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On the whole, point taken. I read that "variance explained" can be misleading, in a way that underestimates the importance. Now, I don't actually know whether that applies here, as I don't know enough statistics, but from my epistemic status, it's entirely possible that it does.
While this may be true, (I don't know myself, but I assume you have some idea what you're talking about), people also often say this of modern tests where such a bias would be significantly less plausible.
I assume many of these could be tested. (e.g. see here). I would think a broader answer to some of these questions would be to look beyond America. National IQs do some of that, but not entirely (as subsaharan Africa is not exactly known for being the most functional).
I don't think this is true. There are a great many people who think there is no IQ difference between racial groups. But after explaining, you are right that it would be flawed when applied to your views.
I think the assumption there might be questionable. Racial pressures have clearly had fairly substantial effects on our society, including putting people where they are not qualified to be, even in relatively essential positions. At the same time, this makes it harder to hire for merit in general, as there's some level of explicit racial preferences that's legally dangerous to have, requiring it be laundered through lower standards and more subjective evaluations.
To be fair though, you do only say that it should be that there is no "innate genetic difference," which means you could recognize group differences in merit in practice, and think that the de facto racial quotas are bad.
But more broadly, if differences in groups are due to societally-caused unfairness, vs. that that's just the way things are, that might affect what we want to do with society, so it does have practical implications that we should care about. (Of course, a mix of causes is entirely possible.)
Going back to the "ideological turing test" point, I do think your views are more nuanced than many others who would take a no innate IQ gap stance, so I don't think that he failed as badly as you seemed to be saying. (You didn't contest otherwise in the last post, but just to reiterate.)
I would hope that anyone on this board has more nuanced views than 'many others' on their side.
Not just because we're supposed to be smart and thoughtful, but because 'many others' is such an inane standard in the modern world. It could refer to a collection of a few dozen tweets from anonymous posters, it could refer to some clickbait article writer being provocative for pageviews, it could refer to some idiot politician with no knowledge of the subject repeating slogans for votes, etc.
I think if we accept those weakman versions of our opponent's arguments as the correct thing to engage with and argue against, or especially as in this case if we assign those weakman views to the entire other 'side', we're both committing an intellectual sin, and making any possibility of discussion and learning impossible and pointless.
Also, more to the point: OP wasn't just saying 'some people in the world exist who believe this', they were using that as a framing to make an empirical argument that their beliefs were correct and the other side's were wrong.
If you just want to sneer at the other side or describe why you hate them, pointing at their weakmen and how annoying/dangerous they are is fine.
If you want to argue that your beliefs are right and theirs are wrong, then you absolutely have to engage with the strongest possible arguments in favor of their beliefs, or else you've demonstrated nothing at all.
Point taken, on the whole.
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Linked article is hilarious in that it says blood lead levels haven't been higher for black people in the last ten years... so throughout the infancy and childhood of the black people currently taking IQ tests.
The fact that they take this as refuting the lead example is a pretty on-the-nose example of how competent/honest I expect the HBD side to be in citing statistics, no offense.
At any rate, yes, lead exposure in poor blacks has been falling for decades, and the IQ gap has been dropping for decades. We'll see what it looks like in another decade or two when the tested population mostly consists of people he's claiming have no differential in childhood lead exposure (though again, that's just one of many possible factors, chosen as a random example).
Yes, but note that it was international tests that had the biggest defects in teh original Murray citations. Note how we said that China was way ahead of us on education for decades, because they tested their smartest kids and we tested everyone. Note how doing these tests in Apartheid Africa or something would have given a big white/black IQ gap, but again with pretty obvious environmental confounds. Every country has a unique history of confounds and a unique testing environment, Africa has been a target of colonialism from all sides for a long time, anyone who's not a real expert in local matters is going to have a hard time interpreting results.
It hasn't. If it has, we would have seen all other gaps associated with it (e.g. wealth, criminality, school grades), shrink too. It's possible to cherry pick noisy IQ studies to make a pattern.
Meanwhile, the gap between white males and Asian women closed and reversed, now median Asian female earns more than median white man (first chart here) https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/monday-evening-links-all-chart-edition/
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You're right that 2010s don't mean much, when it's childhood levels that matter.
But that doesn't affect the bulk of what he argues, only the very first point.
He links in there to an article saying that the Flynn effect has not been racially heterogeneous. Is he wrong?
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I do not accede to this consensus.
This is the conclusion pushed by a decades-long rhetorical and propaganda push, the opposite side of an equal decades-long rhetorical and propaganda push proclaiming the strength of diversity and so forth. Neither of the simple stories told by either side is even nuanced and complex enough to be 'true' in an empirical sense.
Has a black woman ever been promoted into a job she's incompetent at? Sure.
Has a white man ever been promoted into a job he's incompetent at? Oh FUCK yes.
We can start that list with 'every person I've ever worked for, and most presidents' and expand it from there.
Like evolution, capitalism is powerful force towards progress in the aggregate, but incredibly dumb and random at the individual level. Meritocracy is a nice idea, but it doesn't actually explain how the economy works beyond a small macro-scale correlation. The rhetorical picture painted that every hiring decision is 100% meritocratic and optimal, such that applying any new pressure on the selection process is necessarily a step away from optimality, is a pipe dream.
Has a black woman ever gotten a diversity nod when they weren't the strongest candidate on paper? Sure.
Would they have actually hired the best candidate on paper, or would they have hired someone that goes to the same yacht club as the CEO, or is tall with a firm handshake? Networking and presentation are very real things in this arena.
And I do actually believe the 'if two runners have the same speed but one has bad form, recruit the one with bad form' argument, and the 'diversity in backgrounds leads to broader problem solving across the team' argument. I expect a properly-calibrated push for diversity to lead to stronger teams.
That may certainly be countered by improperly-calibrated pushes for diversity driving things down, but I'm not convinced the hiring process in general is well-calibrated enough for that to matter, and certainly no one ever offers statistical data showing a national downward trend (or w/e) when making this argument.
It does make it harder to have merit anywhere, though. At least in the US, due to the "disparate impact" standard, it's hard to use any sort of test to measure aptitude without getting sued, which hurts organizations hire qualified people in general. Like, tests being fine but with different standards for different races would be better than the current status, as at least you'd get the more competent people within each group, but that's illegal.
It's also pretty plainly clear to me that everyone wants more of the favored minorities in their organizations, and this obviously has a tradeoff.
Look no farther than what happened at universities before the SCOTUS case last year (and presumably still happens in many places under the radar), for extremely obvious cases of less qualified people academically being chosen. And SATs are pretty predictive of scholastic achievement.
On the other hand, I see no reason to think that people are promoting incompetent or less competent white people at above average rates? Rather the opposite, given the current incentives?
Your "bad form" and "diversity in background" takes are reasonable, but I at least would have some caution in practice for the latter. Diversity is for some reason nearly always taken to mean diversity along the various groups that the left cares about, and not, e.g. religious diversity, even though I would think that different ideological commitments would do more towards seeing things in complimentary lights than different ethnicities.
At the very least, we should stop legally mandating racial preferences in hiring, and let capitalism do its work of directing resources towards those who do a better job, without interference.
I'll end by pointing out that if you do genuninely think that there's currently a non-innate IQ gap, that probably should still affect who you want to employ—jobs that require more intelligence should end up hiring different racial groups at different rates.
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