Linky Friday #138: Pan-Nordica

Brandon Berg in reply to veronica d says:

People who openly suggest that minorities are less intelligent than whites will have to be limited in their employment prospects. Sorry. But fuck off you racist shits. You cannot expect minorities to work happily among those who believe them intellectually inferior.

This is a perfect example of why this sort of thing is problematic. It’s fairly clear from this paragraph that you don’t understand this issue, but you’re so sure of yourself that you’re chomping at the bit to ruin people’s lives over this.

First, there’s a large, robust, and well-documented gap in scores on any sort of highly g-loaded test. This includes tests like the Ravens Progressive Matrices, a test of pure visual pattern recognition ability, which disproves the myth that the test gap is due to questions about yacht racing.

So, yes, all available evidence points to black people, on average, being less intelligent than white people. There’s not a lot of legitimate controversy about this, though why this gap exists remains an open question.

Here’s the thing: You can accept this and not be a racist. If your reasons for not being a racist depend on denying well-documented facts, you’re pretty bad at not being a racist.

The first thing you have to understand is that the black and white IQ distributions, while not identical, have a large area of overlap. As an analogy, there’s a well-documented difference in average height between men and women. But if you randomly paired off men and women, the taller person in many of those pairs would be a woman. Likewise, if the black and white IQ distributions differ by a standard deviation, there are 7 million black people in the US who have IQs higher than the average white person, and about 40 million white people who have IQs lower than the average black person.

Second, in any situation where the extent of another person’s cognitive ability is something you need to know, you will almost certainly have much better ways to gauge it than relying on race. For example, at a job interview, you can assess the candidate’s skills directly, but all race tells you is that there’s a 95% chance that the candidate’s IQ is within a certain 60-point range.

It’s actually kind of funny how racists and SJWs commit exactly the same fallacy when looking at the racial IQ gap. Racists see it as an excuse to be racist and embrace it, SJWs dogmatically deny it for the same reason. That’s the way the horseshoe curves, I guess.

Third, many (most?) of us spend large portions of our lives in groups segregated by cognitive class. When you go to college, most of your classmates will be fairly close to you in terms of cognitive ability. Those who are much smarter probably went to better schools, and those who are much less intelligent probably couldn’t get in. Likewise at many jobs. As little as the test score gap tells you about a random person on the street, it tells you even less about your classmates and coworkers.

Really, knowledge of the racial IQ gap is pretty useless when it comes to evaluating individuals. All it’s really good for is as a tool for explaining aggregate group outcomes, e.g., it provides evidence against the proposition that the underrepresentation of blacks in cognitively demanding jobs is due to (strangely selective, given the huge overrepresentation of other minorities in many of these jobs) racial discrimination by employers, and suggests instead that it occurs somewhere earlier in the pipeline.

And, of course, one can always try not being bigoted against people with lower IQs. A while back, a regular commenter here referred to The Bell Curve as a book about how black people are subhuman. Putting aside that it wasn’t really a book about race at all, the jump from “mean IQ of 85” to “subhuman” is one that commenter made all on his own, and one which reveals much more about him than about Charles Murray.Report