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Notes -
Not sure about that. I am capable of understanding that different racial groups have different means for IQ, but that the distributions overlap, such that there are always some high-IQ members of low-average-IQ groups who outsmart low-IQ members of high-average-IQ groups. I am capable of understanding on a vague verbal level what a standard deviation is, or principal component analysis does, in allowing intelligence researchers to conclude that there is a general cognitive ability that undergirds people's abilities on specific intellectual tasks, even if their specific mathematical, wordcel and shape rotating abilities diverge a little (or indeed in allowing population genetics researchers to plot members of different ethnic groups on graphs of two or more genetic clines). On the other hand I do not have the maths ability to calculate exactly how many people from group A will score at the 99th percentile of group A given a mean of X and a standard deviation of Y, and a population size of Z. Nor can I actually carry out a principal component analysis.
I think in this analogy I am the ten year old who understands that if you add 2 and 2, what you'll get will be a number, and that that number will be bigger than two, even if they can't calculate it as 4, which is still better than a ten year old who has no concept of what numbers are, or what addition does.
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