NullHypothesis
No bio...
User ID: 2718
NullHypothesis
1mo ago
Just put some numbers/stats and keywords that sound impressive, at a lot of companies HR department, which is where your resume gets initially parsed, won't even have the knowledge to understand technical jargon. Also, most companies put the resumes through a filter before human eyes ever look at it, which is why you should try to match keywords to job postings.
If you're lucky enough to talk to an actual human, if the person isn't technical you wouldn't be able to divulge "trade secrets" even accidentally, and if they are technical you should be able to prove your competence by just talking with them.
Honestly I wouldn't worry about it too much, I highly doubt what you've worked on would qualify as trade secrets that you absolutely cannot divulge, and on the chance that it actually is the case, well your company should've thought twice before assigning a junior engineer with that kind of work.
Just a guess, but I reckon there are two main categories of Asian-White couples:
Asian-white in heavy liberal/tech focused city e.g. San Francisco. This would likely bring the average IQ up.
Bride-By-Mail / Expat Asian-White couples probably brings the average down, since the average women from those places tend to be less educated.
What's also interesting is that if you exclude whites, interracial couples tend to have higher IQ on average. This holds true for Hispanic-Black relationships compared to Hispanic-Hispanic.
NullHypothesis
1mo ago
Did the doxxing reveal if he specifically dislikes black-white interracial dating or other kinds of interracial dating e.g. white-hispanic or white-asian?
NullHypothesis
1mo ago
Guess I don't really know the guy but didn't think I've ever see Madoka Magica in the same sentence with Yudkowsky and drone warfare. I think the issue with these longer works is you have to ask yourself would you be willing to reread the entire thing from the start when the next part is out? There's a lot of good ideas in these longer webnovels but the length is definitely an issue for a lot of people, which is why having a good editor is crucial if you ever want to get it to print. But then you get fans of the webnovel complaining how X and Y were edited and on and on it goes.
I've been binge-watching Roman history videos on YouTube and saw a comment that I should read Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series. It chronicles the last days of the Roman Republic. There's seven books in the series and approximately 568,230 words in total. Apparently the author collected and researched thousands of books and material on the history of Rome while writing the series so it should be fairly historically accurate, although since it is historic fiction there will be made up parts. I barely started the first book so I don't have much thoughts on it yet, but I'm excited to dive into the series.
NullHypothesis
1mo ago
Is GovTrack an actual reliable source? I saw an article about how six democrats voted with the GOP to condemn Kamala Harris as the Border Czar so I looked up these six democrats (and to no surprise ideologically they're in the middle). So I just clicked around, and their political stance becomes obvious with a page like this:
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/ted_cruz/412573
The "Elections must be decided by counting votes" specifically, that's apparent if you select the page for numerous Republican senators. Factor in the fact that they removed the scorecard page labeling her as the most liberal senator and their bias is clear, but I did find utility in their Ideology–Leadership Chart as well-being able to view their voting records and bills.
NullHypothesis
1mo ago
I was being a little cheeky there with the number quoted in the article, which was "Over 10,000 white men from all across the country are expected to join the effort this week and will be on hand to welcome Vice President Harris to the presidential race and pledge to help get her elected".
NullHypothesis
1mo ago
There is likely a genetic component to how much you enjoy certain kinds of food. Just like how some people find cilantro to taste like soap or Hershey's chocolate to taste like bile, there could be something just genetic that impacts your ability to enjoy sushi to the same degree that other people do.
Personally, I enjoy the fact that I can actually taste the fish when I eat sushi. I also find the sushi rice in Nigiri sushi to just be delicious in and of itself, combined with the fish it really elevates it to the next level for me. Technically, the rice is the most important part of the sushi, otherwise you'd just be eating sashimi if you wanted to focus on the raw fish. There's sushi with cooked fish, just eat the type that you like the most, although I find variety to also be an enjoyable experience and my goal when I go to a sushi restaurant is to try every piece at least once before getting seconds on the ones I enjoyed the most that day (except raw squid sushi, I never enjoyed this one in particular).
I think Makizushi sushi, which are the rolled type, are the one most people outside of Japan would think of when they think of sushi. In American sushi restaurants you'll typically find all types of rolls with a mix of ingredients like tempera shrimp, imitation crab, mayonnaise, avacodo, cucumber, etc, and I think these are more popular than actual nigiri sushi, because it fits a flavor profile more accustomed to the western palatte.
NullHypothesis
1mo ago
The implication of having to identify a group for X is that said group typically doesn't support X but this particular groups does and that hey, maybe you fellow member of that group should also support X. There's literally dozens thousands of us!
Will this actually gain support for Kamala Harris among white dudes? Well, the likely answer is that it probably will get a few, but not enough to shift the needle for this demographic in any particular manner.
If you're a white guy, what policies/cultural stances does Kamala have that would want to make you vote for her? I know it hasn't been long since the Democratic Party decided she should be their candidate, but I have heard very little about her actual stances and policies that wasn't something I had to look up my self.
So far, I haven't seen anything that would shift someone that wasn't already planning to vote for her (likely due to her being the democratic candidate, than anything else) to vote for her.
NullHypothesis
1mo ago
I recently read Nikaidou Hell Golf , which a manga series about a man trying to go pro but failing over and over again. Unlike a lot of manga, which is aimed at a younger audience and usually carries a theme of success and triumph, Nikaidou Hell Golf is a seinen manga (target audience being young adult men and older) and it is a story of failure. I think it did touch on golf being a "endless difficult and rewarding sport", the protagonist, Nikaidou Susumu, is a loser with mediocre skills that relies on the sponsorship of others to be able to attempt to become pro.
However, he never gives up (at least up to the most recent chapter) despite watching countless peers of his give up on their dreams to become an adult and take a job that pays the bills, despite being ostracized by those who once saw him as their hope of creating a successful pro golfer and by his much younger peers in the same program, and despite losing his sponsorship and having to come up with his own way of getting money to try to go pro (including taking money from his own retired mother that saved money for a vacation).
You essentially have a man with no future, who continued to take advantage of the goodwill of others in pursuit of his selfish dreams, and is unable to face reality that he should just give up on his dreams and move on with his life. Yet, if you read the story, it becomes clear the man is very aware of his own flaws, he knows he's taking advantage of those around him and feels immense guilt. In a sense, he is an addict, an addict to the game of golf, and to the idea that if he just goes pro he can fix all his mistakes and earn the adoration and respect of those around him.
The story is still ongoing, so it's not 100% clear exactly what the message the author intends to convey with the story. But it does touch a lot on the themes of adulthood, failure, dreams versus reality, and of course, euphoria and disappointment, all centered around one man's relationship with golf.
When golf presents itself in a story like this, I don't mind having to read about it. However, rather than enjoying golf in and of itself, I'm finding entertainment in the stories golf might create. I usually don't find any entertainment in watching an actual game of golf or looking at stats through golf (it also doesn't help that I actually don't play the sport, so those stats mean very little to me). It might just be because I don't create my own stories around these events, while those that do enjoy golf are able to immerse themselves in some kind of greater narrative beyond the game of golf. In a similar vein, I find baseball to be utterly boring, despite finding Michael Lewis' Moneyball to be a fascinating read.
Part of the reason I might not be able to formulate my own stories could be I'm just not in a bubble where anyone actually cares about golf. I work in a more technical role in a tech-focused company, where I rarely interact with executive level people (but I don't think even they really play golf). So none of the coworkers I interact with daily play golf, nobody in my family plays golf, the only time I really knew anyone that played golf was in college because some of my peers worked and played golf at the nearby country clubhouse. But those guys were in a different social group, with a different background. They were from rich, upper class families, while I attended the school on scholarship (and I chose the school precisely because it would cost me the least amount of money to graduate from). I didn't play the networking game well and that's my one regret in college, but honestly, even now I'm not sure, I could've done a good job at it. I don't think I would ever really be close friends with most of them. Perhaps if I did, I might have come to appreciate golf more for what it is.
But alas, golf to me just isn't something I can find myself to really be excited about. At best, it can serve as a medium for storytelling, and I can appreciate it through that, but as a sport in and of itself I can't find myself enjoying. For a guy like Trump, who probably grew up playing golf, who is surrounded by many others who engage in the sport, and who has many stories and experiences with surrounding it, I'm sure golf resonates with him on a deeper level. He's a big man with big stories, after all.
NullHypothesis
1mo ago
I'm not sure there really is a viable alternative currently. Youtube marketshare as a "Media Players And Streaming Platforms category" is at 97.67%. If you look at streaming or short form videos there are competitors, but for long form videos there still isn't any real competition. YouTube rolled out a horrendous UI update but rather than quitting I just found some solutions online via some uBlock filters and Tampermonkey scripts to mostly revert it back to an older UI. I don't know where else I would view videos!
Personally, I would never live without AdBlock, but most people actually don't even bother.
According to one source, 32.8% of people globally use some kind of AdBlock.
Some more stats for US users:
- "While up to 41% of American internet users report using ad blockers... Ad blocking is detected in 18% of web sessions on computers among American users."
- 37% of respondents blocked ads while using a desktop computer.
- 15% of respondents said that they used blockers on mobile devices.
- 10% of internet users in the US say that they block ads while browsing on a tablet.
One could consider how much time people that use AdBlock spend online relative to those that don't, but I've met plenty of people that spend hours on their phone, and they don't use any form of AdBlock.
NullHypothesis
1mo ago
I always love reading your longer posts, you always seem to provide a fresh perspective on things for me.
I never really understood the appeal of golf. Does Trump love the game for what is truly is, or does he love it because it's a rich person sport you can brag about with other rich people that play that sport? Based on his skills and anecdotes, it sounds like he actually is passionate about the sport.
See, at that point in his life, he didn't get the free cheeseburgers.
Gave me a chuckle, I think I might take on your recommendation and read Reilly's book just for making me laugh.
And something Reilly got completely wrong in retrospect...
Maybe I'm just not awake yet but what did Reilly get wrong exactly? Trump is still married to Melania and she continues to serve as the woman by his side on public appearances. I guess the claim that Trump is 100% faithful to Melania is technically untrue since everyone now knows about the Stormy Daniels story but isn't Melania his 3rd marriage? Did Trump actually have a reputation for being a 100% faithful guy back in 2007?
Why is it that a jovial guy like Trump, whose life has been nothing but blessed, is so angry all the time?
I imagine years of your character being attacked would be enough to break anyone. There may not be a single person on earth who's had more negative coverage about them than Trump in the entire world. I'm certain before he got involved into politics most interactions Trump had with the media was positive
What decisions did we all make that got us from there to here?
I ponder that too from time to time. I don't think the current world of politics and discourse would have been even considered a possibility to myself from 10 to 15 years ago. What a time we live in.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
I think the point of Catch-22 is that as hilarious as it is underlying the humor is a tragedy revealing the horrors of war. At first, it's just funny but in the second half, we start to really see the tragic consequences of the absurdity. There are just outright dark scenes like Snowden's death where Yossarian desperately tries to save a dying man's life but is unable to do anything and has to watch Snowden's organs drip out after he is hit by flak.
Then there are the humorous parts that come hand-in-hand with the tragedy.
For example, there is a scene where Yossarian is making love to Nurse Duckett at the beach and it's quite a dreamy and beautiful moment, people are out and about enjoying themselves in this moment of tranquility during the war, only for it to cut short by the death Kid Sampson.
Even people who were not there remembered vividly exactly what happened next. There was the briefest, softest tsst! filtering audibly through the shattering, overwhelming howl of the plane’s engines, and then there were just Kid Sampson’s two pale, skinny legs, still joined by strings somehow at the bloody truncated hips, standing stock-still on the raft for what seemed a full minute or two before they toppled over backward into the water finally with a faint, echoing splash and turned completely upside down so that only the grotesque toes and the plaster-white soles of Kid Sampson’s feet remained in view.
What killed him? McWatt had been "buzzing" the beach as a joke for a while earlier in the chapter trying to scare people by flying his plane dangerously close to the ground. Except this time, he fucks up and actually does kill someone. And in response, he chooses to crash his plane into the mountain killing him. The people watching can't make sense of it, they watched a comrade die and can't do anything but watch the other choose to kill himself as well. The two newbie pilots on the plane with McWatt jump out via parachute, indicating they too failed to convince him otherwise.
This scene is immediately ended with this gem of a line:
Colonel Cathcart was so upset by the deaths of Kid Sampson and McWatt that he raised the missions to sixty-five
And then this line in the immediate chapter afterward:
When Colonel Cathcart learned that Doc Daneeka too had been killed in McWatt’s plane, he increased the number of missions to seventy.
I think that would count as dark humor.
After typing this all out, I just realized where your flair comes from. Somehow I haven't made the connection despite seeing it several times.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
Thanks, fixed.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
Slaughterhouse-five is supposed to be in the category of dark humor/satire, but I honestly don't remember much about that book from when I read it in high school. Catch-22 is often mentioned as a similar absurdist fiction anti-war satiric book and it is the far superior of the two.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
Well, now I feel silly for missing this entire discussion that was already had. Thanks for taking the effort to organize the key points.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
I'm hoping amongst all the people that have an issue with how the moderation is done at least one of them has a good idea on how to improve the place. I gave my idea for a solution and then threw in 6 more (admittedly not well thought out), so they should be able to as well. Thanks for the response.
So far, it seems like the felony conviction has mostly galvanized support for Trump.
He has raised almost $34 million within 6 hours after the conviction, and $52.4 million within 24 hours. 29.7% of donors are new donors: https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20240531368/trump-campaign-says-it-raised-35-million-after-guilty-verdict-nearly-doubling-its-prior-recordl
Early polling shows that the number of people who said they would vote for Trump if he was convicted of a felony has increased post-conviction: https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/majority-believe-prosecution-donald-trump-upheld-rule-law-not-motivated-politics
This is true across democrats, republicans, and independents.
One betting market had Trump's odd job up: https://x.com/IAPolls2022/status/1796288757177446654
It went from 45% at the start of the trial, to 58% after the trial. As of 6/1, it currently sits at 54% https://polymarket.com/event/presidential-election-winner-2024
Just to provide some a counterpoint, this poll from Reuters suggests there would be some drop in support for Trump: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/one-10-republicans-less-likely-vote-trump-after-guilty-verdict-reutersipsos-poll-2024-05-31/ (Note that the number of republicans who said they would be less likely to vote for trump if he was found guilty has actually decreased post-trial.)
This article suggests other betting markets had Trump's chances fallen although that betting market they quote still puts Trump ahead of Biden:https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20240601270/betting-markets-give-lower-chance-of-trump-election-win-even-as-billionaires-back-him
The source Morningstar uses shows across multiple betting markets Trump is ahead of Biden: https://www.realclearpolling.com/betting-odds/2024/president
Trump saw a big leap and then a small correction but he is still ahead compared to when the trial initially started.
It seems like the anti-Tump side has to try much harder to spin this in a negative light than the pro-Trump side has to make it seem like a positive.
No my opinion is not, I think 70 is close to phenotypic average SSA IQ and I consider that African Americans have somewhat similar genotypic IQ to Ivorians because most of their origin is from West Africa (maybe 5 points higher due to White admixture). If you don't like Flynn estimates, get better ones but do not shift into discussion how many degrees Nigerian Americans have (a highly selected group benefiting from race-based affirmative action).
Can you provide a source? Gottfredson puts the black-American IQ average between 85 and 90. Flynn's work is based off meta IQ analysis of IQ testing data largely from before 2000s. I have provided evidence that between then and now that in the Ivory Coast the amount of education has increased. So again, I have reasons to believe that the average IQ would have risen between when the IQ tests had their data gathered to today.
If you're not pulling from Flynn who's the most prominent source behind the 70 IQ estimate for people of Africa then where are you getting your value from? You're the one that needs to provide a source, not me. I've provided numerous sources throughout this discussion to ground this discussion and you've yet to provide anything. This 70 IQ value for people in the Ivory Coast we've been discussing stems from 2rafa's comment several posts up and they point to Flynn as the source so that's the basis for this discussion. If you're using a completely different source to base your beliefs then we can't have a discussion properly. I've made pretty clear where my ideas come from to give you the opportunity to check and you haven't done the same level of effort for me so I'm not going to just take your word for it.
If so (I am not saying it isn't), then you should drop "70 iq people are unemployable" altogether.
Perhaps you have a point here and I should be more clear with my words. - People whose genetic potential caps around 70 IQ and are raised in a Western nation are not mostly employable in Western countries where most jobs are service and intellectual-based. The job-IQ research I'm aware of is done in the US so if you limit the area to just the US you can ignore a lot of other factors that have to be taking into consideration if you try to extrapolate elsewhere. I'm not going to drop the idea altogether. I do get in the habit for talking from a US-centric perspective to thank you for helping me remember to be more specific with my words.
Many people say this, but nearly all twins studies find impact of shared environment on adults low, less than 10%. Research of education>IQ is not stigmatized. Why didn't they come with some impressive results?
And those twins both typically both graduate from high school and still get an adequate amount of nutrition. Just gonna quote Scott yet again:
We know deep biological things matter because it's genetic and correlated with brain size, we know motivation matters because stimulants can raise IQ probably by making people try harder on the test, we know abstract thinking ability matters because of Flynn effect and because people from populations where they've never been exposed to this kind of thing do much worse on tests than is plausible from biological differences alone, and test-taking skills are just a good bet.
Most likely the larger effect sizes are going from almost no education (thus almost no familiarity with abstract thinking) to some education (and some familiarity), and the smaller effect sizes are going from 10 years to 11 years of education or whatever. I wouldn't expect extra education to be very valuable to people already very familiar with abstract thinking, though I'm not sure where to draw those lines.
The difference in an environment where twins grow up in the most extreme examples (upper class America vs lower class America), that gap is smaller compared to the average child in the US and the average child in the Ivory Coast in the 2000s. Both twins still get the benefit of education, which includes learning about abstract thinking. Show me a statistically significant twins study where the twins grow up in two completely different countries with completely different standards of education, or where one gets an education and the other doesnt and yet they end up with similar enough IQ and I might think you have a better point here.
Why these are exceptions? They are just conditions with larger effects, there are many lesser conditions. If some condition drives phenotypic ability to perform well on IQ tests, why wouldn't it be drive their phenotypic ability to perform well on a job?
You know what, I think I misunderstood your point earlier and thought you were saying something else. Upon a reread on your previous posts, I think I see your point and have to agree. I believe my revised statement above should account for this properly now.
It looks to me, that I completely agreed with your point that "70 iq Ivorians not same as 70 iq Americans" and yet that you're thinking I am disagreeing and you do not like that I wrote something unflattering for SSA.
Well, my impression was you didn't agree because every time I point out the reasons why they aren't equal, you swoop in to challenge the reasoning and then you didn't explicitly say anything about your thoughts on that until your most recent response. Thank you for clarifying. I think your clarification with "genotypic IQ" and "phenotypic IQ" is actually a very good distinction because when people typically discuss IQ they don't make this distinction, and then racists will take the existing research to justify their beliefs framing it as purely "genotypic IQ" and all this does it prevent further research into IQ which is a net negative for the world since now it's controversial to do research into IQ.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
The lyrics are from this BBC article: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68017347
"I love and enjoy what I am doing." Mr Sastha R has benefited from a boom in India's VFX industry. Not only is India's domestic film industry demanding more special effects, companies from overseas are sending work to India. For example, the dragons in the fifth season of Game of Thrones were created in Mumbai.
Streaming entertainment firms like Netflix, animated TV and film producers, and the computer games industry are all demanding more. "The VFX industry has surged due to an infusion of visual effects in almost all the entertainment sector," says Namit Malhotra, founder of Prime Focus, a giant Indian media firm which owns...
And then loops back to "Mr Sastha".
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
This sounds a lot like speed reading. You can increase your reading speed without losing comprehension based on information density. This means a lot of nonfiction books you can speed read because they typically spend 200 pages to convey 1-5 key ideas. But if you were going through a physics textbook, you can speed read all you want but you're not going to retain any information. I guess it depends on what kinds of videos are being watched.
Unlike speed reading, it's not easy to adjust your consumption rate on the fly. I find it very annoying having to rewind the video when watching at faster speeds if I miss something and want to rewatch it. If I feel I need to speed through the video I actually just use the right arrow key to skip a few seconds and read the subtitled text than increase the video speed. I think it really depends on the video. I usually read for knowledge and watch for entertainment, so I don't really increase the video speed because I'm trying to enjoy my time watching the video, not optimize for speed. I read fiction slower, too.
YouTube doesn't have a speed option faster than 2x, so you'd have to go a bit out of your way to get the videos to play faster.
No it's not.
Then why do you respond with "Nigeria certainly has much lower threshold for getting a university degree"? I don't see what education in Nigeria has to do with the education of Nigerian Americans in the US.
Did I say something which made think you so?
Yes, because when presented with 3 possible explanations for how children from Ivory Coast are now graduating elementary school with data from 2012 in conjunction with Gottfredson's description of those with 75 IQ you chose "probably much simpler" as the most likely option. Meanwhile, your opinion on IQ for people in Ivory Coast is likely based on Flynn's paper which I point out has some issues to take into consideration.
The reason the 70 IQ person from USA is going to fail at work is because they are actually incapable of mastering elementary school-level concepts, and most jobs in the US today require some level of intelligence. If you acknowledge that a baby from the Ivory Coast growing up in the US would be able to pass elementary school, it goes to reason that how you should interpret that 70 IQ average value from the Ivory Coast is not equivalent to 70 IQ person in the US. Maybe it makes sense in your world where you deny the effect education has on IQ, but I have reasons to believe education does have an impact on IQ, and your casual dismissal of "you're not sure" or you think it is a "sociologist's fallacy" does little to convince me otherwise.
This seems to be where our disagreement largely stems from and if we can't agree on this then our conclusions will just have to be different.
I did. Nigeria certainly has much lower threshold for getting a university degree.
This is such an odd point to argue. Consider 2nd generation Nigerian-Americans: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23780231211001971
For example, among second-generation Asian men, 3.6 percent dropped out of high school and 7.3 percent obtained PhD or professional degrees, whereas the corresponding figures for second-generation Nigerian American men are 0.4 percent and 14.1 percent, respectively. The specific group with the highest level of educational attainment is arguably second-generation Nigerian American women; Table 3 indicates that 71.1 percent of them have bachelor’s or higher degrees in comparison with 68.2 percent for second-generation Nigerian American men.9
Is it so hard to believe a self-selected group that is allowed to immigrate to the United States could just so happen to be more educated than the average US population? They're not going to Nigeria to get their education. They're getting their education in American Universities just like any other 2nd generation American migrant group.
So would IQ decrease from FAS or cerebral palsy (phenotypic) have mostly no effect on whether the individual could function well in modern society?
This is the exception. Not everyone in Ivory Coast or other sub-saharan African country has FAS or cerebral palsy or other non-nutrition defective diseases driving the IQ down.
lower IQ than population average is often associated with personality deficits and mental disease, which average member of low IQ population does not have.
This personality IQ correlation is done in the US and thus it cannot be appropriately extrapolated to Africa. Unless you know any specific studies/research to suggest otherwise, I don't know any.
On the Flynn Effect:
The variability of the Flynn effect suggests that either the population IQ change is not a simple phenomenon that can be explained by a single factor, or, if it is the result of a single factor, the influence of this factor is different in different subgroups of the population or in different domains of ability. Researchers have studied some factors (for example, is it a real IQ gain due to social, population, or genetic factors, or is it simply a psychometric artifact?) that may have played a role inside the “black box” behind the Flynn effect. As significant genetic modifications of a population only occur over very extended periods, the IQ gain observed during a 50-year period cannot be explained by modification of the genetic characteristics of Western populations.
The Flynn effect seems rather to be a consequence of several interrelated factors. Educational progress during the twentieth century seems to be a strong factor underlying the Flynn effect. Several studies have shown the impact of schooling on intelligence (Ceci & Williams, 1997).
Barber (2005) analyzed the relationship between schooling and IQ using data collected in 81 countries. He observed that the intellectual differences between countries were mainly related to literacy rate, attendance at secondary school, and agricultural population percentage.
Thus, not only may the improvement in education have caused an increase in the population's intelligence, but the changing pace of this improvement may also have caused variations in the magnitude of the Flynn effect in different countries and at different periods in a country's development.
Another important factor underlying the Flynn effect is the considerable improvement in bioenvironmental conditions of life since the end of World War II. Bioenvironmental conditions refer to the interactions between the environment and individual biophysical characteristics.
As trees do not grow to the sky, human intelligence has likely some developmental limits that will be reached sooner or later. Regarding height potential, a ceiling seems to have been reached in some countries where positive bioenvironmental conditions appeared earlier – in Norway and Sweden, for example, the height of conscripts is no longer increasing (Schmidt et al., 1995). At the same time, in countries where positive bioenvironmental conditions appeared later (for example, Southern European countries), height is continuing to increase. A similar phenomenon is now being observed for intelligence. In Norway and Denmark the Flynn effect has not been observed since the 1990s, and intelligence seems to have reached a plateau.
So, there is a wide range of literature to support the idea the increase in IQ is not because Western nations somehow genetically got more intelligent, but instead that improvements in education, nutrition, and health resulted in the increase of IQ. Once these educational and health-related factors allow populations to reach their maximum potential, we see that IQ is no longer rising (Norway and Denmark for example). Most African nations have not yet caught up in terms of education, nutrition, and health.
Okay, now let's look at what Flynn used for his IQ estimates of Sub-Saharan Africa. Look at the dates of when the IQ studies he uses in his meta-analysis. 1998, 1988, 1965, 1960, 1993, 1995, 1981, 1937, 1964, 1975, 1965, 1954, 2004, 1950, 2007, 1961, 1994, 1976... you get my point. Most of these studies are looking at IQ over a period when African countries has yet to see the benefit of improvements in education, nutrition, and health to the degree that Western and Asian countries have.
Flynn rejects several studies of IQ in trying to estimate the IQ of African countries for various reasons. One study he rejected because it was tested on high school-educated Africans, because the average African did not study in high school at the time the study was conducted. If your goal is to find the median IQ of the country that's fine but then you have to be very nuanced about how you interpret that IQ, because you're comparing a country where the average citizen graduated from high school to one where the average citizen doesn't even have the opportunity to go to high school. When it comes to IQ people assume that IQ is static and doesn't change and then racists use IQ to justify their stances. I'm not so naive as to argue that IQ would be equivalent if all races got equal amounts of education and nutrition and are raised in an equivalent culture, but I am arguing that IQ gap would be not as large.
I don't know how you can reject the notion that education has an impact on IQ. I'm just going to quote Scott here
We know deep biological things matter because it's genetic and correlated with brain size, we know motivation matters because stimulants can raise IQ probably by making people try harder on the test, we know abstract thinking ability matters because of Flynn effect and because people from populations where they've never been exposed to this kind of thing do much worse on tests than is plausible from biological differences alone, and test-taking skills are just a good bet.
Most likely the larger effect sizes are going from almost no education (thus almost no familiarity with abstract thinking) to some education (and some familiarity), and the smaller effect sizes are going from 10 years to 11 years of education or whatever. I wouldn't expect extra education to be very valuable to people already very familiar with abstract thinking, though I'm not sure where to draw those lines.
Any argument or data point I bring up that might suggest the IQ of Africans could be higher you seem to challenge. What's your angle here? What's your belief? I'm honestly confused about what your intention is. What are you looking to get out of this conversation? Do you believe if we take the average baby from the Ivory Coast and raise them in the US they're going to fail elementary school?
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
I think in a just world conservatives and leftists would live in their own vision of society absent of the benefits of the other's vision of society and suffer the consequences of their own beliefs.
As it stands you one can just blame all bad things on the other side and believe all good things to be from their side.
https://x.com/travishelwig/status/1817954718989390317
Considering the guy who helped produced it previously worked for Crooked Media, a liberal/progressive American political media company, as well as Adam Ruins Everything, I'd wager it's an actual ad from a group that's on the left.
https://x.com/wontpacdown/status/1817953646409286059
They're asking for donations to actually get this on air, some possible explanations:
I'm curious what actual normies and independents/undecided voters would think if they watched that ad. Or even your everyday democrat that isn't chronically online.
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