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

W. Davis: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern 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.