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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   25590 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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Or to put it another way, if we take a baby born to the average person in the Ivory Coast and raise them in a Western nation with Western nutrition and education, would they on average have 70 IQ?

How is it relevant in the context?

To go back to my original point, a 100 iq racist arguing that an 85 iq population are 'animals' can construct a stronger argument than a 115 iq racist arguing that a 100 iq population are animals Both would be incorrect for reasons you already stated previously, but if they were trying to refine the definition of animal you get better arguments the lower the IQ goes.

agree! (and one of ways to present it might be to assign IQ values to animals.

Unless something like eugenics or gene editing becomes a reality I doubt the average level of intelligence will rise more than 5-10 IQ points for the developed nations.

How is it relevant in the context? The hypothetical is other society that is +2SD shifted to us.

and I'd like to point out Moore's law is no longer being met

I'm dreaming of seeing programmers having to actually optimize software! But I talked about older smartphones with 128 megabytes of RAM being nearly useless now. This is irrelevant if pace development stalls in near future.

Just as programmers constantly add more layers of indirection and shitty memory usage, the higher IQ society will invent more paperwork and qualifications even for simpler jobs.

How is it relevant in the context?

Read my next paragraph and read it in context of it being a response to 2rafa's post. I argue 70 IQ in Ivory coast != 70 IQ in the US so whether or not 2rafa can employ people they met in the Ivory coast (and there are so many things to address here are such as are the people they met actually 70 IQ) was in my opinion not a good response to the economic value of a 70 IQ person.

How is it relevant in the context? The hypothetical is other society that is +2SD shifted to us.

I prefaced the comment by saying these are just my thoughts. I don't even think a society of 130 IQ can exist naturally. We already know what a society of 70 IQ and 100 IQ looks like. Sure is fun to think about though!

the higher IQ society will invent more paperwork and qualifications even for simpler jobs.

I'm not so sure, maybe 130 IQ society will do that, or maybe they can progress past the notion that everyone has to work because if such a society can create robots to make most jobs absolute then we would probably be at the point where AI and robots could do almost anything better than a human can. So even the 130 IQ person could be made obsolete in their own society. My point is that you cannot extrapolate past patterns to the future without adequate reasoning. For example, if you look at a child's growth, one could incorrectly assume human beings continue to grow taller and taller until they die. When we were talking about success in society, it usually refers to the ability to have a job, although there are other factors. My point is that a 130 IQ society may make the concept of jobs in relationship to humans obsolete, and just because we have previously seen the growth of new industries replace old ones does not mean the pattern will continue.

We have seen humanity move from agriculture > industry > services > IT/Data to put it simply. The type of skills needed transform from manual labor to mental labor and human relationships. If robots and AI make those obsolete, what next? You seem to think more mental labor, but I think if AI makes mental labor obsolete it can just as easily replace new mental labor that is required. Jobs exist to solve problems, in the era where robots and AI replace most existing jobs, will there be enough problems to require most of the human population to tackle? High IQ people tend to not have kids anyways, so I don't think overpopulation will be an issue.

Read my next paragraph and read it in context of it being a response to 2rafa's post.

I did

I argue 70 IQ in Ivory coast != 70 IQ in the US

is your point that only genotypic IQ affects employability, but not phenotypic? or that non-IQ factors matter too, when your statement that 70 IQs not employable needs updating

High IQ people tend to not have kids anyways

this highly depends on society. Because genotypic IQ grew over time, this doesn't have to be

The 70 IQ person in the US is more likely to be at the peak of their genetic potential due to the availability of resources. I think if you take the supposed average 70 IQ person from the Ivory Coast and give them a Western country-level education, their IQ could still rise 10-15 points. There is some evidence to support that for every additional year of education, IQ rises 1-5 points. Maybe not because children benefit much more from education than adults.

Also, I'm not sure if IQ measurements of the Sub-Saharan African countries do follow a true bell curve since IQ level is adjusted for a mostly Western country. I think the IQ distribution would likely skew right in these countries. We may see a drop-off point above 100 IQ because smart Africans typically migrate to better countries to make a better living. Fun fact, did you know Nigerian-Americans are one of the most educated groups of people in the United States?

IQ plays a more significant role in the lower bracket in terms of job success and ability than at the higher levels. Since the studies are based in the US I think it would be fair to assume most people reached their genetic potential. So IQ matters significantly sub 85, but around 100 and higher it no longer becomes as strong of a predictive tool of job success.

In terms of phenotypic vs genotypic IQ we don't know for sure but based on Gottfredson's description of IQ ability I'd say it applies mostly to genotypic IQ. According to Gottfredson

75 signals the ability level below which individuals are not likely to master the elementary school curriculum or function independently in adulthood in modern societies.

It seems extremely unlikely you take an Ivory Coast child and give them US-level nutrition and education that a majority of them would be unable to pass an elementary school education. Wikipedia indicates that while the Ivory Coast is behind educational availability for its population, the literacy rate rose from 48.7% in 2000 to 89.9% as of 2019. And by 2012 94.2% of children attended secondary school. To me, it doesn't make sense 70 IQ people are able to graduate primary school if Gottfredson indicates people below 75 IQ cannot master elementary school education unless that IQ description only applies to the US population where the study was done, or the IQ measurement in Ivory coast is inaccurate or outdated, or primary school education in the Ivory Coast is incredibly simple relative to that of the US.

this highly depends on society.

Good point, I didn't really consider the cultural aspect properly.

I think if you take the supposed average 70 IQ person from the Ivory Coast and give them a Western country-level education, their IQ could still rise 10-15 points.

I was going to write just same 10-15 points, but then didn't because didn't see the point in the context. Also, this increase would require better medicine and food etc, not only better education. I didn't read the link beyond abstract, I think they're making typical sociologist's fallacy.

Fun fact, did you know Nigerian-Americans are one of the most educated groups of people in the United States?

I did. Nigeria certainly has much lower threshold for getting a university degree.

In terms of phenotypic vs genotypic IQ we don't know for sure but based on Gottfredson's description of IQ ability I'd say it applies mostly to genotypic IQ.

So would IQ decrease from FAS or cerebral palsy (phenotypic) have mostly no effect on whether individual could function well in modern society?

While I more agree with your argument than not, your argument is lacking something important.

Some points to consider: lower IQ than population average is often associated with personality deficits and mental disease, which average member of low IQ population does not have. There might a component to IQ results ("familiarity with IQ testing culture") which has very little effect on mundane tasks.

or primary school education in the Ivory Coast is incredibly simple relative to that of the US.

probably much simplier

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?

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?

No it's not.

They're getting their education in American Universities just like any other 2nd generation American migrant group.

They get education in USA universities, meaning they enjoy massive (de facto) SAT bonus in enrollment, mainly intended for AADOS. While education is a proxy for IQ, it is a poor proxy in case when comparing between universities/degrees having different standards or affirmative action.

Any argument or data point I bring up that might suggest the IQ of Africans could be higher you seem to challenge.

I agree that African countries IQ might went up by 10-15 points if they get higher standards of living.

I don't know how you can reject the notion that education has an impact on IQ

I am not sure whether education increases IQ scores or hidden things that we want to measure when we do IQ tests.

What's your angle here?

I'm just discussing what sprung from claim '70 iq not employable'. And what's your angle?

Do you genuinely believe if we take the average baby from the Ivory Coast and raise them in the US they're going to fail elementary school?

Did I say something which made think you so? If most US Blacks finish elementary school, why wouldn't I think average Ivorian immigrant wouldn't?

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 don't see what education in Nigeria has to do with the education of Nigerian Americans in the US.

Maybe I am wrong. I heard claim "Nigerian Americans are very educated" claim many times, and I always thought that it referred to 1st gen Nigerian Americans and majority of those got their higher education in Nigeria (I think that about 50% Nigerians obtaining higher education in Nigeria emigrate)

I think I have to repeat myself "While education is a proxy for IQ, it is a poor proxy in case when comparing between universities/degrees having different standards or affirmative action."

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.

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).

that 70 IQ average value from the Ivory Coast is not equivalent to 70 IQ person in the US

If so (I am not saying it isn't), then you should drop "70 iq people are unemployable" alltogether.

but I have reasons to believe education does have an impact on IQ

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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