Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK?

In this sense, God has screwed over each and every one of us- in three billion bases of DNA, there's bound to be alleles which we really don't like.

What I find amazing is that no article I read actually quotes Watson as saying Africans have lower IQs. What he said was that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really.”

His claim was ONLY that Africans' intelligence is different than "ours."

Is there much doubt as to his meaning? Perhaps not, but I should think on this blog we would not commit the sin of assuming too much.

   Poverty | War | Sweatshop | Schooling | Racial Attitude

Assumptions:

1. Intelligence describes some quality that individuals have.
2. Individuals have different aamounts of or ability in that quality.
3. Larger groups of can be created by grouping these same varying individuals and this group can be said to have a group average in terms of intelligence.

Some conclusions that follow from these assumptions:

1. Any group of people, divided by almost any arbitrary measurement into a large enough sample will differ in the average amount of intelligence each particular subgroup has.
2. Arbitrarily dividing the worlds population into "races" based on their skin pigmentation will create subgroups that also have a differing average intelligence.

Therefore, different racial groups have a different average intelligence. This logic doesn't depend on what exactly you define as intelligence, as long as something is defined as intelligence. This logic doesn't imply that any particular racial group must have more intelligence than any other particular racial group. It just implies that by definition, individuals are different from each other and thus groups of individuals will also tend to differ in their different characteristics.

Now for the fun part.

Does it matter that different races have varying "average" intelligences? Only if you are racist and judge people by what arbitrary "race" you've mentally classified them as. To me, if you insist on classifying people based on their physical appearance, it would make more sense to classify people by height, or eye color, or their weight. Those attributes tend to make more of a difference, genetically.

However, perhaps you find race an easy way to filter individuals into categories. In that case, based on the extensive evidence, in some geographic regions, people with darker skin have a lower average intelligence as judged by the best tests and definitions of intelligence available. What's interesting is that in some other geographic regions, people with darker skin have a higher average intelligence.

So used as a bayes filter, skin color isn't going to typically give you the ability to improve your judgement of intelligence unless you have other demographic information that has a much better correlation.

In actual fact, if you want to judge a person's intelligence based on some quick rules of thumb, there are much better demographic methods available to you than skin color. National origins, wealth levels, education obtained (for older individuals), etc...

On the other hand, if you really care that much about it, just ask them to take whichever intelligence test you prefer for you.

But to say that races differ in intelligence? That statement should be as non-controversial as a statement of fact as it is useless as a guide to actions and policy.

Sharper, if the divisions are truly arbitrary and on a basis uncorrelated with individual intelligence then the difference in population average will be (crudely speaking) on the order of 1/sqrt(N) where N is the size of each population. N is so large here that the sorts of interracial "differences" that are inevitable on the grounds you give are also clearly negligible, and no one who claims that races do, or don't, differ in intelligence is talking about such tiny differences.

Eliezer, leaving aside the bit about God, I think there's at least one way in which differences (in actual intelligence, or in others' estimates of your intelligence, or in other things that matter) can be worse when they're distributed according to race: network effects. Nations, societies, cultural groups, families, etc., tend to be somewhat homogeneous by race. So if you belong to a race that's systematically poor (to take an example that uncontroversially does occur) then you're doubly screwed: you have no money, and all the people around you who might have been able to help you also have no money, and all the social structures that might have been built up to help you aren't there because no one else around you has any money either.

As I tried to make clear a while ago, humans are very particular about the kinds of inequality that bother them. Race tied inequalities are among the ones they care most about.

IME most people only think individual IQ differences are ok because they believe other qualities compensate the difference. If they say that some person has a higher IQ, they usually (at least implicitly) question their social skills, financial success, physical prowess, etc.. Also they always talk about much smarter people, not about the 50% under the average, conveying the idea that difference is due to the genius' unusually high IQ not because most people are stupid in comparison. OTOH group comparisons usually imply that one group is smarter and the other is dumber, by comparing the average values for each group. While race is a sensitive issue, if we exchange race by gender, economical status, birthplace, weight, etc., the controversy is pretty much equivalent.

About the IQ vs. GDP "controversy" both Lynn and Vanhanen should be ashamed. They're not even decent scientists, their methodology is flawed and they manipulated the data to fit their results! You can't say "I don't have the real data so I'll just put a number here and argue that it's true because I say so." and expect it to be taken at face value. It's not an experiment if it isn't reproducible (which rules out almost everything except biology, physics and chemistry ;) and you can't reproduce it if you force the data to fit your pattern.

Now, speaking about IQ itself, does make sense talking about it? Is there (at least) a significant correlation between IQ and any useful metric? Can we say that IQ improves our utility, for example? Are we (as a scientific community) sure that IQ measurement isn't just self fulfilling (i.e. it measures what high IQ people have, but not much more)? I know of the (methodologically valid) studies that show people with higher IQ earning more but those studies don't show if these cases are a direct result of IQ (i.e. they're more effective) or a indirect result due to employers favoring people with high IQs (or SATs). Also other (methodologically valid) studies show that IQ doesn't correlate to financial growth (i.e. becoming richer) because people's investment and saving habits don't correlate with IQ.

IMO IQ is a poor metric, it can't give reliable predictions about things that really matter (e.g. GDP, personal finance, scientific achievements, etc.). I fail to see how it's better than trying to measure how fast can people divide long numbers, surely it may be impressive and have a couple of use cases, but mostly it doesn't matter. IMNSHO it's telling that those people trying to correlate IQ with other values always use bad methodology and end up trying to convince the reader that correlation (i.e. their results) equals causation (i.e. their hypothesis).

IME most people only think individual IQ differences are ok because they believe other qualities compensate the difference. If they say that some person has a higher IQ, they usually (at least implicitly) question their social skills, financial success, physical prowess, etc.. Also they always talk about much smarter people, not about the 50% under the average, conveying the idea that difference is due to the genius' unusually high IQ not because most people are stupid in comparison. OTOH group comparisons usually imply that one group is smarter and the other is dumber, by comparing the average values for each group. While race is a sensitive issue, if we exchange race by gender, economical status, birthplace, weight, etc., the controversy is pretty much equivalent.

About the IQ vs. GDP "controversy" both Lynn and Vanhanen should be ashamed. They're not even decent scientists, their methodology is flawed and they manipulated the data to fit their results! You can't say "I don't have the real data so I'll just put a number here and argue that it's true because I say so." and expect it to be taken at face value. It's not an experiment if it isn't reproducible (which rules out almost everything except biology, physics and chemistry ;) and you can't reproduce it if you force the data to fit your pattern.

Now, speaking about IQ itself, does make sense talking about it? Is there (at least) a significant correlation between IQ and any useful metric? Can we say that IQ improves our utility, for example? Are we (as a scientific community) sure that IQ measurement isn't just self fulfilling (i.e. it measures what high IQ people have, but not much more)? I know of the (methodologically valid) studies that show people with higher IQ earning more but those studies don't show if these cases are a direct result of IQ (i.e. they're more effective) or a indirect result due to employers favoring people with high IQs (or SATs). Also other (methodologically valid) studies show that IQ doesn't correlate to financial growth (i.e. becoming richer) because people's investment and saving habits don't correlate with IQ.

IMO IQ is a poor metric, it can't give reliable predictions about things that really matter (e.g. GDP, personal finance, scientific achievements, etc.). I fail to see how it's better than trying to measure how fast can people divide long numbers, surely it may be impressive and have a couple of use cases, but mostly it doesn't matter. IMNSHO it's telling that those people trying to correlate IQ with other values always use bad methodology and end up trying to convince the reader that correlation (i.e. their results) equals causation (i.e. their hypothesis).

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I browse with javascript disabled (security reasons) and usually can post in most blogs. I also write software for a living, so I know that any of those aren't required. Please consider improving your blog software to something simpler and less restrictive.

There are no racial inequalities there are only human inequalities.

Sharper, dividing humanity into the subpopulations "male" and "female" does not result in average IQ differences, though brain-volume does differ, as does the visuo-spatial vs verbal component of intelligence, and the standard deviations for them differ as well. It is usually an assumption of statistics that large enough groups with arbitrary divisions (say, by a "natural experiment") will not differ on average.

In which geographic region were you thinking of where darker skin indicates higher intelligence?

Daniel Yokozimo, nobody had been discussing Lynn yet, so you should have mentioned that that the book you are referring to is called "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" so other readers aren't left in the dark. I believe if you remove all the data they made up/estimated the result is pretty much the same, although I haven't actually read the book myself. If you know of a study finding no correlation between IQ and GDP or GDP growth, provide a link. The reason people are interested in IQ it because it has more predictive power than any other variable in psychology and possibly any social science. It isn't just employer preference, it also predicts likelihood to be in an accident on the job (within professions).

Group differences are distressing because the more of a difference there is, the more grounds there are for discriminating on the basis of race or sex, and it is incredibly frustrating to find oneself continually judged not for one's own manifested abilities, but for the average abilities manifested by other people who who share one's race or sex.

Yes, if there is an average group difference, then race or sex alone would count as Bayesian evidence of a particular level of ability. A perfect Bayesian, looking at all the evidence, would be justified in statistically discriminating. But there aren't any perfect Bayesians; that's why this blog exists. One needn't contend that all groups have identical average capacities in order to be worried about discrimination. The problem is not discrimination itself, considered abstractly in some toy domain; the problem with discrimination is that in the real world, people are going to do it wrong, and do it wrong in all sorts of harmful and oppressive ways.

In "An Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning," Eliezer writes that people don't pay enough attention to priors, but I wonder if the opposite isn't the case when the task is evaluating people whose race and sex are known.

Perhaps I misunderstand the purpose of this web site, but why not just stop categorizing people and look at each individual as they are in the present with love and respect? Eliezer-excuse me if this is inappropriate, but have you read the book of Job? I don't mean as the word of God that must be believed at all costs, but as an insightful look at the human condition. (I'm not religious, but that doesn't mean I have to discount the wisedom that does show up in the Bible or other religious texts, does it?)

Who has suggested not looking at each individual with love and respect?

Could you be more specific about the insights you find in the book of Job that are relevant here? (It doesn't seem to me to say anything about individuals versus groups, or about the implications of varying intelligence or other unequally distributed benefits; and what it says on the question of whether God is just amounts to "how dare you question his justice? he's bigger than you". But no doubt I'm missing something.)

U can't possibly say what I want about this and keep it short, but I"ll try anyway. I'll sketch the bare outlines and if you want you can fill in the details.

The US race problem comes entirely from insufficient miscegenation. If we mixed things up sufficiently we'd have no separate races in 2 generations. But we haven't, yet.

Consider Gause's Law. Populations that don't mix are like separate species, they won't stably fill the same niches. The alternative to one population going away is a caste system -- guarantee that each race has niches that are theirs alone, that they have a guaranteed place in the society.

The developing US caste strategy was abandoned for one that officially lets anyone compete for anything. We have to claim that the competition is fair, or equality is a sham.

In reality, africans have far more genetic diversity than anyone else. Without detailed information it would seem to follow that they'd have more variability in intelligence, and in anything else that hasn't been intensely selected. And also in traits that have been selected; a diverse population will tend to find multiple solutions to challenges.

Within a single breeding population, inequalities tend to average out. If you cheat me in a land deal, maybe my grandson marries your granddaughter and it's all in the family. In 5 generations there's more chance for that, in 10 generations it's likely. If one of my ancestors cheated another of them, he shouldn't have done that but it doesn't mean much to me. Between separate populations the outrage tends to build up. If you cheat me and get the advantages at compound interest, my great-great-grandchildren just have it worse. It's predictable we'll have problems when separate populations interact too much.

About gods, if you suppose that you will have an infinite life for which this short life is only some sort of audition, then it isn't at all important about injustices you endure here.

Also, who died and left you deciding what's good and what's evil? A god might have some higher purpose that makes your petty concerns irrelevant. All of nature is arranged in feedback loops -- when one population gets too large it degrades its environment and then the population size gets adjusted downward. "Too large" can be defined as "large enough to degrade its environment to support fewer". This goes on everywhere. When a human baby dies in a degreaded environment, isn't it the same thing? Should we be exempt from the feedback loops that run the rest of the world? Of course we'd think so, but why would anybody else agree?

TGGP: Eliezer referenced the book (the wikipedia url on the "real" link, lookup for the phrase "Is Idang Alibi about to take a position on the real heart of the uproar?"). I thought everybody followed the links before commenting ;). Anyway I assume that if something is referenced its discussion is on topic.

Regarding their data, we can't just remove the data they fudged, we need to redo the analysis with the original data. We can't just discard data because it doesn't fit our conclusions. Using their raw data without fudging we are left with low correlation, many data points outside the curve.

Ditto for any other studies. I highly skeptical of sociologists or psychologist papers because they always (again IME) have use very bad statistics. Most assume a gaussian or poisson distribution without even proving that the process generating the data has the right properties. The measurement process is highly subjective and there's no analysis to assess the deviance of individual measures, so they don't properly find the actual stddev of their data. If one wants to aggregate studies, first one must prove that the measurement process for each study is the same (in the studies mentioned in your "predictive power" link this is false: at least two Lynn studies use population samples with different properties, also another couple use different IQ tests) otherwise we are mixing unrelated hypothesis.

I'm highly skeptical of IQ measurement, because it's too subjective. Measuring the same individual over and over on a long interval we get different results, but we shouldn't. A physicist wouldn't use a mass measurement process that depended on subjective factors (e.g. if the measured object is pretty or the time of measurement isn't jinxed), in a similar way we shouldn't use a measure of mental capacity that is highly dependent of stress (which has no objective measurement process) or emotional state. In this situation one of the best approaches would be using many different data measurements for each individual and aggregate the data with Monte Carlo analysis to find the probability of each results. We can't just fudge the data, discard sample we don't like and use a subjective methodology, otherwise it isn't science. When a physicist does a experiment he has a theory in mind, so he either already has an equation or ends up discovering one. The equation must account for all variables and the theory must prove why the other variables (e.g. speed of wind in Peking) doesn't matter. "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" fails to prove that any other factors influencing GDP are irrelevant to the IQ correlation, that alone discredits the results.

Correlation is the most overused statistical tool. It is useful to show patterns but unless you have a theory to explain the results and make actual predictions it's irrelevant as much as the scientific method is concerned. If we ignore this anything can be "proven".

Skin color is a function of the latitude at which ones ancestors lived.

This is obvious through observation: ancestors lived on the equator - brown skin. ancestors lived at extreme north/south latitude - white skin.

Gareth, I don't believe I specified a quantitive amount by which they would differ, just that they would differ. You're right, normally (pun intended), the groups wouldn't differ by much. That's part of the point, isn't it. Why care that they differ at all? There isn't a useful reason to care that group X has a different average IQ than group Y. Does a particular group of dark skin people have a lower intelligence due to their skin color? Not likely. Other factors are much more significant. There's no causual relationship between the two factors. The only reason it's mentioned at all is because some people have a hang-up about defining themselves or others by the color of their skin.

If you took two groups. One group with high intelligence and a second group with low intelligence and genetically modified them to change only their skin color, would their intelligence change drastically as well? The point is that skin color is not a causal factor in determing intelligence, so it's meaningless to use as a filter when presented with a sample size of one random individual with skin color X.

For a bunch of reasons, recent black immigrants from the East Indies in NY have a much higher average intelligence than blacks in NY with a longer US family pedigree (and a higher average intelligence than your average white in NY, for that matter) Does it matter to their intelligence what color their skin is? Apparently other factors matter a lot more. My point is that racial grouping is more arbitrary than most other groupings as a basis for making judgements and is only really used by people out of historical inertia. The groupings of people into "race", whether done by individuals or by governments tends to be pretty damn unscientific compared to say, geneticly-based groupings. I don't know first-hand about the UK's classification schemes, but have you seen the racial categories governments in the US use?

TGGP,

Dividing the human population into two groups, male and female, does in fact result in one group having a higher average intelligence than another. Depending on your actually used definition of intelligence, you may decide that one group has a higher average than the other and which group that is may change over time. I suppose if you modify your definition of intelligence based on the actual level of that quality in males and females you might be able to come up with a definition that for an instant in time made the two groups equal, but the actual population changes quickly enough that your definition would also quickly become outdated and the two groups would no longer be equal in your proposed definition of intelligence.

On the question of if there is a usefully measurably large difference between the groups (as opposed to an actual difference), then I agree that it's not useful to use male/female group membership as a filter or test for an individuals estimated intelligence, regardless of which of the popular definitions of intelligence that you subscribe to. The variance is way too high within the population to make it a useful indicator for practical purposes.

Again, that's why the fact of there being differences should be as unremarkable as it is useless as a guide to decisions and policy.

Take a step back. Theoretically if someone divided the world population into two groups by randomly assigning each individual the letter "A" or the letter "Z", you would have two groups that on average have a miniscule difference in intelligence, or athletic ability, or whatever you want to measure.

But practically speaking, knowing the results of the "A" and "Z" groups and also knowing which group your individual belongs to is useless as compared to a factor that actually has a casual relationship to what you are trying to measure that individual for.

No offense to the sociologists among us, but individual characteristics matter far more than group characteristics when making any sort of judgement or decision.

TGGP,

Sorry, forgot to answer your additional question in my reply. Whenever Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams get together in a small group (as they do occasionally), within that small geographical region darker skin color is a great indicator of higher intelligence. Makes all these divisions seem just a little more arbitrary, doesn't it?

On a more serious note, Queens, NYC, NY has a higher than normal proportion of black West Indies immigrants. In that geographic region, blacks have an average IQ higher than those with lighter skin. Other US locations include Pembroke Pines, Florida, Rialto, California and Brockton, Massachusetts. They also have a higher median income, are more likely to live in a two parent household, own their own home, etc...

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g- Nobody has suggested treating people other than with respect and love. It seems to be a fairly common thread in the things I'm reading here. Instead of asking "what group has a lower or higher IQ?", why not ask, "How do we raise an indiviual's IQ?" I may be misreading Job, I see more like- "don't forget the beauty that surrounds you"

Sharper -- Pembroke Pines? Holy schmoley, that's a pretty small neighborhood. I'ts more known in my mind for Canadian snowbirds than high IQ dark skinned people. Do you have a reference for your assertion? I'm personally intererested because it's about 5 miles down the road from where my sailboat is right now. Plus it's where a friend of mine lived when she was in the escort business.

Douglas, I don't see why we can't ask both questions, but in any case the question this post was about wasn't "what group has a higher or lower IQ?" but "why do people think that group IQ differences matter more than individual ones?" -- decrying group-over-individual emphasis just as much as you are.

All the stuff about natural beauty in Job is there to make the point "God is bigger and cleverer than you are, so who are you to question him?". (Hence the constant refrain of "Do you know ...?, Have you seen ...?, Were you there when ...?".) It's admittedly rather grand, at least once you get over what now reads like bizarre Bad Science (storehouses for the hail, etc.), and people whose judgement I respect have claimed it's great poetry, but I still don't quite see what insight into the human condition it offers beyond "Sometimes bad things happen for no readily apparent reason", which most people over the age of three have noticed even before they read Job.

"in his humble opinion": Jim Watson? Humble? There's a first for everything.

Race adds extra controversy to anything; in that sense, it's obvious what difference skin colour makes politically. However, just because this attitude is common, should not cause us to overlook its insanity.

You can thank the Nazis for making race so political that it won't be touchable for generations. You can also thank the segregationists for irritating that political gland and making race untouchable for more time.

Francis Galton brought a lot of ideas to the world, but the one that was amplified to the point where it will take centuries for the controversy to die down was "eugenics." And when people hear the word "eugenics" I bet you that they also hear "master race." I read a lot of science fiction, and I believe that there have been very few novels that discuss eugenics as anything other than a project to make "supermen." Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country and Sawyer's Hominid trilogy are the only ones that come to mind at this time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton

Weasel words: I use "thank" purely out of sarcasm.

Why isn't the concept of fairness a bias? It seems to meet the criteria.

People care about race because race is about who your blood relatives are, and who, to some extent, your descendants will be.

A racial group can best be defined as an extended family that has more coherence and cohesiveness than a typical extended family because it is partly-inbred.

So, that's why people care so much.

Also, please, can we stop equating "race" and "skin color"? Haven't you ever seen an African albino? Being white in skin color doesn't make him white racially.

Or consider the famous golfer Vijay Singh, who of South Asian origin and was born on Fiji. He is darker than the average African-American (but has Caucasian features). He is never, ever considered to be racially black or African-American in America. Never. You can make up a list of other dark-skinned people who aren't considered black in America, such as pundits Dinesh D'Souza and Ramesh Ponnuru.

Race is about ancestry.

Different societies have different ways to deal with the inevitable complexities of genealogy in assigning people to races, but they are genealogy-based, not skin color based.

I thought the actual point of this article was nifty, but I thought this was stupid:

If God has not given intelligence in equal measure to all his children, God stands convicted of a crime against humanity, period.

As much as you open/close this, there isn't nearly enough in this article to justify the claim. I am not asking you to justify it. I am just curious why you include something like this in an otherwise focused article. What is the point of having this and saying it the way you did? To me, it just sounds like "Boo God!"

I had a hard time deciding whether to ask this question to just let it go. I figured asking would sound too petty or trollish. But I posted it anyway. I don't know if I have seen your answer to this yet.

I think Eliezer is missing the main cause of the uproar in cases like this. The stance of the uproarers is not that "If this was true, it would be horrible, so let's not believe it." It's more like, "believing this is true would cause people to act horribly, so let's not believe it."

Claims of innate racial and sexual differences in intelligence have historically been baseless rationalizations that attempt to justify oppressing the group in question. So now when anyone raises the question, they are shouted down because they are tarred with the same brush. The objectors are not saying that if true group intelligence differences would be worse than individual intelligence differences. but that saying there are group differences is worse than saying that there are individual differences, because while individual differences clearly exist, group differences probably don't and are usually postulated by people who are motivated to invent them. This may be irrational, but not in the way this post focuses on.

Differences between groups is obvious to any rational person I think. I cannot see how it can be otherwise. Anyone calling this racist is mind killed.

Individual intelligence differences are NOT thought of as okay. Try introducing yourself on a random message board with each of these and see what happens:

• Hi, I'm Joe and the main thing I'm good at is art.
• Hi, I'm Joe and I'm proud of my Native American ancestry.
• Hi, I'm Joe and my IQ is 170.

Joe with the IQ of 170 will be called arrogant, a liar, an elitist, treated like a scam artist, or told he has no social skills. That's not telling Joe he's okay. That's telling Joe not to talk about his difference. Let's explore what it means to be told you can't talk about your difference for a moment. Imagine going into a room and saying each of the following:

• Hey, don't say you've got Native American blood, that's socially inept.

^ This comment will surely be interpreted as racism.

• Hey, don't say you're good at art, you're a liar.

^ This comment will be interpreted as an extremely rude or even oppressive comment. Making judgments about whether artists are "good" or "bad" is taboo and considered, by many, to be oppressive to self-expression.

• Hey, don't say your IQ is 170, don't be an elitist.

^ This comment prejudges the person. It assumes that they're an elitist when they're just talking about an intellectual difference that doesn't prove anything about your personality.

So, why doesn't Joe get to have the same freedom to express himself without society oppressing that? Why doesn't he get to talk about his difference without expecting prejudiced remarks that jump to conclusions about who he is?

We have a million excuses for this. "People feel threatened by intellect." Well, they used to feel threatened by black people, but that doesn't excuse society from working on removing their prejudices about black people and it doesn't excuse them from working on removing their prejudices about gifted people.

"That's just not polite." <- This is an interesting excuse. I'll explain why:

Imagine you go into a room and say "Hi, I'm white." (I realize that people of any race may read this comment, I am asking you to humor my hypothetical situation for a moment.)

Your race is evident. This is a neutral statement of fact.

If someone tells you "That's just not polite." why are they saying that? They're probably confusing it with an expression of the white pride attitude that is associated with the KKK. They're assuming that you're prejudiced.

What if you went up to a bunch of random white people and accused them of hating black people? Since this doesn't happen frequently, they'd probably be mostly bewildered. But imagine if random people did that to them every day.

Prejudice is a very serious offense to be accused of. It would stress them out. They'd wonder what kinds of social and career opportunities they might be missing out on. They might become more cautious to guard their physical safety - after all, prejudice is the kind of thing people get really heated about and some people get violent when they're upset. They'd start to hide hints that they're white on things like resumes. They would be oppressed by an assumption that they're prejudiced, just the same way that they'd be oppressed by an assumption that they're all criminals.

Accusing a person of prejudice simply for being part of a certain group is, in and of itself, prejudiced. That's prejudging them based on some trait that they can't control, not on their behavior. Yet, if you claim to have a high IQ, you are very likely to be accused of elitism. People act like this prejudice against people with a high IQ is okay and that gifted people should behave like an oppressed minority by hiding their difference.

I'm glad you think it's okay with the rest of the world for people to talk about their intelligence differences, I think that's okay. But a looooooot of people don't!

I'm pretty sure individual IQ differences aren't OK (in that sense) in certain contexts. There's a stereotype that (except in clinically pathological cases) if your son doesn't perform well at school, his teacher is expected to tell you that he doesn't put enough effort in it, not that he's stupid.

The uproar associated with racial differences in IQ has two main reasons to me.

The first one is historical : black slavery and all its consequences still running in the modern world, the nazis and their racial theories, ... those horrors of history justify, from a political point of view, an uproar against attempts to classify people in races and "rank" the races. We know where that path leaded often enough in history, and we don't want to ever walk it again. Since most people don't really understand statistics or bayesian reasoning, spreading that "black are less intelligent than white", even if it were true (which I honestly don't know, cf my other comment), can do a lot of harm.

The second one is not so much about skin color itself, but about being able to spot easily, from birth, that someone is supposed to be less intelligent. Individual intelligence difference do exist, but except in rare cases (Down syndrom and the like) it's hard to detect. In day-to-day social interaction, you don't know that the one in front of you is supposed to be more or less intelligent. When the first grade teacher sees the kids fo the first time when they enter school, he doesn't know which kid is smart and which one isn't. If you could detect that easily, if everyone, just looking at you, could say "oh he's probably dumb" or "oh he's probably smart", it would greatly amplify the base unfairness of being slightly more or less intelligent. If skin color really has a strong correlation with intelligence, it would be somehow like tatooing people their IQ score on their forefront.

You talk of the injustice of treating a trueborn prince like a peasant, or a baby swan like an ugly duckling.
Eliezer talks about the injustice of different people being born princes or peasants in the first place, of there being swans and ducks.

It's clear which is the deeper injustice, and which is the superficial one.

Interesting. [searches Google for "crystallized intelligence"]

Fluid intelligence measures like Ravens have proven valuable for predicting success in mathematics--and little else.

Cite please. This is a completely novel claim to me, one I routinely see problems with (eg. a few days ago reading a SMPY review mentioning a 13-fold gender imbalance in extremely high SAT math scores while tests of fluid intelligence show little or no such asymmetry). I find it very hard to believe that matrix tests predict mathematics success and little else.

If you are trying to express some reasonable position like "IQ tests (which include subtests covering a variety of crystallized materials as well as fluid intelligence measures) will have some incremental predictive validity for various activities or life outcomes over an IQ test (which is just a measure of fluid intelligence)", then perhaps one could agree. But your current absolutist statements seem to be endorsing some other position...

Why not cite a study favoring your claim directly rather than challenging me to? What does fluid intelligence predict besides math success? If it predicts more, there should be studies on point.

Are you challenging me to find a single study using a matrix test which predicts to any degree some metric other than math success, such as income or employment or highest attained degree, and that's it? Are you sure? Because your following restatement agrees that matrix scores can be predictive outside math.

I'm not saying matrix tests don't predict anything but math achievement; rather that fluid intelligence adds nothing to prediction beyond what a general IQ test provides, which is to say, a bit more precisely, its other correlates with achievement can be accounted for by a combination of other factors. That's a lot stronger than your "reasonable" position--which I'd call a trivial position--but weaker than claiming fluid intelligence measures are useless for brute prediction outside math. They have no value outside math prediction because other tests are better for other predictive purposes.

I think we have different views on what is "valuable" (eg. is a matrix test faster and easier to administer than your combo of other factors? Then it could be valuable even if it's not quite as good a predictor), but your stronger position does not seem obviously wrong to me, so I won't object to it.

If your first sentence you claim that the tests are well designed.

In your second sentence you explain what is wrong about their design.

Considering this, I have trouble understanding your third sentence.

This comment seems to have little content beyond insult. It doesn't belong here.

With individual differences, people are being judged as individuals, and on the basis of their individual capabilities.

With racial differences, people are being judged as members of a race, and not on the basis of their individual capabilities.

At least, that's the fear.

You seem angry that there is variation across humans in intelligence.

Are you proportionately a magnitude even more incensed that dogs get screwed with lower intelligence, no thumbs, and an inability to talk?

You happily group humans together as your "team" it seems. In the past, and probably even currently, there are people who group together "males of my nationality" as their team or even "my relatively immediate family" as my team, and don't worry much about "fairness" outside their team boundaries.

Is your choosing humanity as your team something you feel you are constrained to do? Or is it a choice you make, if so why? Or is it possibly just an artifact of where and when and how you grew up, how you were raised as it were?

It doesn't occur to me that it is particularly "unfair" that people are different one from the other any more than it does that species are different one from the other. Am I just wierd? Or just different?

As to "fixing the horror," if you had the option to distribute your above-mean IQ points, one at a time, to the truly poor, those who are stupid, would you? If there was a technology that could raise your AGI by 20 points would you buy it for yourself or buy it for someone stupid? I have happily worked to make myself as smart as I can be my whole life, and never felt the slightest bit of guilt about that, which I presume I would if I thought my high intelligence was unfair. And I'm pretty sure I am not a sociopath.

It's a problem, and I agree... Rich people tend to get and stay smart (and rich) by being brought up in enriched environments (lots of conversation with adults, and lots of books) and then working in enriched environments (competitive socially- and technically-demanding professional jobs that require constant learning). Many poor people get and stay poor by working repetitive minimum-wage jobs to help their families while also being harassed more than rich people are, and don't have enough time to invest in reading/education to advance themselves because their family needs more money right away. Africa has lots of natural resources but lots of poverty, and the poverty incentivizes short-term consumption, corruption, and war for scarce resources, instead of investment. A sufficiently well-defended African nation-state could presumably pull a South Korea and get to first-world status in a generation by min/maxing for investment in education, like South Korea did. But, they'd need strong internal controls against corruption, and strong external controls against terrorism. South Korea had these (Confucian culture, and blockade by water and US military). I mean, people are the same species regardless of skin color and so presumably have equivalent/compatible brain structure as well. Poverty makes many stereotypes look true.

The example of magical strength in HPMOR is a commentary on intelligence in the real world. People who study obsessively get really smart and eventually look "naturally brilliant", like Hermione. Rich people claim natural superiority despite putting their children through prep schools, like Draco. Some people experience chance events that push them in new directions different from those taken by their older biological relatives, like Harry. Parental expectations about studying and work mean that the apple tends not to fall far from the tree.

Dr. Watson could have said what he did in a totally non-offensive way, something like, "Systemic poverty in many countries within Africa means that most Africans have enjoyed less access to quality education than members of richer nations, and consequently perform worse on average on written IQ tests". It's a similar error to what Don Sterling made. Don Sterling should have said, "I want my girlfriend to stop cheating on me and bringing her other boyfriends to my games" instead of "I want my girlfriend to stop bring black people to my games." Being classist is slightly less offensive than being racist.

if you think that being born with Down's Syndrome doesn't impact life outcomes, then you are on crack. ... So much for God being just

Good point. I hadn't realized that the dialogue about race is fueled partly by religious zealotry defending the just-world hypothesis. Makes sense. As Lovecraft said, the most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. This is a lot to live with until I/we figure out how to fix some of this stuff.

Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK?

In short, because the rich use individual IQ differences to justify their superiority.

(e.g. "I'm just smart and worked hard! It's not polite for me to talk about my two decades of very expensive private schooling.")

The problem with racism is the confusion of correlation and causation. To state that "blacks score lower in IQ" is to imply that being in the Venn Diagram circle "black" automatically lines you up with a "lower IQ circle." But, besides the sheer difficulty of defining racial categories in the first place, this ignores that there are other factors in which you can group people which will cause those circles to line-up far more accurately. Particularly ones based on environmental pressure of a person's ancestors. If a group is put into a position with forced manual labor without self-determination or decision-making, the genes that make you more physically capable will tend to cause longer survival and thus more reproduction and spreading of those genes in comparison to ones that aid mental calculation.

The same is true on the other side of the spectrum if you are are forced into a situation where mental calculation is emphasized, such as rice farming or financial work.

To group these characteristics by "race" is to imply an incorrect source. Decisions made based on these incorrect assumptions cause very bad things to happen.