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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28112 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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It was summer of 2021 during CW discussion of the NFL's "race norming" scandal and a number prominent HBDers (including a few who are still active today) defended the practice of artificially lowering the scores of high performing black individuals as necessary to "improve accuracy

This is incorrect. There was a billion dollar lawsuit, and in a settlement the NFL had to pay based on estimates of the loss in cognitive function caused by concussions. The 'race-norming' was assuming that black people (with concussions) started from lower IQs than white people, to reduce the NFL's payouts. Which is reasonable, because large-scale IQ testing of black people does find they have lower IQs. They are not claiming that the black person is 'too smart', and his IQ should be adjusted down. They're claiming that he has the average IQ of a black person, not a white person, and thus his score of (past IQ - current IQ), i.e. his IQ loss, should be adjusted down. Again, you persistently mischaracterize the statements of your opponents, instead of engaging with their arguments.

My go-to example is that someone can have all the genetic potential in the world and still end up a flabby bastard if they don't eat well or work-out

Can you make a direct analogy for the cases of education and income here, so we can address it directly?

Or in the case of the linked thread, all the genetic potential in the world isn't going to make a kid read well if nobody teaches them to read

It's very relevant that we have phones, school-provided tablets, libraries, and closed-caption tv shows. These massively equalize the 'environment' people experience relative to the past!

The replies I get (assuming anyone engages at all) are typically something along the lines of "Maybe, but if we control for all those other factors, genetics will be the only one left". And that's often where the conversation, breaks down because they haven't actually adressed my claim about effect sizes, they're just explaining what the term "Controlling for" means.

What's an intervention that you think would have a comparable effect size to genetics?

This is incorrect. There was a billion dollar lawsuit,

To be clear, I'm not talking about the lawsuit, I'm talking about the culture war thread discussion about the lawsuit.

...and there is no need to "assume" anything because the NFL has a Wonderlic Score for every player who's entered the league since 1968.

As I argued at the time, adjusting Tomlinson's Wonderlic score down because he's Black is about as central an example of old-school "racism" as it's possible to come by these days.

Hm. I highly doubt the exchange occurred as you describe, because the IQ tests were taken post-concussion and were very low and already had basically nothing to do with baseline black IQ. But if I'm wrong then I'm wrong.

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