Debate over IQ and progress from a racialist....

[RadioRaheem84]

His response:



It's easy to find dispassionately compiled statistics on national IQs. National IQs differ greatly. For example, one source shows Japan with an average IQ of 105, whereas Equitorial Guinea comes in at 59. Is it just coincidence that Sony, Toyota, Honda, Fujitsu, Hitachi, and so forth came from Japan rather than from Equitorial Guinea?

Perhaps more to the point - was the transistor a gift to Bell Labs from interplanetary aliens, or was it the creation of some really smart people who worked there? Where did fiber optics, internal combustion engines, high-carbon steel, jet engines, antibiotics, genome sequencing, digital computers, refrigeration, railroads, communication satellites, etc, etc, all come from? Mozambique?

I would not argue that your heart is in the wrong place, but I do think that your understanding of the engines of progress and prosperity are quite naive.

Perhaps you don't have much experience in research and development. In a good R&D lab, a handful of really, really smart people drive the breakthroughs. Such people have given us just about everything that we have today in terms of material progress.

Think of people like Thomas Edison. Such people are absent from low-IQ places such as Equitorial Guinea. As shown by the thinness of the tail of the Gaussian distribution of intelligence, moving the average IQ down by even ten points drastically cuts the number of highly intelligent people in the population. These missing people are the ones who are smart enough to be scientists, engineers, doctors, judges, and legitimate lawyers. They are the Edisons, the inventors of the transistor, the Learned Hands, and so forth.

When a population has an average IQ of 59, it includes almost literally nobody who is smart enough to function at a high professional level in today's world. Pretending otherwise deprives us of any meaningful way to help such a population, if that's what we want to do. EG is not just like Switzerland, only warmer -- it is a completely different world, populated by a completely different kind of cat.


Apparently, there is a link between national IQ and progress is enough for this racialist,nationalist guy to assume that Japan is intellectually superior to Mozambique.

I think there is a causation fallacy this guy is using. Didn't Ha Joon Chang already destroy the myth of development being based on the superiority of the West and Japan?

[RadioRaheem84]

Can we also address the superhuman myths addressed in his post,something a lot of people are obssessed about?

[Tim Cornelis]

All I see is an additional argument against capitalism. If people are not smart enough to 'innovate' themselves out of poverty, we need to make this unnecessary through redirecting our productive capabilities and potential to the satisfaction of social and individuals needs. It may be that some groups have, on average, lower IQs than others, though stressing the superiority of one over the other remains an ecological fallacy and, moreover, assumes that one's merit is solely determined by one's intelligence.

[Let's Get Free]

Intelligence is a vague and culturally contingent concept with no clear meaning that we can easily test, and those tests we have developed for the purpose are inherently biased and flawed. Even if we were to pretend that IQ tests were legitimate measures of intelligence, the differences are due to environmental factors.

[conmharáin]

This person may also need a crash course in Tesla's "contributions" to Edison's inventions.

[Tjis]

IQ tests are biased. Especially those with a verbal component are subject to cultural bias. But even without the verbal component, they are designed for a generation of children that's used to being tested all the time in school. In that way they don't just measure intelligence, but also academic discipline, as in, sitting quietly, staying focused on the task at hand, considering the test important, rather than a distraction.
These are skills that are taught pretty universally in western education systems. In Mozambique however, less than half of the children finish primary education due to various socio-economic reasons. So many kids don't learn working in the basic testing framework that's very familiar to most of us.

Additionally, any intelligent person is not very likely to stick around in Mozambique. Brain drain is a big problem all over Africa, again, due to socio-economic reasons.

[Ocean Seal]

An abstract metric that we really don't understand measures the IQ of the world's developed countries as better than the underdeveloped countries. You mean to tell me that an academic thought exam favors those with classical training? Tell me more, Mr. Racist.

[Lacrimi de Chiciură]

IQ tests test for proficiency in domains of knowledge privileged by the test-givers. People in the poorer countries also don't have the same level of access to libraries, books, and resources. It's pretty easy to be "smart" if you have the resources, otherwise you have to be incredibly motivated. Knowledge production under imperialism creates an unequal distribution of knowledge. & can you really measure an aptitude for being "smart" without taking into account the contexts where your intelligence is put to use? Intelligence is material that you gather--just ask the CIA. Precolumbian peoples had thousands of books that were burned by the Spanish conquistadores and now there are only like 3 or 4 of those books left and hardly anyone can actually read them--that highlights the politically-motivated nature of intelligence inequality as well.

Some interesting links relating to this topic:

15 Year Old Sierra Leone Kid invents electronics in Africa (http://www.informafrica.com/gab_gallery/15-year-old-sierra-leone-kid-invents-electronics-in-africa/)

W. Davis: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World (http://fora.tv/2010/01/13/Wade_Davis_Why_Ancient_Wisdom_Matters_in_the_Moder n_World)

[RadioRaheem84]

Excellent posts guys! Thanks.

What do you guys think about the almost superhuman libertarian myths he is also pressuming in his post? Why are people especially in the West and especially in the US obsessed with intelligence?

[Rafiq]

IQ is not hereditary

Sent from my SPH-D710 using Tapatalk 2

[Lacrimi de Chiciură]

Excellent posts guys! Thanks.

What do you guys think about the almost superhuman libertarian myths he is also pressuming in his post? Why are people especially in the West and especially in the US obsessed with intelligence?

It seems like a manifestation of the myth of "American exceptionalism;" there is sort of this general idea that only some very special genius could come up with something so "innovative" like American "democracy."

[Yugo45]

Beside IQ tests being biased, many psychologists agree that intelligence isn't something you're born with, but something you learn. And learning depends on your socio-economic conditions. Or that it's a mixture of both. For example, I remember reading about intelligence tests they did on African-Americans in south USA and in north USA (at the time of WW1). And they found that those in the north had averagely a much bigger IQ then those in the south (even from many whites there), because they had better standards of living etc.

And whose fault is it that people from Mozambique (or poor regions in general) don't have good enough socio-economic conditions to learn (because learning obviously comes AFTER fighting for bare survival)?

So of course "people like Thomas Edison" aren't born in Mozambique or whatever.

Also, Thomas Edisone wasn't even fucking smart. All he did was copy ideas of other people. And those few that he did come up on his own were through trial and error (as he said it himself) and trial and error is NOT intelligence.

[RadioRaheem84]

I love this thread. It's been super educational. Thanks guys. Keep it coming.

The guy is also using his gig as an R&D specialist as a way to tout his own achievements as a genius pillar of society.

Isn't a lot of R&D research funded by the government?

[Red Commissar]

Intelligence isn't hereditary or intrinsic to races, that much is obvious. It's cultivated and grown- a country like Equatorial Guinea does not have robust public investments (as well as money from industry, business, other private groups...) into education like Japan has. If anything this underscores a problem with capitalist systems concentrating the wealth of the world into a small group of nations. It wasn't too long ago when Europeans and Americans were applying the same arguments to nations like Japan to explain why they were superior, nations they now hold up as model ethnicities to act like they aren't racist, only pointing out "facts" when it comes to Africa.

I don't think you'll have much luck with this guy, to believe in this nonsense is racist bs means they're too far gone. Or have unwarranted self-importance and a massive ego. How do you keep getting into arguments with nutjobs like this anyways?

A good book on this written from a scientific standpoint is Stephen J. Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man", which takes to task the notion of IQ tests being applied the way they've been by racist sociobiologists/psychologists trying to push a warped application of biological determinism (in simpler terms, swinging completely to "nature" on the nature-nurture dichotomy) . He added on to this after the book "Bell Curve" was published back in 1994, widely praised by media and politicians, but having little to no enthusiasm from scientists, to criticize those findings.

[Sidagma]

I also wanna bring attention to an article, and while I can't post links for another 18 posts, the article is entitled "Ableist Word Profile: Intelligence" and is hosted on disabledfeminists dot com.

The article describes in some detail the way that IQ tests have been used as an instrument of oppression. The whole thing is worth reading, but this passage in particular demonstrates some of the cultural specificity in question:

Measuring cultural and class assimilation: One task on the Beta exam showed a man in an awkward position, on one foot with a hand extended, with objects at the end of a path. The recruit was told to fill in the missing part of the picture. In the world Terman and Yerkes lived in, this was universal knowledge; the man was bowling, the path was a bowling lane, the objects at the far end were pins. It’s not universal everywhere. Another question related to yachting.

The passage about the "superhuman Thomas Edison" is just sucking up to rich white guys. First off, Thomas Edison didn't actually invent most of his shit, he just had enough money to copyright it. He actually filched it off of a bunch of super exploited migrant workers like Nikola Tesla. This is a recurring theme for mythologized capitalist figures in the West -- Bill Gates inventing computers with Ada Lovelace (for example) getting no credit whatsoever, the four or five guys who are alleged to have basically carried the whole Enlightenment, you know the drill. This veneration of cultural figures is also a western-specific phenomenon that doesn't carry over everywhere.

[Crixus]

His response:



Apparently, there is a link between national IQ and progress is enough for this racialist,nationalist guy to assume that Japan is intellectually superior to Mozambique.

I think there is a causation fallacy this guy is using. Didn't Ha Joon Chang already destroy the myth of development being based on the superiority of the West and Japan?
put in the 3w's .edrev.info/essays/v10n6.pdf

[Tristana]

His response:



Apparently, there is a link between national IQ and progress is enough for this racialist,nationalist guy to assume that Japan is intellectually superior to Mozambique.

I think there is a causation fallacy this guy is using. Didn't Ha Joon Chang already destroy the myth of development being based on the superiority of the West and Japan?

Aren't there distinct differences in the material reality of Equatorial Guineans and Americans? I'd imagine that they'd work more with their hands and use kinesthetic ability in order to survive compared to the "white collar" work of medicine, law, computers, etc. of the United States. In that case, I don't think it's fair to administer the IQ test as it tests skills that those who live in EG don't regularly use.

If he replies with something along the lines of "well that just shows you the prevalence of 'white man's burden'" and then brags about how white people are more industrious (which is a common argument from the White Nationalist crowd), post lists of African and African-American inventions. And if he continues to demand evidence of "major inventions that drive humanity forward", then he's just moving the goal posts.

Honestly, it's not worth debating them. It's more headache than its worth.

[Conscript]

1. People like Edison became relevant because of established capital
2. Why cite corporations, products of state assistance?
3. Lol averages. How does that saying go? The inventor of the average drowned in a river with an average depth of 0.1 meters?

[Poison Frog]

Jet engines, antibiotics, and fibre optics were all invented in the richest nations? I'm shocked.

Meanwhile in the real world, I've had black bosses, teachers, and doctors - they all seemed plenty intelligent to me.

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

My comrade JMP wrote a piece on this


"Hard" Sciences Finally Catch Up to Social Sciences…
…In figuring out that IQ is a bullshit theory. After all, critical leftists have been pointing out that a standardized test designed to reveal a concrete and universal intelligence quotient was about as "scientific" as phrenology and other para-sciences for decades. One almost wonders why it took so long for neuro-scientists to discover what we had already proven without a laboratory and brain-scanners: that there is no such thing as an "intelligence quotient" and that there can be no objective measurement of intelligence unaffected by the conflict of social classes.

Not that a bunch of brain-scans are capable of explaining how intelligence is also a social phenomena, not something simply found in the brain, but at least they can tell us that all of this IQ nonsense is a just that––nonsense––because, lacking an understanding of the social aspect of intelligence, it also lacks any basis in crude biology. There is nothing in the brain that can be measured as an "intelligence quotient" and, as the senior researcher of this study that has once again disproved IQ says: "the bottom line is the whole concept of IQ––or you having a higher IQ than me––is a myth." This from a neuro-scientist who probably doesn't care about the reasons why the social sciences have debunked IQ. (Now, if only wikipedia would preface its entry about "intelligence quotient" in the same way it prefaces its entries on other crack sciences. Unfortunately, it still claims that "[w]ell-constructed IQ tests are generally accepted as an accurate measure of intelligence by the scientific community." Not anymore!)

The heavy investment of some people in the concept of IQ was always dubious. When a given person's knowledge is overdetermined by the education s/he receives from infancy, and if this person is born into a poor family without access to the same pedagogical opportunities as someone in a far more economically privileged family, a standardized testing to measure peoples' "braininess" should have been dismissed as unscientific from the get-go. And when such tests attempt to avoid this supposed problem of educational accessibility by imagining an equal playing field of IQ, they still ended up producing cultural/linguistic errors that reified the normative culture as the standard of intelligence. And then attempting to merge all of this with pattern recognition, as if all of these things were the same single field of "intelligence" existing somewhere in the mind and thus dooming dyslexics to low scores, these tests were always something of a mess.

You know, I was never subjected to an IQ test but I knew a few people who were––in fact, I know someone who supposedly received a 150 on his test but never ended up becoming the next Einstein or renaissance man. In fact, I suspect that if I was tested I would have scored pretty low because of my learning disability that, at the point when such testing would happen, had caused at least one chauvinist teachers to call me "retarded". I also suspect there are people who would have tested low and who could have become Shakespeares and Einsteins if they had been given different opportunities.


Now even neuro-science tells us the bell-curve is bullshit.

So thankfully, we have this new study that argues for the utter uselessness of imagining that there can be a single "quotient" that can be measured and called "intelligence" existing anywhere in the human brain. And though it is true that the mind-brain problem is still a significant philosophical issue for some people, those who would like to defend the supposed "scientific" veracity of IQ by stating that the "mind" is separate from the "brain" have left the realm of science. When it comes to intelligence and mind, after all, the only "hard science" capable of measuring something like this would have to be neuro-science.

The problem with pseudo-sciences is that they take a while to vanish. Since this recent study, coming as it does from the so-called "hard sciences", is the figurative kill shot to theories of a single "intelligence quotient" that can be accurately measured, the death throes will probably stretch over a decade. It really is too bad that the social sciences couldn't have killed this theory off––unfortunately, people seem to think that neuro-science possesses more authority than critical sociology in this area.

Now if only some evolutionary biologists could release a study saying "evolutionary psychology" is a myth and also catch up to the critical social scientists.

[DROSL]

Maybe they are dumb for our way of life, but not theirs. It's a cultural difference not racial.

[RadioRaheem84]

A number of posters here have tried to help you understand real life a little better. If you would chatter less and listen more, you might actually learn something. For example, it has become apparent that you are so poorly educated in things quantitative that you don't grasp even the basics of random variables and statistical distributions. Your would-be career is going to suffer mightily as a result.

Regarding the coherence of my arguments -- if you go into just about any major university library in the English-speaking world, you will find numerous papers that I have written. If you check the world's patent offices you will find my name recorded hundreds of times. So, in retrospect, I guess that I have been served fairly well by my coherence. Again, you're welcome. You benefit from the contributions of people like me every day. http://pics3.city-data.com/forum/images/smilies/smile.gif

History didn't start the day you were born. Many of us went through the phase when we thought that Marxism was the way to go -- from each according to his ability and to each according to his need. This generally appeals to young people who fear that they will not be able to compete successfully in an economy such as ours. So to compensate, they like to redistribute wealth according to their idea of fairness.

The evidence is overwhelming that we were wrong. Real life came along at some point, and we began to realize that redistribution doesn't really work very well -- contrast, for example, East Germany with West Germany or the Soviet Union with the United States. More years of living began to show us that yes, some people really are lazy and/or dumb, and, discounting bad luck that actually does befall a few people, that's why they remain poor.

Just so you won't be disappointed, I will also suggest comparing the accomplishments of Jewish people with the accomplishments of Black Africans. Jews have been persecuted for millennia, held in slavery, and shoveled into ovens, and yet they always bounce back, thrive, succeed, prosper, and contribute greatly to the culture around them. Why? Because of their unusually high intelligence, their drive, and their cultural values. Note that these values are part of the foundation of Judeo-Christian American culture at its best. You would do well to learn a little about it . . .


This guy is may be a zionist. And am I really missing something when it comes to random variables? :confused:

Also if this guy is serious then that is scary that someone like this exists in academia. Help me bring this clown down.

[Crixus]

Besides the link I provided which is a detailed critique of this guys source material (Not Jarrad Taylor but the book "IQ And The Wealth Of Nations) lets use historical materialism to interpret his lack of understanding concerning causation and correlation. Japan underwent the process of pre market primitive accumulation in the 19'th century in a coercive manner - facilitated by the US pushing the market system on them in order to open up eastern markets to trade/commerce. Japan had a somewhat united and feudal/mercantile culture which made traditional western colonialism almost impossible. It would have been all out war and unprofitable. With the change of property relations and the introduction of education in a somewhat independent fashion they flourished (as far as market standards go). To illustrate why I bring up primitive accumulation and the cultural changes that take place with the implementation of the market system lets look at feudal times in England. If we could get a time machine and go to England while there were serfs and feudal lords and we gave the serfs (adjusted for time/culture) IQ tests what do you think the outcome would be? Would they score lower than feudal lords? If the same was done to Vikings in the 10'th century? The bourgeois embryonic and new capitalists of the up and coming market system saw their own people (White Europeans) as stupid, prone to vice, violence and laziness- much of what they now say about people of color. Adam Smiths views on European working peoples lack of intelligence are well known but other bourgeois philosophers and economic theorists took it even further. In England they once made laws to execute beggars and imprison the poor in mental asylums. In the book "System Of Moral Philosophy" Francis Hutchinson (Adam Smiths teacher) advocated placing those ignorant and lazy white poor people into slavery/indentured servitude. Millions of them. Sloth, ignorance and indolence, he thought, was an epidemic to be fought by facilitating brutal oppression and this is the route they took in Africa but his pupil Adam Smith advocated education in the west to alleviate workers/the poor of this so called affliction. In Africa it's never traditionally been about the west contributing to the economic/social uplifting of the African people as Smith advocated in the west it's always been about how the west can extract as much wealth as possible and when the bourgeois did that to their own people what do you think the result was? In the days before public education, when 6 year olds worked in fields and factories, when the brutality of extracting surplus value was at it's most obvious what do you think the IQ of working poor in the west was compared to rich men of leisure who had time and money to educate themselves?

Anyhow, low IQ in undeveloped regions is indeed contributed to genetics by people who don't understand the history of uneven development which largely depended on the amount of organized or centralized resistance put up by the various targeted populations. Take native Americans for instance. They didn't, like Japan, have a centralized culture. Tribes were spread out across North America which made it possible for Europeans to subjugate the entire people's into a sort of second class human for reasons of attaining wealth in an even more brutal fashion than happened to European serfs/early workers. If, as was the case in Japan, Native Americans had a centralized system the USA wouldn't have been able to form and Britain, eventually, would have been forced to take the same route the US did with Japan. They would have had to culturally and economically transform the continent in a more 'egalitarian' fashion in order to open up the continent to bourgeois trade/commerce. Africa is much the same, it was a decentralized tribal area which has nothing to do with IQ and everything to do with historical and material circumstances. Just now, as David Harvey points out, primitive accumulation is still taking place around the globe, the process that Marx, at times, actually praised as progressive because of industrialization but in the modern era education and cultural shift also accompanies globalization but not everywhere. Something that has taken place on an uneven scale not because of the IQ of populations but because of the perceived or real needs of capital and some regions as I explained were more vulnerable to abject domination due to a lack of centralization to defend themselves from brutal colonization. The more the dominated and oppressed the more profitable it is for the bourgeoisie. To understand why the brutally oppressed have problems assimilating to the colonizer culture and thus into scoring high on our silly IQ tests read Pedagogy Of The Oppressed by Paulo Freire. I'd urge you to first check out the link I posted though then keep in mind debating the Jarrad Taylor types is never fruitful because they don't WANT to see the world how it really is they want to use pseudo-intellectual arguments to validate their already held racist ideas much in the same way classical philosophers saw poor Europeans and used the same 'logic' to oppress us.

[TheRedAnarchist23]

I always find strange how the nazis can be so fucking stupid.
I would say something about this, but it just isn't worth it.
What that person said was so ridiculous and ignorant it is worthy of an answer.

QxUClvLGvDo

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Thomas Edison lolololol!!!!!!!!!
I actually think racist schmuck's own example - a theiving conman (he once electrocuted an elephant to demonstrate why alternating current was too dangerous for society) who did a lot of patenting, but relatively little inventing - is perfect. The fact is, IQ tests (and the social forms that produce them) precede high IQs. On the other hand, drop a Phd candidate or an engineer in to subsistence farming, and see how they fare.
To borrow from a favorite lyricist, any first world chump who thinks their 140 IQ means something needs a Holiday in Cambodia.

[RadioRaheem84]

At first he was playing it off as though he was a "moderate" but then he revealed his nazi colors. Normally I would shrug this off but he is claiming to be an accomplished man with several patents under his belt. I would hope to at least dismantle his arguments in the hopes that people reading the forum will not associate inane racial theories with success.

[RadioRaheem84]

Also I need to know if perhaps I really do not understand the basics of random variables or stat distribution like he said. I need to know if this was just a cheap personal jab or if perhaps I really lack those basic skills. I basically just paraphrased what you guys wrote. Is there something really "scientific" that I missed or messed up on in these racial/nationalist IQ theories? Can they really be quantitatively measured and it's something I am not undestanding from his p.o.v.? I mean I am sure a man of science wouldn't just be fooled like that. :confused:

[#FF0000]

http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/minorities.shtml


DNA studies do not indicate that separate classifiable subspecies (races) exist within modern humans. While different genes for physical traits such as skin and hair color can be identified between individuals, no consistent patterns of genes across the human genome exist to distinguish one race from another. There also is no genetic basis for divisions of human ethnicity. People who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, (http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/humanmigrations.shtml) but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other.

Well uh, there you go.

Also want to point out that someone with an IQ of 59 would very likely need assistance just to accomplish every day tasks and wouldn't be able to live without it. Of course this is an average which, uh, means a good chunk of people would have tested significantly lower than that.

What I'd like to know is the median and range, as well as the difference in results according to age and location.

[NegativeCorrelation]

Intelligence isn't hereditary...Actually, IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component.



Intelligence isn't hereditary...the book "Bell Curve" was published back in 1994, widely praised by media and politicians, but having little to no enthusiasm from scientists...Actually, much of the book's claims received support from scientists of many walks. Sure, a notable amount of scientists dissented from Hermstein's view, but this does not mean that his views were completely, or even mostly disregarded by science during his time.

[Poison Frog]

This guy firstly strokes his own member by telling you that he is highly intelligent and that the rest of us benefit from his intellect. Then he tells you that Marxism is for teenagers who are afraid they won't be able to compete in capitalist society. Do we really need to analyse this argument much? We could list hundreds of examples of adults who were perfectly capable of competing, and yet adhered to Marxist thought, but what's the point?

He uses the USSR as proof that communism doesn't work. What is his response when you tell him that the USSR was never a communist society? And if we are going to play the game, I'd argue that the "third world" that he so loves to denigrate is proof that capitalism doesn't work.

While he is, according to himself, very good at understanding statistics, he isn't too smart when it comes to accounting for the differences in materialistic reality between the groups of people that he compares. The histories of Jewish people and black Africans are not similar, despite his crude and flippant reference to Jews being shovelled into ovens. This man is clearly prioritising his racism against blacks over his anti-Semitism, in order to appear balanced and unattached to any racist agenda.

He tells you that poor people are poor because they are either lazy or dumb. Far from thinking this man is highly intelligent, I would conclude he is actually entirely estranged from some very fundamental facts about reality. I really don't think he's anywhere near as intelligent as he thinks he is, and I'm pretty sure none of us are benefitting from his odious opinions.

[Kenco Smooth]

I've never found the simplistic link's between IQ and national wealth hugely convincing. Factors like brain drain and the inadequacy of high IQ individuals without appropriate occupations being available mean that any link is going to be a very convoluted one involving multiple interacting factors.

That said there's a lot of misinformation about IQ tests in this thread for obviously political reasons. IQ scores have consistently been shown to be moderate to highly heretible (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21826061) and evidence indicates that the measured factor is relatively independent of the test(s) used (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028960300062X). As far as bias goes it is possible that tests are biased against groups, however there are a number of ways of identifying such bias and in many (maybe the majority) of cases there's no clear indicator of bias (http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Bias_in_mental_testing.html?id=wJR9AAAAMAAJ). This paper (http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/dolanSH2004.pdf) identifies racial bias in tests of Dutch and South African participants and I think it's important to emphasise how it did that, by empirical analysis of the data provided, not by picking out select questions and concluding "well that must be biased" as left wing critics of IQ tests have often done.



A good book on this written from a scientific standpoint is Stephen J. Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man", which takes to task the notion of IQ tests being applied the way they've been by racist sociobiologists/psychologists trying to push a warped application of biological determinism (in simpler terms, swinging completely to "nature" on the nature-nurture dichotomy) . He added on to this after the book "Bell Curve" was published back in 1994, widely praised by media and politicians, but having little to no enthusiasm from scientists, to criticize those findings.

Gould's book is exactly the kind of insubstantial and dishonest criticism that sadly dominates with criticisms of IQ. His only actual argument against the existence of g, that factor rotations are mathematically equivalent so could either point towards a single factor of ability or multiple unrelated ones was resolved 30 years before Gould wrote (it's a hierarchical structure which tapers off into a single factor). Add on top of that his refusal to add brain imaging data which showed a clear link between brain size and IQ in the revised version, his fudging of data to accuse someone else of fudging data (http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001071) and his complete confusion over 'reification' (more commonly called hypothesising) and you're left with nothing but a patchy history of sordid uses of IQ.

[ind_com]

How does this person explain the IQ of African Americans which is much more than native Africans? Do African Americans get their extra intelligence as invisible brainwaves from whites?

[Tim Cornelis]

This guy is may be a zionist. And am I really missing something when it comes to random variables? :confused:

Also if this guy is serious then that is scary that someone like this exists in academia. Help me bring this clown down.

He is not a Zionist, he is a racialist. Ashkenazi Jews reportedly have an average IQ of between 110 and 115, and 1 in 3 Nobel Laureates is of Ashkenazi descent. This is what your opponent is referring to.

My suggestion is, do not disagree with him (even though you might) — say "okay, assuming you are right then wouldn't…" — and then assert that one's intelligence does not equal one's merit, and that if poverty cannot be elevated through competitive methods of innovation it should be abolished in favour of a planned economy in accordance with needs, where intelligence to get ahead of others in terms of financial well-being, is obsolete. He is unconsciously making an argument why capitalism cannot be reformed, so use that against him.


Thomas Edison lolololol!!!!!!!!!
I actually think racist schmuck's own example - a theiving conman (he once electrocuted an elephant to demonstrate why alternating current was too dangerous for society) who did a lot of patenting, but relatively little inventing - is perfect. The fact is, IQ tests (and the social forms that produce them) precede high IQs. On the other hand, drop a Phd candidate or an engineer in to subsistence farming, and see how they fare.
To borrow from a favorite lyricist, any first world chump who thinks their 140 IQ means something needs a Holiday in Cambodia.

The point was not Edison in itself, so don't get hung up on that. Edison stole from Tesla, but Tesla was also white, so that argument would be self-defeating.



This guy firstly strokes his own member by telling you that he is highly intelligent and that the rest of us benefit from his intellect. Then he tells you that Marxism is for teenagers who are afraid they won't be able to compete in capitalist society. Do we really need to analyse this argument much? We could list hundreds of examples of adults who were perfectly capable of competing, and yet adhered to Marxist thought, but what's the point?

He uses the USSR as proof that communism doesn't work. What is his response when you tell him that the USSR was never a communist society? And if we are going to play the game, I'd argue that the "third world" that he so loves to denigrate is proof that capitalism doesn't work.

While he is, according to himself, very good at understanding statistics, he isn't too smart when it comes to accounting for the differences in materialistic reality between the groups of people that he compares. The histories of Jewish people and black Africans are not similar, despite his crude and flippant reference to Jews being shovelled into ovens. This man is clearly prioritising his racism against blacks over his anti-Semitism, in order to appear balanced and unattached to any racist agenda.


You have to be familiar with your opponent's stances in order to stand a chance in a discussion, and from the arguments here I can see that this is not the case. The racialist opponent is a racialist, not an anti-Semite. Some white nationalists call themselves racialists but not all racialists are white nationalists. For example, Richard Lynn (to which RadioRaheem's opponent was referring when mentioning an average IQ of 59) is a racialist but acknowledges that his 'race' is 'inferior' to the intellect of Asians and Jews. This is the type of opponent RadioRaheem is facing, not a white nationalist or supremacist. In fact, if he says his name appears hundreds of times in academia, are you sure your opponent isn't Lynn himself?

[Strannik]

Racial theories of intelligence have only two minor problems:

1) We don't know what "race" is
2) We don't know what "intelligence" is

[revolon]

As it could sometime depends on a specific nations people or different racial groups thoughts, values and beliefs on which they are living. So, there could be Varied IQ's according to there mental approaches also.

[Poison Frog]

While he is certainly a racist, and appears not to be an anti-Semite, I suspect Jewish people would taste unpleasantness under his rule. A flippant turn of phrase and perhaps no more, I admit. Although hatred of the supposed Jewish world conspiracy affords high intelligence to Jews, and is nonetheless anti-Semitic. Anyway, it's a moot point.