a big societal conspiracy against them, when in reality their outcomes are almost identical to white people who score the same on IQ tests as those groups do.

It is true any discussion of the subject marks you as a racist so how can we have an honest conversation in such environment? Just look at your own down votes?

Having said that, even if the academic outcomes of people with darker skin color were worse (no idea if that is true, or in which country) just knowing that is no proof. It may as well be cultural or even income based (pregnant mothers eating worse quality food for example, or same thing with young children).

Is the question even answerable? What kind of intelligence do we measure with "academic outcomes"? How do we adjust for income and quality of life as a child, things like having both parents, or grandparents? It's an absolute minefield of possible manipulation. Same data can probably be spun to "proove" any hypothesis you have.

Then imagine writing a proposal for such research. What benefits can you predict? If you find there is absolutely no correlation between skin color and academic outcomes after adjusting for all external factors will it convince people that are racist as part of their identity? I doubt it.

Lets say you do prove there is some correlation. What the result of that would be? Open discrimination and vindication of racist views. But even if the principle was true the average doesn't apply to individuals so you can't apply it to any particular person.

In the ideal world, assuming this is true, we could then ask for the question of, well, what can we do about these people with different intelligence levels?

Intelligence is not just a single thing. We can assign a number by an intelligence test, of course, but there are lots of ways to look at it that are more nuanced. Generally, you're not going to say someone is better than everything you're going to find that someone is better at some things. And so can we direct people to the things you're better at for the better of everyone? Division of labor is a good thing.

But contrast, assuming that we find it's not true, then we can ask, well, why are we finding these differences in the data? if it's not genetic and perhaps we can find what it really is and then improve those groups that are currently disadvantaged.

The larger point is you have to know before you can make a useful adjustment.

What plausible mechanism is there to even approach the idea that skin color influences intelligence? Why not study the effects on intelligence of eye color, or blood type?

This is especially clearly just a racist concept once you realize that none of the studies of IQ vs race actually do any genetic testing, they only rely on phenotype. Which is absurd given the fact that the child of a black-skinned person born in sub-Saharan Africa and a white-skinned person born in a village in Ireland is extremely likely to be black-skinned, but is genetically just as much part of both populations. It's only the history of racism that assigns this child as black more so than white.

We know that people with red hair tend to metabolize anesthesia differently. It is not completely implausible that there is also a correlation between looks and other traits, although it seems almost impossible to me to untangle cultural, environmental and genetic effects.

Of course, any two traits can be correlated. But unless there is an obvious causal mechanism ("whiter skinned people get sun burns more easily", "darker skinned people tend to have vitamin D deficiencies at higher latitudes"), there's no reason to assume it and start looking for it to prove or disprove. It's a priori just as likely that there is a genetic link between toe shape and intelligence as skin color and intelligence. Yet no one is doing the science of measuring toe length correlation to intelligence, just skin color ("race").

As far as I know phrenology measured all kinds of things and claimed correlations. But they used highly dubious data (even for their time) and the field is now too unpopular to try (something similar) again with better methodology.

And I would say that the racist claim is that there is observable correlation and that genetic explanations are about as probable as other explanations. But I suppose many non-genetic explanations (eg cultural differences) would also be counted as racism, since in these kinds of discussions race and culture are often jumbled together.

Wouldn’t the racist claim be that because some group has a lower average IQ, they deserve fewer rights and freedom and less dignity?

The implication that if one group was shown to have a measurably lower intellect they are less “human” somehow is really worrying.

It is my understanding that it's only racist if the group somehow aligns with a race, but I don't know a good term for that belief when it doesn't align with races.

"Skin color"? There's never been anybody with functional intelligence who thinks that skin color alone determines race.

Intelligence is inheritable.

Intelligence isn't even well defined.

That doesn't matter.

Apparently not.

for the sake of DJT's offspring I hope not

Probably because people take the idea and run it right off a cliff like Wil-E-Coyote, because very few commenters on message boards know what "heritability" actually means.

> intelligence isn't racial..

The same way as South-Koreans are by now taller than North-Koreans (because of material reasons) we could posit that "intelligence", i.e. the "workings" of our brain, can be distributed in a non-uniform manner across humankind, depending on the "local" material conditions.

And this is not about "race", because according to those that do believe in the "race" stuff both North-Koreans and South-Koreans are part of the same "race", it is about those material conditions that I've mentioned and which, in the end, by necessity end up modifying things in our (very material) brains, and hence in our "intelligence". Believing otherwise, meaning believing that are our brains are not affected by the material conditions under which we live our day-to-day lives, would be preposterous.

Right, but the equation of workings of the brain to intelligence is the tricky bit. That's like equating the workings of my bicycle to my decision to ride to a particular place.

> workings of the brain to intelligence is the tricky bit

I don't find it that tricky, intelligence does come from the brain.

> That's like equating the workings of my bicycle to my decision to ride to a particular place

Both one's brain and one's "intelligence" belong to the same person, like, physically and materially, which is not true when it comes to your bicycle example. More to the point, I find the comparison itself kind of self-describing, it's like deciding to "outsource" intelligence to some other external, non-ethereal entity (like a bicicle that is physically separate from a human being) in order to avoid those hard questions the OP was alluding to (hard questions that oftentimes also involve the political side of things).

Now I want to say that your ideas don't come from your brain. But of course they do, as a result of interaction with other people's ideas, some of which were written down. (Don't worry, I'm not a dualist.)

The thing is that no matter how fancy your bicycle, I can still ride my shitty bicycle to a university, and you can ride your lubricated carbon fiber bicycle into a ditch, and then you're not so smart. If what you call intelligence is how fast your bicycle typically goes into the ditch, then sure, it can be measured on a scale and you have more of it.

You, as a dualist, is the least of the fears we hold.

There are other notions about the transfer of ideas: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/06/memory-transfer

I'm not a dualist! Fumes

Wait, cannibal worms that eat memories? My my.

I for one thank our AI overlords that weight training avoided that path not taken :/

If you think any brain can be just as intelligent no matter how it works then why not extend that to things that aren't brains? If everyone's brain is equally good then isn't a rock just as good as well?

A lot of HN is currently about rocks that we've made very smart, in case you haven't noticed. I don't want archeology polluted by generic academic culture war stuff, so can we please leave "intelligence" out of it?

Well this just proves the point I'm making.

It takes an enormous amount of engineering work to make an intelligent rock, and not all intelligent rocks are equally intelligent. This is very obvious.

Sure, if the rock has good ideas.

(Rocks don't have ideas.)

I don't think many people dispute the fact that the environment plays a role in intelligence. Not even many people dispute that there is some heritability to intelligence. What is in dispute is whether that heritability means that some races are on average genetically more intelligent than others (and another problem is how to define intelligence).

I don't understand how the precedents could lead to any question regarding the disputed conclusion

If we define intelligence as IQ then the evidence is overwhelming that the average differs among races. Even in Singapore, which has a very high standard of living, nutrition etc., we still see Chinese Singaporeans perform significantly better than Malay Singaporeans on various measures of intelligence, with Indian Singaporeans somewhere in the middle. The same pattern is seen among Chinese, Indians and native Malaysians in Malaysia, and globally when we compare the mean IQ scores of China, India and Malaysia.

That could also be explained by cultural differences, I don't think the evidence is overwhelming.

Or it could be discrimination. There are studies that show that black and white mixed races children did not score any higher than children with two black parents, while white people score higher than black people on average, which may point to some discrimination impacting IQ.

Discrimination against whites in favor of blacks doesn't lower white IQ.

There are significant cultural and economic differences between those communities. These will be similar between Singapore and Malaysia. The Chinese and Indians are sufficiently recent immigrants for their culture to still have a lot in common (they speak the same language, follow the same religions, have inherited attitudes) with the places their ancestors came from.

No, you mean to say "if we define intelligence as the output of IQ testing", which clarifies that you're projecting from statistical surveys (with all sorts of potential confounders) rather than some directly queryable and innate attribute of people.

How do you define races? As I said in another comment definitions shift and they are different in different countries. I have an encyclopedia from the 1950s that defines South Asians as "Caucasoid". Some East Africans were also defined as "Caucasoid" historically.If we define races on the basis of genetic similarity then almost everyone whose ancestry is from Eurasia is the same "race", but people whose ancestry is African belong to multiple races.

Race was only ever a stand in before we had an accurate understanding of genetics.

Yes, but people seem very reluctant to accept that. They keep trying to pretend that genetics backs their culture's definitions.

If genetics had no impact whatsoever then great apes would have the same intelligence potential as humans, as human races are more diverse then you give them credit for.

The impact of it's culture and behavioral like inbreeding being acceptable probably plays a bigger role though, but denying genetic impact is just putting your head in the sand because you cannot face reality not being equal. Which it ain't. It's also almost certainly a range, with most of the curves overlapping. If studied, I'd expect there to be a measurable impact in the rates of high intelligence individuals with the median intelligence being pretty close across all groups, but obliviously just my personal experience from interacting with people.

Race is a combination of genetic, and cultural factors such as nutrition, early childhood care practices, social values, etc.

Humans are far more genetically homogenous than many animal species due to a population collapse at one point in our developmental history.

Cultural practices can have a big effect on intellectual development, so disentangling any possible genetic factors from cultural ones can be very difficult, but there is very little evidence for genetic factors related to race also being related to intelligence at the population level. Obviously certain genetic disorders can have a significant effect.

Every study that's been done shows a significant difference in mean IQ across races. Suggesting otherwise is anti-science, putting ideology over reality. That doesn't mean everyone of any particular race is stupid; Indians in America for instance on average have higher IQS than white Americans, in spite of the average IQ of India being significantly lower, because only the smarter Indians manage to immigrate to America.

Most studies of Indians done in famous IQ tests were of those Indians who lived in villages and suffered from diseases. Its been debunked so many times.

Those who immigrate to America are not smarter. They just had the where with all to pay for immigration. Even those who go on scholarship have to prove they have atleast land/housing back in India to even get a chance to immigrate.

I remember looking up the source of the IQ data from Nepal a few years ago. It was a taken from an IQ survey of a school for mentally disabled children..

Talk about sampling bias lol.

You're giving away the game here by building an argument around national IQ statistics, because there is no such thing. There are serious surveys of IQ test results in places like the United States, with some statistical validity. There is no equivalent global country-by-country survey that would enable you to compare the United States to India or any other country. The reason people believe there are is because there are multiple fraudulent studies that claim to provide those numbers, and people cite them without reading the underlying papers and seeing what they did to generate those numbers.

IQ differences between the racial groups is one of the most, if not the most, replicated findings in psychology.

Are they consistent across time and cultures? Are they corrected for differences in health, education, culture, wealth, etc? How big are racial differences compared to differences between people from different social classes?

How do you define racial groups? its something that constantly shifts. I have an encyclopedia for the 1950s that defines South Asians as "Caucasoid" which is not how most people now think.

You can do a dimensionality reduction on genetic variants and certain recognisable groups fall pretty clearly out of the data.

Do those groups relate closely to what people generally mean by race? Race as defined in which culture? I know from personal experience that its not the same definitions across cultures. How big are those differences compared to differences within racial groups?

Take a look yourself.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Principa...

Obviously some racial groups which are heavily socially constructed are not borne out by the data. There's no cluster for 'Latinos'. But in general I think there is quite a high correspondence with race as it is constructed in society and culture.

So on that graph, the distance between East and West Africans is about as great as the distance between Indians and Europeans. Somalis are closer to East Asians than they are to Southern African Khoisan people. Bedouin Arabs and Southern Europeans are closer to each other than either are to North Africans or Northern Europeans.

There are certainly some cases where the genetic data matches conventional thinking about race, but also many where they flatly contradict. It also suggests that saying something like "white people are genetically smarter on average than black people" is highly suspect. The group of people that we call "black" has a greater range of genetic profiles than the rest of the world put together, and the group we call "white" is kind of confused—to be genetically meaningful it would probably need to either include North Africans and Arabs or exclude Southern Europeans.

There is more genetic diversity among Africans than among all of the non-African groups. And yet I haven't seen a racial typology that didn't lump all of the Africans into one race, very often while they're trying to declare differences between people in the same European cluster.

Where are South and SE Asians on that?

Looking at this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation#/media...

It looks as though there are two rough clusters, Africans and everyone else, with Europeans and Middle Easterners in the intersection. Pretty much reflecting geography.

Based almost entirely on racist studies, including some famous ones that were comparing white and black school children in apartheid South Africa. I wonder if there may have been some confounding variables there, but surely this is just my bias.

Plus, none of these studies actually spend the money to do any genetic testing, they simply assign people to "white" or "black" race based almost always on skin color (which, since the gene for dark skin is dominant, is a very poor marker of actual genetic similarity - the great grandchild of a dark-skinned person with otherwise only white-skinned relatives can still be dark-skinned).

Edit: and I'm not even mentioning the obvious publication bias, as essentially only racists care about this race vs intelligence discussion, at least enough to invest in creating studies about it. Plus the fact that IQ itself is actually a very problematic measure, when applied beyond its actual medical use (quantifying mental disability).

We care about racial differences in outcomes that are correlated to IQ, such as employment and imprisonment.

What if some of the observed racial differences were caused by a lack of vitimin D, due to darker skin photosynthesising less of it? Vitamin D is essential for brain development. Black people in northern climates get less of it than evolution intended. This lack of vitamin D might be causing reduced brain development in black populations. If that is true, we could fix the prison crisis and racial IQ differences with a pill!

Sadly we don’t know because you can’t do the research to test the hypothesis.

If we block all research into a problem then we can’t solve it.

If you actually care about fixing a problem then we should bring all available tools to fix and solve it.

> correlated to

Correlation measures whether Y=mX+c holds with small error. I sometimes think that many people unknowingly assume that all dependencies are somehow straight-line ones. This is distinct however from "linear approximations" in physics, which can at least be justified sometimes.

I also suspect that correlations of 0.5 or lower are often just statistical noise.

I don’t see how your reply relates to my comment. At no point do I say that any correlations are linear, nor does my argument depend on linear correlations.

Fundamentally my argument is maybe science can solve a problem, let’s at least try.

It's a good tool if you want to rank people, it's a bad tool if you want to help people. IQ tests couldn't (and can't) even detect dyslexia, a specific disability which you can get help with, which was known even in Terman's time. IQ tests by design throw out all information which could complicate ranking people. If your goal is to help, why would you measure people with a tool which can't tell the difference between dyslexia and concussion?

IQ tests have been revised several times to address things like that, like that they "unfairly" penalize dyslexia, or that they had lots of questions which were easier for people of specific social backgrounds. Every time they were, they naturally became less "predictive", since both dyslexia and not belonging to the California white upper middle class give you pretty obvious disadvantages in life outcomes.

So don't waste time on IQ, and don't waste time on other academic culture war BS either.

If you can’t study IQ how do you demonstrate that lead poisoning causes reduced intelligence?

The research to ban lead in fuel relied on measuring IQ and measuring lead exposure, then showing a correlation between the two.

At the population level IQ is a very useful tool.

IQ is a very bad tool for measuring populations. That's because IQ is definitionally designed to force a population to adhere a particular metric: a bell curve distribution, with the median at 100 and the standard deviation of 10. Whatever the thing you're measuring is--and there's good reason to think it's not "intelligence"--you're crunching and distorting that measurement to get the number at the end of it to force the population to adhere to a standard distribution.

We don't have a good model of what intelligence is. But since IQ studies are fairly common, there's a lot of data collected that uses IQ, and since it IQ looks vaguely like "intelligence," a lot of researchers who are motivated to find reasons to declare particular people intelligent or unintelligent are more than happy to use that data to support their claims.

Did you even read my comment?

Answer this question:

> If you can’t study IQ how do you demonstrate that lead poisoning causes reduced intelligence?

The answer to that question should be blindingly obvious: you don't.

It should be clearly evident that trying to use IQ to establish that "<insert ethnic group here> are stupid" is bad science. It's the same sort of science to establish that "<insert environmental factor here> causes stupidity," so we also need to reject it even if the environmental factor is clearly something problematic. The problem isn't the conclusion, it's the methodology.

So do you reject that lead poisoning causes stupidity because it is unethical to measure intelligence?

It’s a good thing that measuring IQ enabled us to discover that trace amounts of lead in the environment causes reduced intelligence. That was a key piece of data for banning lead in fuel. The loss of IQ points happens to all kids living in cities, rich and poor. Rich powerful people didn’t want their kids made stupid by lead in the air.

I think that removing lead from paint and fuel has greatly improved the lives of billions of people.

No, we knew lead was bad. We knew what heavy metal poisoning looked like, we knew lead caused heavy metal poisoning. We knew of a hell of a lot more concrete effects than average lower scores on IQ tests.

> The loss of IQ points happens to all kids living in cities

No, it didn't. The reduced test scores happened _on average_.

I won't rule out that what you said is correct, in that it may well be the fear that "my child may lose 1-5 IQ points!" helped get lead banned, but if so, that's an indictment of society.

I agree with half of this argument but think you're taking it too far when you reject IQ testing as an epidemiological tool. It's not dispositive. It's statistically ill fitted as a ranking tool, for the reasons you stated, and the fact that it's not reliable across its whole range, and test-test reliability issues, &c. But like, "you can use it as an indicator for environmental causes of cognitive harm" is actually a valid argument, I think?

Wait, this is the opposite of reality. IQ is in fact a useful tool (in a battery of other tools) for helping diagnose cognitive deficits and learning disabilities. That's what it's good for: as a clinical tool. It's in fact terrible for ranking people.

Well that's what it was used for! Do your history homework, mr. clinician!

Tell me then, if someone scored low on a text-based IQ test and that's all you know, how do you tell if it was caused by dyslexia or concussion? I guess you break out that "battery of other tools"? What does IQ tests give you that those other tools don't give better?

Oh, I know one. An excuse to write someone off as simply stupid. An excuse to _stop looking_ for the things which might have helped them. Which is what it was historically used for.

Of course it is, creating that difference was the basis for IQ testing in the first place.

Difference in IQ test scores between racial groups in the United States is established and replicated. Differences in innate intelligence are not. It's not hard to intuit the difference; you just ask yourself, "I wonder what else could have been different between racial groups in the United States at the time these surveys were conducted?".

It replicates worldwide, it's not a US thing.

What do you mean "it replicates worldwide"? What replication are you referring to?

>intelligence isn't racial

And how do we know that? Any very controversial stuff like this will have people on both sides doing all in their power to convince everyone to their point of view. The truth gets lost.

To discuss this objectively we have to first agree on some basics. First I think the concept of race is a bit outdated. People have phenotypes and these phenotypes have various features (one may be skin color).

Also where did the idea there exists one feature responsible for "intelligence" came from? It seems to be accepted apriori, but I think the truth is closer to humans (and animals and AI) having various types of intelligence. Social, emotional, linguistical, math like, spatial (ability to imagine shapes etc) and probably few more.

And those intelligence types may very well have a genetic component and be present in one phenotype in a different mix than another.

But saying it is likely vs having actual proof are two different things so my view is that we simply don't know.

This is a message board trope. In reality there are multiple fields of study, all of which feature active and frequent publication in major journals, that address this question. Also: intelligence is not racial.

Lysenkoism predates the defeat of the nazis and it's pretty much the same pseudoscientific dismissal of nature for ideological reasons.

To be honest, I'm more interested in what ideology/religion lead to the Yamnaya Y line taking over a continent in a timespan of over thousands of years to almost utter replacement despite of the fact that, in the end, the "invaders" were almost identical to the "invaded", than I am in elucidating whether Llama 3 being less performant than Gemma 4 in benchmarks is due to the training corpus or the architecture.

I don't feel like being racist either way.

Based on the evidence we have it seems that they simply killed most (in some places almost all) of the local men they could find?

Who is they? The Yamnaya never made it out of the Ukraine.

We know people often kill people. That doesn't even need explanation.

My argument is that it is thousands of years and dozens of mixed generations.

Why do you decide to participate in a thousand-years-long campaign to kill the neighbor who is also your second cousin?

There is no reason they couldn't have turned the other way and attacked their other second cousin.

My best guess is religion but it could also have also been a different kind of fanatic ideology.

The immigrants from the steppes and their descendants. It's hard to interpret the fact that the majority and often 90% or more pre Indo European male lineages were replaced in Western and Northern Europe in any other way.

Sure it took many generations but it's hard to imagine that the violence wasn't culturally and racially motivated. Based on genetic evidence it's speculated that that there were more than 10 male migrants to every female coming from the steppe.

> The Yamnaya never made it out of the Ukraine.

I'm not sure what that means? Their descendants clearly did reach Iberia and Britain.

Regardless of how you feel about being racist, some people will accuse you of being uncomfortably close to a Nazi for talking about the Yamnaya Y line taking over a continent, because 19th and early 20th century anthropologists that the Nazis liked and amplified the ideas of really did think that the Yamnaya Y line took over a continent, they just called them "Aryans" instead of "the Yamnaya Y line".

There’s really only one way you totally replace male lineage.

>(e.g. obviously a lot of non-Latin ethnicities adapted Roman way of life),

If you wanna tell the romans to GFY you're gonna have to adopt a lot of the structures that make them competitive in order to resist them. There's a fairly large "you wrestle the pig you get shit on you" factor going on.

Most of the ethnicities/nations that adapted Roman way of life did not attempt to secede from Roman rule for centuries after that, if ever.

While it is true that learning from Rome was very useful for its later challengers, this usually was not the primary motivation for adoption of Roman culture, especially before ~ 400 AD. It was more about the higher standard of living plus legal stability, as long as Rome could enforce its Pax.

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