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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5896 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

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The most obvious refutation of that refutation would be that those populations are highly selected for intelligence. I am sure if someone like me who knows next to nothing about the topic can thing of this caveat, Chanda can think of it too. Does he address it?

I thought the same thing. Half-way through the series, I recall Chisala citing a black refugee population that settled in California (rather than skllled educated immigrants) where their children achieved average results in school. My assumption is that this example was cherry picked from many hundreds of refugee communities that did poorly, but there it is.

Where in California? East LA or the Central Valley, or someplace where average results aren’t ‘shows up about half the time and can spell own name, with assistance’?

Sorry, it was Seattle rather than California. He was writing about refugees from the Horn of Africa (ethiopians, somalians, oromo), whose children performed above the domestic black average test scores depite not speaking English at home. The results weren't collected for intelligence research but as part of the city government's report on refugee education. Here is the exact part

So, how does one of the lowest IQ scoring groups in Africa, emigrating with the lowest evidence of any selection whatsoever (economically or academically), have their children score above black Americans in one of the highest scoring states for native black Americans, (some) even outscoring Hispanics who are assimilated, before they are even assimilated themselves? How do even the Somalian refugees brought in from a total failed state catastrophe outscore black Americans as soon as they just learn to read some English?

It can certainly not be explained by any of the recent HBD answers, individually or in combination

Thank you! I am very happy to finally see someone earnestly attempting to refute HBD arguments. For completeness' sake, here is an archive of the blog post, the source article and the presentation Chisala got his numbers from.

I remain unconvinced. There is no indication that the Somali sample is in any way representative of the source population. Here is Chisala's argument:

Their performance above American blacks (labeled as “English-speaking” blacks) defies the common sociologist explanation that higher achieving black immigrants are simply the most driven members of their source populations (some were just in refugee camps), and it equally defies the modern hereditarian argument that they are just the most self-selected in intelligence relative to their source populations, unless we now start extending this cognitive self-selectivity and “assortative mating” quality to people who run to United Nations refugee camps for protection. (It is not necessarily all who were from these camps, but that doesn’t matter since even those who were from there are performing above native black Americans).

Chisala seems to assume that most of the Somali sample comes from refugee camps. But the source article only mentions that "[The Somali children's] families came to the U.S. to escape their war-torn country, many by way of refugee camps.". Chisala puts this aside by saying that "It is not necessarily all who were from these camps, but that doesn’t matter since even those who were from there are performing above native black Americans". But I didn't get that from a cursory glance of the data, which only seems to report aggregate data. Even so, there are a whole host of different selection effects with those coming from refugee camps. As one commenter puts it:

In a country like Somalia, getting into a refugee camp may be more desirable than not being in one. And from there to be selected for relocation to America may also be more desirable than not.

As with most desirable things in life, those with a higher IQ or socioeconomic status may be better at working the system to their benefit to get them.

Chisala did, as far as I can see, not respond to this concern.

I have not yet looked at the UK data Chisala mentions.

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