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Notes -
In fact, I’ll go further and say that this is an isolated demand for lack of rigor.
In a forum of people who read rationalists, in a subculture directly descended from blogs with names like “Less Wrong” and people who write long winded posts on logical fallacies,
That we should totally disregard an obvious day 1 of class example of a logical fallacy. Because hey, it’s against a group we tend not to like around here.
Isolated demand to let the fallacy against Haitans slide! We all know they’re bad anyway, it doesn’t really matter if we can prove it or not.
If I were to use the same tactic (one news article about a killer?) to show that conservatives are categorically dangerous, I’d get laughed out of the forum and for good reason. That’d just be ridiculous on the face of it.
Maybe one or two very patient mottizens would explain to me some of the very basics of how logical fallacies work. A few Scott Alexander posts and I’d be on my way having been educated.
Hooray for rigor! But, eh … here it’s about immigrants, and that’s kind of our thing around here. Why bring rigor to something we already know is bad? That’d be a total buzzkill.
Haiti scores 338 on the World Bank’s measure of Harmonised Test Scores, which is more than 1.8 standard deviations below the UK – the equivalent of 27 IQ points. So if Britain has an IQ of 100, Haiti has an IQ of 73.1, although other measures peg it at 67. I think that should be sufficient data then?
Ah, cool, that’s right about the estimated size of the Flynn effect
Roughly 30 IQ points
Flynn effect isn’t on G, and even with Flynn effect, racial group gaps and rank ordering do not change
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