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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26172 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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I assume many of these could be tested. (e.g. see here).

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).

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).

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.

and the IQ gap has been dropping for decades

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/

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.

The IQ gap has been dropping for decades

He links in there to an article saying that the Flynn effect has not been racially heterogeneous. Is he wrong?

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