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I’m an HBD skeptic, but I will steelman to the extent that studying these sorts of things is very difficult even if there weren’t people interested in pushing the data to support their ideas. The data frankly isn’t there, and we’re using proxy data on almost every front. Nations are not always homogeneous and therefore using e.g. Sweden’s results as White peoples’s results is always going to be a bit much. Add in the confounding factors (quality of the school system, students’s health, wealth, and culture) and you have a mess even before you turn to finding a proxy (often just as difficult to measure) for IQ. Then you come to whether or not a country is reporting data honestly, whether EA can mean different things in different countries, and so on.
I don’t mind if someone tries to correct obviously bad data as long as it’s done in a way that doesn’t bias the results and that’s fairly honest. Norming EA to the standard of international math and reading tests is perfectly reasonable. Knocking off three years of attainment because it’s a majority black country isn’t.
what do you mean by this, you're writing just to inflate word count? IQ tests require from 30 minutes to hour or more, and many people do not want to waste time on it. Ticking boxes in questionaire about degree they have is less than minute, and more people cooperate.
this is a non-issue since EA here only used for getting polygenic index in reference population which is either one country or some quite similar countries. Then, polygenic index is used to predict which EA other population would had if they lived in reference country.
you're imagining what your outgroup done bad?
Educational attainment is a poor proxy because unless you have a standard curriculum across the entire cohort of the study, the end point can vary widely even if the students are reported to have completed the same grade level. Even within countries, school districts and even individual schools can vary enough that it’s not a good proxy. In my area, private Catholic schools are much more rigorous than public suburban schools, which are more rigorous than public urban schools. Taking the scores of even local students and comparing them with the polygenetic index is a bit difficult when a 12th grader at St. Simon Catholic School is expected to take calculus, while his peer in an urban school is expected to maybe master basic algebra in 12th grade. It might well be that if the urban students were put in the Catholic school, they’d be knocked back by several years based on the material covered.
I’ll agree that it’s easier to get compliance on a tick box than an IQ test, but the results are as I said above often not directly comparable between regions and certainly not between countries with different systems.
The example I gave was mostly an example of what bad faith would look like. I don’t think you’re doing it, but if someone were trying to fudge the numbers in a given direction. If you’re basing your estimated correction on curricula not being the same, or standardized test results between countries, that makes sense. But you’d have to do it on the basis of the content the students know or were taught. It can’t be based on making an assumption based on location, language or race if you want results between locations, languages, and races to mean anything.
I'm afraid you haven't read what Piffer & Kirkegaard done. p.s. edited: grammar
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