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One thing that stuck out to me was how much he emphasised the environmental component of IQ. Maybe he genuinely believes this to be the biggest cause of group differences (and to be fair, someone with his education is more qualified than I am to comment on that), maybe it's wishful thinking or maybe it's a hedge against accusations of racism; after all, he's can claim he's not saying that some groups of people are inherently less intelligent than others.
I mean, to be fair, figuring out which direction causation runs for shithole countries having low IQ is actually a relevant question.
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I agree. Scott seems to be doing his best to mollify the anti-HBD crowd, by claiming that a partially genetic and partially environmental explanation for IQ is actually the anti-racist position. It gives them a graceful out, with the option of acknowledging the evidence without entirely overruling their worldview in one fell swoop.
Which is definitely misleading, because what's commonly accepted as the anti-racist stance is that IQ is 100% environmental, and that the IQ figures for much of the world are bogus. If they accept the substantial amount of evidence for lower IQs of African Americans, that's entirely environmental and thus proof of concerted and active racism. If a trillion dollars are spent to eliminate all inter-group differences and fails, then you've both not spent enough money and there's subtle structural racism that eats up the gains.
I'm pretty sure that most anti-racists would outright deny that if environments were equalized, there would be any significant difference between races.
Edit:
Seems to me that Scott would balk at saying it out loud, but also simultaneously not deny that he believes it. In a "that's not what I said" versus "I don't believe that" sense.
I don't think you'd even get to that point - most of these people would deny the validity of IQ tests as a means of measuring intelligence in the first place.
As was seriously advocated by class I took in college.
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The biggest woke idealists even deny the existence of differences in intelligence on the individual level. They think that anyone can be taught anything. Lysenkoism. They might say things like "imagine believing in IQ, lmao" or "IQ tests only measure someone's skill at taking an IQ test", or "intelligence isn't among the important human qualities", and perpetuate myths about social ineptitude among the supposed smartest, and so on...
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I'm guessing it's a combination of the 1st 2, since Scott seems likely to believe that 3 wouldn't work; the people who tend to accuse him of racism would do so regardless of whatever hedging he might choose to do except on the margins, and those margins probably aren't that big. Like most people who dive into this topic, at least from my perception, he probably hopes that the environmental factors, which can be more easily controlled than genetic ones, are very important. Thus he ends up genuinely believing it.
It could also be a combination of 2 and 3 - also like most people who dive into this topic, he probably wishes that the types of people who would accuse him of racism for exploring this topic in good faith would be willing to modulate such accusations based on hedging. And so through wishful thinking, he genuinely believes that such hedging would help him.
Can they? Inequities have continued to exist despite countless social engineering efforts. If we just need to modify the environment more, that's pretty dispiriting: it's not easy and has failed.
On the other hand, if the cause is genetic, I can more easily imagine a fully egalitarian, rich world a century from now, with some new, effective gene therapy that we can put our efforts into making universally accessible.
The rather spotty - at best - track record of social engineering efforts is a good point. However, despite my generally tech-optimistic stance, I think population-engineering efforts through gene therapy has an even worse track record, i.e. none. That doesn't mean that it's worse or less likely to work, but I do think, until we actually see real-world examples that gene therapy - and specifically population-wide gene therapy of this sort - can be implemented, we are correct in believing that environmental factors are easier to manipulate than genetic ones.
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Boosting Africa and India into having IQ’s in the mid eighties is enough for them to be functional lower-middle income countries. You don’t need a ginormous environmental effect.
India is a lower-middle income country?
https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519-world-bank-country-and-lending-groups
We might disagree on the criteria for being a "functional" one, but it matches my own standards in a way most of Africa doesn't.
Is it high-functioning? Hell no, but it's also not Sub-Saharan Africa, and better than Nigeria and the like (I happened to have a nice chat with a Nigerian doctor who joined my workplace)
I expect that in a decade or two, if AI didn't steal livelihoods, we'd reach Thai or Eastern European standards. Think of how the average middle-class American looks at how impoverished the middle-class Brit is (and the latter really isn't starving to death or has a absolute dearth of consumer goods) and perhaps that's how they'd look at the middle-class Indian.
There is an enormous chasm between Thai and Eastern Europe. The latter are catching up with the west very fast, the lag is only 10 years. In Poland, for example, the purchasing power today is similar to that of Brits in 2018. The purchasing power of Thais is more like Britain in the 90s.
Poland was always a more Western European country than Eastern European. The East Slavs have always been different and they are in much worse shape.
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