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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32785 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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The median east African has a room temperature IQ.

The median east African is more intelligent than most posters here on TheMotte.org including myself.

I heartily disagree that the latter is true, with my argument being simply, just look at that cursed continent.

That being said, I once read something by a prolific HBD poster on Twitter or Substack who I can't recall, who made an argument about why black people, despite significantly lower IQs than average, still seem to function much better than that low value would suggest:

When most people benchmark mental retardation, they implicitly consider the case of retarded white people, the majority of who have some kind of developmental or neurological disorder that's dragging them down. They're not just stupid, they're non-functional in important regards.

Whereas an 70 IQ African is not sick, they're just dumb, but are much more capable of social interaction and productive endeavors than the former, though they can't hope to match 100 IQ people of any race.

I believe that person showed anecdotes from special needs tard wranglers who noticed how the black kids were better behaved and apparently smart than the white ones, because they simply were much better functioning overall despite their identically low IQ scores.

I contend that a healthy chimp can beat a bad case of Downs in almost everything, even if they're both terrible at IQ tests. One is an animal well honed to its niche, whereas the other is simply outright defective.

So, African society and culture evolved to be well adapted to lower IQs, and they're not as clearly dysfunctional as you'd expect.

Leaving that aside, in desperately poor countries, like most of Africa, people need to be able to hustle or starve, they don't have well trodden paths ahead of them that they can follow as long as they're competent and come out ahead. While hustling is certainly a laudable thing, I suspect that if the world went to shit and we had to start from scratch, the median Mottizen would spank their asses.

Indians speak 2 or 3 languages because that brings clear and massive utility to them, presumably the same case for Africans who need some more. On the other hand, most Americans can speak English from the cradle to the grave and do just fine, so it's by no means their failure that they don't bother to do so most of the time. In their place, I wouldn't either.

You don't judge Bill Gates by the standards of Stone Age persistence hunters and get all perplexed that he has wealth and high status despite his abysmal inability to run a marathon.

I heartily disagree that the latter is true, with my argument being simply, just look at that cursed continent.

I don't think this necessarily follows, unless you want to look at Europe after Rome left, and declare the Europeans must have naturally crazy low intelligence as well (or, I suppose you could argue that the difference can be made up in 1000 years).

Based on the my observation of the middle-ages, it seems pretty reasonable that the former territories to struggle amongst themselves in a series of constantly escalating conflicts until a distaste for war is (quite literally) beat into the local culture enough to outweigh the natural human drive to see your out-group killed (at least enough to stop fighting with people within a few hundred km). This seems to take several hundred years (it could possibly be faster with increased communication speed, but the power vacuum in Africa is only 60-80 years old, so I'm not willing to write off the theory yet).

It's only at that point that you can build infrastructure and complicated supply lines that complex societies are built on. Before that, I would only expect high-intelligence to result in more efficient killing.

Alternatively a single victor/foreign power can come in and dominate (your classic pax X-ana period). The point is more that stability seems to come from either subjugation or deep cultural changes that seem to be orthogonal to intelligence.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that you're entirely wrong, but I think looking at the state of an area for a single 50-100 year period is a horrible argument about the IQ of the humans that live there.

I catch a lot of flak from HBDers on this sub when I argue that IQ doesn't measure intelligence per-se so much as it measures something like "Academic Aptitude" and that to the degree that any correlation between IQ and life outcomes exists it is mostly due to modern secular society using academics as a means of sorting "winners" from "losers" and enforcing social stratification.

Yet here you are seemingly making what is effectively the same argument.

any correlation between IQ and life outcomes exists it is mostly due to modern secular society using academics as a means of sorting "winners" from "losers"

Do you think tests like reaction time, or reverse digit span fall into this category? Reaction time is correlated with IQ:

Correlations of simple RT means with AH4 scores were − 0.27, − 0.30 and − 0.32, for age 30, 50 and 69, respectively; and − 0.44, − 0.47 and − 0.53 for 4-choice RT.

0.53 is quite high as these things go.

Reverse Digit Span is 0.45 correlated with WISC-R IQs, according to Jensen.

I agree that tests like WORDSUM (whose correlation with IQ is 0.71) are very culturally loaded and surely are mediated by academics, but I can't see how reaction time, or the backward digit span are similarly affected.

g has a lot of correlation with IQ tests and a whole bunch of other measures, and to say that it's irrelevant is just not true. Intelligence is useful. There are other relevant factors in life success, of course.

There are other relevant factors in life success, of course.

What would you say are the genetic factors that are relevant? I can think of a bunch of social factors, like being wise enough to choose parents who are rich and live in a free society. The ones that come to my mind are being good-looking, being musical, and being tall. For women, being blonde is a huge win, as are the other obvious things, so long as you don't approximate the Willendorf Venus (and even then?).

There have been great efforts to find other factors that are independent of g, but it seems quite hard to isolate any. Even being good-looking is correlated with having less genetic mutations, and this also weakly correlates with g. In the US:

It shows that physical attractiveness is significantly correlated with general intelligence (r = .126),

Musicality correlates as well.

A remarkable direct correlation between IQ and musical scores in both the control (r≥0.38) and experimental (r≥0.37) groups was observed.

Alas, among non-Hispanic whites, even being blonde correlates with IQ. Brown haired men (104.4) and blonde women (103.2) are on the top of the heap, though blonde women have the smallest standard deviation (12.2) and black haired men (mean IQ 100.1) the largest (15.2).

The conclusions come from a survey of 10,878 white Americans asked about their natural hair colour (Hispanics and African Americans were excluded to eliminate bias). The results showed the average IQ of blonde-haired women was 103.2, 102.7 for brown hair, 101.2 for red hair and 100.5 for black hair.

The results showed the average IQ of blonde-haired women was 103.2, 102.7 for brown hair, 101.2 for red hair

Scottish and Irish people BTFO? In all likelihood dark hair probably has the highest standard deviation because it includes some white America’s highest and lowest populations, while blondes are more uniformly from Northern Europe.

Red heads are also more uniformly from Northern Europe.

Redheads are highly disproportionately from specific sub-regions of Northern Europe, though.

Some personality traits is one, I think. The big 5, for example, have some correlations with intelligence, but they don't correlate perfectly, and do impact life.

For most of your answers, yes they might correlate, but that's not the same as causation. (or, at least, there will be more than one factor involved in the causation, which complicates the picture beyond IQ being the only factor that matters)

Hlynka, to put it bluntly, your claims on that matter were conclusively debunked by multiple posters, yet your approach, instead of engaging, was to stick your fingers in your ears and not respond.

IQ is a good measure of g and also immensely predictive for almost all life outcomes we really care about.

I've seen several posters catch bans for expressing their frustration with your obtuseness, so I'll leave it here before it annoys the mods.

Hlynka, to put it bluntly, your claims on that matter were conclusively debunked by multiple posters

No they weren't. What happened is that same half dozen or so posters linked the same tired unreliable sources and then got mad and accused me of being "obtuse" when I questioned their sources and methodology rather than play the role of a straw-man who "gets destroyed by facts and logic"

tard wranglers

Leave off the rdrama/4chanisms, please.

Aww, can't a man enjoy himself sometimes? I'd like to think that almost all my posts are still net positive :(

But as you wish.

I'd like to think that almost all my posts are still net positive

They are, that's why this is more of a "tut tut" than a real warning.

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