Facebook's censorship of mainstream science

[ApostateAbe]

I actually agree with Loren here:
(1) the black distribution in the op does not look nearly as normal as the white distribution;
(2) while i don't think that SES completely covers all the effects of poverty, not including it or other factors does make the graph worthless.

Suppose we had absolutely no idea what causes the racial intelligence gaps. It could be SES, poisoning, diet, genetics, white oppression against blacks, demons, outer space aliens, or a combination of such things. It still does a helluva to explain racial inequalities such as school grades, school graduations, advanced degrees, income, job performance and promotions, because the intelligence score variable with or without race regardless of the cause significantly correlates with all those things. There is only one reason to dismiss such data as "worthless," and it isn't a good one, nor is it because the black curve doesn't look as curvy as you would like.

 

[Canard DuJour]

Something to keep in mind: any data which attempts to show racial differences (whether genetic or discrimination) and doesn't control for socioeconomic status is worthless.

Racial intelligence differences exist even after controlling for SES,

Yet again - no, they don't. Controlling for SES, the lowest achievers here in the UK are native-born whites, below native-born blacks, and the highest are black African immigrants, especially Nigerian Ibo people (even without controlling for SES). The latter is also apparently the case in the US. Whatever is true of African Americans, they are no more a "race" than low SES British whites (or blacks), or African immigrants - or, for that matter, white Americans a few generations ago who scored lower than current African Americans.

This stuff isn't in Pseudoscience because its conclusions are politically incorrect. It's here because the conclusions are unwarranted by the evidence, the research supposedly supporting it is notoriously unreliable, and the plethora of counterexamples and confounders are never satisfactorily addressed. It was given a fair shake in Science and couldn't get past that.

I suggest being highly aware of the motivation to look for excuses to dismiss the data. Even if we had absolutely no idea of what causes the racial intelligence gaps, the data is far from "worthless." It deeply ties into a vast array of other racial inequalities.

Absolutely.

 

[Jarhyn]

The 'racial' gap is easily explained by a few rather simple things. These things typically amount to 'generational institutional racism'.

Let's assume that pretty much every child is more or less the same in terms of ability. Now, take some segment that has an identifiable, but arbitrary trait. Let's use 'blue eyes' as the trait. Now let's put those children in homes with parents who are uneducated and who don't have any reason to respect the value of education. Make those same parents poor, and highly stressed. Let's make the quality of educational materials dependent on those same parents' ability to pay for them, which they can't. Let's make their teachers exactly those teachers who are forced into this ass end of the educational system. Let's put these kids in high population density areas, which because of their age, are rife with lead.

Then let's wait a few generations and tell ourselves it's genetic, because there is a population difference between the blue eyed kids and everyone else.

I submit that everyone is born in the normal population group, and the thing that primarily differentiates populations of students are culture and environment, and that this culture and environment has the capability of creating different kinds of intelligence, intelligence geared to different ends than the IQ, intelligence which helps the holder of it more adept at surviving with nearly nothing rather than intelligence which helps the person who possesses it build greater things.

I doubt African American populations in america are less intelligent, per-se, merely I expect that they have learned different ways of using their brains to get clever answers geared for the world we force them to live in as a society.

Edit: oh, look what I just found posted in Political Discussion. It appears to be a gorgeous affirmation of what I just said. THANKS Athena!

http://talkfreethought.org/showthread.php?9652-School-Segregation

 

[ApostateAbe]

Racial intelligence differences exist even after controlling for SES,

Yet again - no, they don't. Controlling for SES, the lowest achievers here in the UK are native-born whites, below native-born blacks, and the highest are black African immigrants, especially Nigerian Ibo people (even without controlling for SES). The latter is also apparently the case in the US. Whatever is true of African Americans, they are no more a "race" than low SES British whites (or blacks), or African immigrants - or, for that matter, white Americans a few generations ago who scored lower than current African Americans.

This stuff isn't in Pseudoscience because its conclusions are politically incorrect. It's here because the conclusions are unwarranted by the evidence, the research supposedly supporting it is notoriously unreliable, and the plethora of counterexamples and confounders are never satisfactorily addressed. It was given a fair shake in Science and couldn't get past that.

I suggest being highly aware of the motivation to look for excuses to dismiss the data. Even if we had absolutely no idea of what causes the racial intelligence gaps, the data is far from "worthless." It deeply ties into a vast array of other racial inequalities.

Absolutely.

The phrase, "controlling for SES," means something mathematically specific. It means, after placing both blacks and whites on an SES scale, you can compare the IQs between blacks and whites. If a black with a low SES has an IQ equal to a white with a low SES, and also a black with a high SES has an IQ equal to a white with a high SES, then the racial IQs are equal after controlling for SES. This is a very easy claim to put to the test. SES is variously defined, but it is typically a derivative of a combination of income, educational achievement, and career status. The paper by Neisser et al., 1997, "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" has a section on "Socioeconomic factors," as follows. The paper was designed as the APA's anti-racist rebuttal to The Bell Curve.

Socioeconomic factors. Several specific envi-
ronmental/cultural explanations of those differences have
been proposed. All of them refer to the general life situ-
ation in which contemporary African Americans find
themselves, but that situation can be described in several
different ways. The simplest such hypothesis can be
framed in economic terms. On the average, Blacks have
lower incomes than Whites; a much higher proportion of
them are poor. It is plausible to suppose that many in-
evitable aspects of poverty--poor nutrition, frequently
inadequate prenatal care, lack of intellectual resources--
have negative effects on children's developing intelligence.
Indeed, the correlation between "socioeconomic status"
(SES) and scores on intelligence tests is well-known
(White, 1982).

Several considerations suggest that this cannot be
the whole explanation. For one thing, the Black/White
differential in test scores is not eliminated when groups
or individuals are matched for SES (Loehlin et al., 1975).
Moreover, the data reviewed in Section 4 suggest that--
if we exclude extreme conditions--nutrition and other
biological factors that may vary with SES account for
relatively little of the variance in such scores. Finally, the
(relatively weak) relationship between test scores and in-
come is much more complex than a simple SES hypoth-
esis would suggest. The living conditions of children result
in part from the accomplishments of their parents: If the
skills measured by psychometric tests actually matter for
those accomplishments, intelligence is affecting SES rather
than the other way around. We do not know the mag-
nitude of these various effects in various populations, but
it is clear that no model in which "SES" directly deter-
mines "IQ" will do.

A more fundamental difficulty with explanations
based on economics alone appears from a different per-
spective. To imagine that any simple income--and edu-
cation-based index can adequately describe the situation
of African Americans is to ignore important categories
of experience. The sense of belonging to a group with a
distinctive culture--one that has long been the target of
oppression--and the awareness or anticipation of racial
discrimination are profound personal experiences, not
just aspects of socioeconomic status. Some of these more
deeply rooted differences are addressed by other hy-
potheses, based on caste and culture.​

The references are as follows:

Loehlin, J. C., Lindzey, G., & Spuhler, J. N. (1975). Race differences in
intelligence. New York: Freeman.

White, K. R. (1982). The relation between socioeconomic status and
academic achievement. Psychological Bulletin, 91, 461-481.​

Your claim of "no, they don't" is refuted by the researchers who would otherwise be on your side, regardless of what your demographic perceptions of the UK may be. Racial intelligence differences really do exist even after controlling for SES. So, don't kid yourself. The reason why my threads are confined to the "Pseudoscience" forum is the same reason that Indian office workers delete the same science on Facebook and block me for thirty days. The correctness or incorrectness of the science is not the issue. The issue is that there is a popular religion, people like you are loyal adherents, and the data is blasphemy.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I actually agree with Loren here:
(1) the black distribution in the op does not look nearly as normal as the white distribution;
(2) while i don't think that SES completely covers all the effects of poverty, not including it or other factors does make the graph worthless.

I'm not saying SES completely addresses the non-genetic factors. I'm saying that if you don't look at it you're not even taking the low-hanging fruit. Things like the Jewish and Chinese drive towards education will be much harder to measure.

 

[ApostateAbe]

The 'racial' gap is easily explained by a few rather simple things. These things typically amount to 'generational institutional racism'.

Let's assume that pretty much every child is more or less the same in terms of ability. Now, take some segment that has an identifiable, but arbitrary trait. Let's use 'blue eyes' as the trait. Now let's put those children in homes with parents who are uneducated and who don't have any reason to respect the value of education. Make those same parents poor, and highly stressed. Let's make the quality of educational materials dependent on those same parents' ability to pay for them, which they can't. Let's make their teachers exactly those teachers who are forced into this ass end of the educational system. Let's put these kids in high population density areas, which because of their age, are rife with lead.

Then let's wait a few generations and tell ourselves it's genetic, because there is a population difference between the blue eyed kids and everyone else.

I submit that everyone is born in the normal population group, and the thing that primarily differentiates populations of students are culture and environment, and that this culture and environment has the capability of creating different kinds of intelligence, intelligence geared to different ends than the IQ, intelligence which helps the holder of it more adept at surviving with nearly nothing rather than intelligence which helps the person who possesses it build greater things.

I doubt African American populations in america are less intelligent, per-se, merely I expect that they have learned different ways of using their brains to get clever answers geared for the world we force them to live in as a society.

Edit: oh, look what I just found posted in Political Discussion. It appears to be a gorgeous affirmation of what I just said. THANKS Athena!

http://talkfreethought.org/showthread.php?9652-School-Segregation

Regardless of what you may suspect about the race gaps, this is an important point: the gap is not easily explained. Even if it is mostly genetic, it is not an easy explanation. In turn, each environmental explanation is difficult. It is easy only if you never look at the critical research. If school segregation was the fundamental primary explanation, then an easily testable prediction would directly follow: blacks and whites in desegregated schools have equal (or almost equal) average IQ. Maybe you can take a guess at how well the prediction holds up. The data is the beginning point for such investigations on the issue. Suppose school segregation was the fundamental problem: that would be great, we would know exactly how to solve the problem, whereas we wouldn't even know the problem exists if we didn't know the racial IQ difference exists. Though the racial intelligence gap is more heavily-corroborated than almost any other psychological phenomenon, Facebook and every other popular social force is actively suppressing the data to the point that even intelligent people doubt the correctness of the data (i.e. Loren Pechtel and Don2 in this thread). At the very least, you can join me in disagreeing with that suppression.

 

[Canard DuJour]

Yet again - no, they don't. Controlling for SES, the lowest achievers here in the UK are native-born whites, below native-born blacks, and the highest are black African immigrants, especially Nigerian Ibo people (even without controlling for SES). The latter is also apparently the case in the US. Whatever is true of African Americans, they are no more a "race" than low SES British whites (or blacks), or African immigrants - or, for that matter, white Americans a few generations ago who scored lower than current African Americans.

This stuff isn't in Pseudoscience because its conclusions are politically incorrect. It's here because the conclusions are unwarranted by the evidence, the research supposedly supporting it is notoriously unreliable, and the plethora of counterexamples and confounders are never satisfactorily addressed. It was given a fair shake in Science and couldn't get past that.

I suggest being highly aware of the motivation to look for excuses to dismiss the data. Even if we had absolutely no idea of what causes the racial intelligence gaps, the data is far from "worthless." It deeply ties into a vast array of other racial inequalities.

Absolutely.

The phrase, "controlling for SES," means something mathematically specific. It means, after placing both blacks and whites on an SES scale, you can compare the IQs between blacks and whites. If a black with a low SES has an IQ equal to a white with a low SES, and also a black with a high SES has an IQ equal to a white with a high SES, then the racial IQs are equal after controlling for SES. This is a very easy claim to put to the test. SES is variously defined, but it is typically a derivative of a combination of income, educational achievement, and career status. The paper by Neisser et al., 1997, "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" has a section on "Socioeconomic factors," as follows. The paper was designed as the APA's anti-racist rebuttal to The Bell Curve.

Socioeconomic factors. Several specific envi-
ronmental/cultural explanations of those differences have
been proposed. All of them refer to the general life situ-
ation in which contemporary African Americans find
themselves,(...)​

No they don't and I can stop you right there and refer you back to the post to which you ostensibly respond. "Contemporary African Americans" are no more a "race" than low SES British whites (or blacks), or African immigrants - or, for that matter, white Americans a few generations ago who scored lower than current African Americans.

Yesindeedy, it's an easy claim to put to the test and it doesn't hold. If something's the case here but not there and now but not then (in timescales on which inter-group genetic variation can be discounted), you're probably looking at mostly - and possibly entirely - environmental causation. That doesn't rule out genetic causation, but ruling it in is pseudoscience.

 

[ApostateAbe]

Yet again - no, they don't. Controlling for SES, the lowest achievers here in the UK are native-born whites, below native-born blacks, and the highest are black African immigrants, especially Nigerian Ibo people (even without controlling for SES). The latter is also apparently the case in the US. Whatever is true of African Americans, they are no more a "race" than low SES British whites (or blacks), or African immigrants - or, for that matter, white Americans a few generations ago who scored lower than current African Americans.

This stuff isn't in Pseudoscience because its conclusions are politically incorrect. It's here because the conclusions are unwarranted by the evidence, the research supposedly supporting it is notoriously unreliable, and the plethora of counterexamples and confounders are never satisfactorily addressed. It was given a fair shake in Science and couldn't get past that.

I suggest being highly aware of the motivation to look for excuses to dismiss the data. Even if we had absolutely no idea of what causes the racial intelligence gaps, the data is far from "worthless." It deeply ties into a vast array of other racial inequalities.

Absolutely.

The phrase, "controlling for SES," means something mathematically specific. It means, after placing both blacks and whites on an SES scale, you can compare the IQs between blacks and whites. If a black with a low SES has an IQ equal to a white with a low SES, and also a black with a high SES has an IQ equal to a white with a high SES, then the racial IQs are equal after controlling for SES. This is a very easy claim to put to the test. SES is variously defined, but it is typically a derivative of a combination of income, educational achievement, and career status. The paper by Neisser et al., 1997, "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" has a section on "Socioeconomic factors," as follows. The paper was designed as the APA's anti-racist rebuttal to The Bell Curve.

Socioeconomic factors. Several specific envi-
ronmental/cultural explanations of those differences have
been proposed. All of them refer to the general life situ-
ation in which contemporary African Americans find
themselves,(...)​

No they don't and I can stop you right there and refer you back to the post to which you ostensibly respond. "Contemporary African Americans" are no more a "race" than low SES British whites (or blacks), or African immigrants - or, for that matter, white Americans a few generations ago who scored lower than current African Americans.

Yesindeedy, it's an easy claim to put to the test and it doesn't hold. If something's the case here but not there and now but not then (in timescales on which inter-group genetic variation can be discounted), you're probably looking at mostly - and possibly entirely - environmental causation. That doesn't rule out genetic causation, but ruling it in is pseudoscience.

Canard DuJour, I am not sure I am following what you are saying, and I would like to get a better idea of what you are saying, so answer this thought experiment, if you are willing: suppose you had a scatterplot of SES (horizontal x axis) versus IQ (vertical y axis), and on that scatterplot you have one set of points representing blacks and another set of points representing whites. You then draw two best-fit lines: one for blacks and another for whites. Is the best-fit line for blacks (1) below, (2) above, or (3) approximately equal to the best-fit line for whites? To be sure you understand, #1 means that the IQ of blacks is BELOW the IQ of whites after controlling for SES, #2 means that the IQ of blacks is ABOVE the IQ of whites after controlling for SES, and #3 means that the IQ of blacks is EQUAL to the IQ of whites after controlling for SES. Choose #1, #2, or #3.

 

[Jarhyn]

The 'racial' gap is easily explained by a few rather simple things. These things typically amount to 'generational institutional racism'.

Let's assume that pretty much every child is more or less the same in terms of ability. Now, take some segment that has an identifiable, but arbitrary trait. Let's use 'blue eyes' as the trait. Now let's put those children in homes with parents who are uneducated and who don't have any reason to respect the value of education. Make those same parents poor, and highly stressed. Let's make the quality of educational materials dependent on those same parents' ability to pay for them, which they can't. Let's make their teachers exactly those teachers who are forced into this ass end of the educational system. Let's put these kids in high population density areas, which because of their age, are rife with lead.

Then let's wait a few generations and tell ourselves it's genetic, because there is a population difference between the blue eyed kids and everyone else.

I submit that everyone is born in the normal population group, and the thing that primarily differentiates populations of students are culture and environment, and that this culture and environment has the capability of creating different kinds of intelligence, intelligence geared to different ends than the IQ, intelligence which helps the holder of it more adept at surviving with nearly nothing rather than intelligence which helps the person who possesses it build greater things.

I doubt African American populations in america are less intelligent, per-se, merely I expect that they have learned different ways of using their brains to get clever answers geared for the world we force them to live in as a society.

Edit: oh, look what I just found posted in Political Discussion. It appears to be a gorgeous affirmation of what I just said. THANKS Athena!

http://talkfreethought.org/showthread.php?9652-School-Segregation

Regardless of what you may suspect about the race gaps, this is an important point: the gap is not easily explained. Even if it is mostly genetic, it is not an easy explanation. In turn, each environmental explanation is difficult. It is easy only if you never look at the critical research. If school segregation was the fundamental primary explanation, then an easily testable prediction would directly follow: blacks and whites in desegregated schools have equal (or almost equal) average IQ. Maybe you can take a guess at how well the prediction holds up. The data is the beginning point for such investigations on the issue. Suppose school segregation was the fundamental problem: that would be great, we would know exactly how to solve the problem, whereas we wouldn't even know the problem exists if we didn't know the racial IQ difference exists. Though the racial intelligence gap is more heavily-corroborated than almost any other psychological phenomenon, Facebook and every other popular social force is actively suppressing the data to the point that even intelligent people doubt the correctness of the data (i.e. Loren Pechtel and Don2 in this thread). At the very least, you can join me in disagreeing with that suppression.

Read the whole post. Your argument contains a bad assumption that simply fixing the school portion of the lives of these students will somehow give them equal outcome if they are "equally human". But the problem is, the majority of a life in poverty isn't lived at school.

I submit that yes, equal and unsegregated education will improve things, and this is borne out by research. These students will make friendships with wealthier kids, and have more upward mobility due to networking, as well as better teachers, more academic opportunities, and up-to-date materials. But it won't for one second remove the impact of having uneducated, often drugged parents stressed out to their limits, judgement from peers for stepping away from 'their culture', it won't free them from lead poisoning, and it won't stop them from going to bed hungry.

So no, it's still pretty trivially easy to see why it comes down to institutional racism.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

I actually agree with Loren here:
(1) the black distribution in the op does not look nearly as normal as the white distribution;
(2) while i don't think that SES completely covers all the effects of poverty, not including it or other factors does make the graph worthless.

I'm not saying SES completely addresses the non-genetic factors.

I agree with you and did not claim that you claimed SES completely addresses the non-genetic factors. What I wrote is that SES does not entirely measure the effects of poverty. A family that has been in poverty for multiple generations may have the same income as another family that has been in poverty for 1 generation. It's a different type of poverty/environment for those cases.

I'm saying that if you don't look at it you're not even taking the low-hanging fruit.

I agree that SES is low-hanging fruit and further, I would add that only listing the race is misleading.

Things like the Jewish and Chinese drive towards education will be much harder to measure.

Probably, yes, I will add that Indians in the US are the highest paid according to a chart that Trausti posted. According to national IQ scores, Indians allegedly have one of the the lowest IQs.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

I actually agree with Loren here:
(1) the black distribution in the op does not look nearly as normal as the white distribution;
(2) while i don't think that SES completely covers all the effects of poverty, not including it or other factors does make the graph worthless.

Suppose we had absolutely no idea what causes the racial intelligence gaps. It could be SES, poisoning, diet, genetics, white oppression against blacks, demons, outer space aliens, or a combination of such things.

Don't forget pathogens, parasites, etc.

It still does a helluva to explain racial inequalities such as school grades, school graduations, advanced degrees, income, job performance and promotions, because the intelligence score variable with or without race regardless of the cause significantly correlates with all those things.

There is a difference between explaining something and correlating something.

There is only one reason to dismiss such data as "worthless," and it isn't a good one, nor is it because the black curve doesn't look as curvy as you would like.

That's an ad hominem and a mischaracterization of the valid math statement I made--the distribution isn't normal and appears skewed.

 

[ApostateAbe]

Suppose we had absolutely no idea what causes the racial intelligence gaps. It could be SES, poisoning, diet, genetics, white oppression against blacks, demons, outer space aliens, or a combination of such things.

Don't forget pathogens, parasites, etc.

It still does a helluva to explain racial inequalities such as school grades, school graduations, advanced degrees, income, job performance and promotions, because the intelligence score variable with or without race regardless of the cause significantly correlates with all those things.

There is a difference between explaining something and correlating something.

There is only one reason to dismiss such data as "worthless," and it isn't a good one, nor is it because the black curve doesn't look as curvy as you would like.

That's an ad hominem and a mischaracterization of the valid math statement I made--the distribution isn't normal and appears skewed.

Please make a full argument so I don't misunderstand. The distribution isn't normal and appears skewed, therefore...? The data is inaccurate? The data is not to be trusted? What?

 

[ApostateAbe]

"There is a difference between explaining something and correlating something."

Yes, but the converse point seems to be more relevant: you can't explain anything without a correlation. If you immediately dismiss a correlation as "worthless," then you have nipped in the bud any explanation. Pathogens, parasites, etc... why would you need such explanations for the racial IQ correlation? There is no such correlation. If there is a correlation, then prove it. Whoops, you just got blocked by Facebook for 30 days.

 

[ApostateAbe]

Regardless of what you may suspect about the race gaps, this is an important point: the gap is not easily explained. Even if it is mostly genetic, it is not an easy explanation. In turn, each environmental explanation is difficult. It is easy only if you never look at the critical research. If school segregation was the fundamental primary explanation, then an easily testable prediction would directly follow: blacks and whites in desegregated schools have equal (or almost equal) average IQ. Maybe you can take a guess at how well the prediction holds up. The data is the beginning point for such investigations on the issue. Suppose school segregation was the fundamental problem: that would be great, we would know exactly how to solve the problem, whereas we wouldn't even know the problem exists if we didn't know the racial IQ difference exists. Though the racial intelligence gap is more heavily-corroborated than almost any other psychological phenomenon, Facebook and every other popular social force is actively suppressing the data to the point that even intelligent people doubt the correctness of the data (i.e. Loren Pechtel and Don2 in this thread). At the very least, you can join me in disagreeing with that suppression.

Read the whole post. Your argument contains a bad assumption that simply fixing the school portion of the lives of these students will somehow give them equal outcome if they are "equally human". But the problem is, the majority of a life in poverty isn't lived at school.

I submit that yes, equal and unsegregated education will improve things, and this is borne out by research. These students will make friendships with wealthier kids, and have more upward mobility due to networking, as well as better teachers, more academic opportunities, and up-to-date materials. But it won't for one second remove the impact of having uneducated, often drugged parents stressed out to their limits, judgement from peers for stepping away from 'their culture', it won't free them from lead poisoning, and it won't stop them from going to bed hungry.

So no, it's still pretty trivially easy to see why it comes down to institutional racism.

I should not have reduced your claim to a singular cause. If it is a complex combination of contributing causes, then it is not trivially easy. You have a long list of potential contributions, and I expect you would not wish to limit the potential causes to that list. Speculation of course is trivially easy, but actually knowing the truth is not. Even with a large combination of contributions, it is not untestable. There are ways to put the hypotheses to the test. Would you like to know about such ways?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I'm not saying SES completely addresses the non-genetic factors.

I agree with you and did not claim that you claimed SES completely addresses the non-genetic factors. What I wrote is that SES does not entirely measure the effects of poverty. A family that has been in poverty for multiple generations may have the same income as another family that has been in poverty for 1 generation. It's a different type of poverty/environment for those cases.

I'm saying that if you don't look at it you're not even taking the low-hanging fruit.

I agree that SES is low-hanging fruit and further, I would add that only listing the race is misleading.

Things like the Jewish and Chinese drive towards education will be much harder to measure.

Probably, yes, I will add that Indians in the US are the highest paid according to a chart that Trausti posted. According to national IQ scores, Indians allegedly have one of the the lowest IQs.

H1-Bs--that seriously skews the sample. We aren't seeing the average Indian so we can't make the comparison in the first place.

 

[Canard DuJour]

Yet again - no, they don't. Controlling for SES, the lowest achievers here in the UK are native-born whites, below native-born blacks, and the highest are black African immigrants, especially Nigerian Ibo people (even without controlling for SES). The latter is also apparently the case in the US. Whatever is true of African Americans, they are no more a "race" than low SES British whites (or blacks), or African immigrants - or, for that matter, white Americans a few generations ago who scored lower than current African Americans.

This stuff isn't in Pseudoscience because its conclusions are politically incorrect. It's here because the conclusions are unwarranted by the evidence, the research supposedly supporting it is notoriously unreliable, and the plethora of counterexamples and confounders are never satisfactorily addressed. It was given a fair shake in Science and couldn't get past that.

I suggest being highly aware of the motivation to look for excuses to dismiss the data. Even if we had absolutely no idea of what causes the racial intelligence gaps, the data is far from "worthless." It deeply ties into a vast array of other racial inequalities.

Absolutely.

The phrase, "controlling for SES," means something mathematically specific. It means, after placing both blacks and whites on an SES scale, you can compare the IQs between blacks and whites. If a black with a low SES has an IQ equal to a white with a low SES, and also a black with a high SES has an IQ equal to a white with a high SES, then the racial IQs are equal after controlling for SES. This is a very easy claim to put to the test. SES is variously defined, but it is typically a derivative of a combination of income, educational achievement, and career status. The paper by Neisser et al., 1997, "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" has a section on "Socioeconomic factors," as follows. The paper was designed as the APA's anti-racist rebuttal to The Bell Curve.

Socioeconomic factors. Several specific envi-
ronmental/cultural explanations of those differences have
been proposed. All of them refer to the general life situ-
ation in which contemporary African Americans find
themselves,(...)​

No they don't and I can stop you right there and refer you back to the post to which you ostensibly respond. "Contemporary African Americans" are no more a "race" than low SES British whites (or blacks), or African immigrants - or, for that matter, white Americans a few generations ago who scored lower than current African Americans.

Yesindeedy, it's an easy claim to put to the test and it doesn't hold. If something's the case here but not there and now but not then (in timescales on which inter-group genetic variation can be discounted), you're probably looking at mostly - and possibly entirely - environmental causation. That doesn't rule out genetic causation, but ruling it in is pseudoscience.

Canard DuJour, I am not sure I am following what you are saying, and I would like to get a better idea of what you are saying, so answer this thought experiment, if you are willing: suppose you had a scatterplot of SES (horizontal x axis) versus IQ (vertical y axis), and on that scatterplot you have one set of points representing blacks and another set of points representing whites. You then draw two best-fit lines: one for blacks and another for whites. Is the best-fit line for blacks (1) below, (2) above, or (3) approximately equal to the best-fit line for whites? To be sure you understand, #1 means that the IQ of blacks is BELOW the IQ of whites after controlling for SES, #2 means that the IQ of blacks is ABOVE the IQ of whites after controlling for SES, and #3 means that the IQ of blacks is EQUAL to the IQ of whites after controlling for SES. Choose #1, #2, or #3.

Then you're asking the wrong question since what I'm saying is that "blacks" and "whites" is insufficient information to give a consistent and commutable answer. Which blacks, which whites, from where and when? The statement I challenged was "Racial intelligence differences exist even after controlling for SES". In the examples I gave, the answer would be (2). In fact blacks here are paid less than whites with same academic attainment right across the SES spectrum while the lowest attainment is among whites. If it ain't so elsewhere, then so much for racial theories lumping blacks or whites together. If you mean strictly local IQ test score differences - even assuming they measure a strictly innate difference - then they ought to be commutable within evolutionary timescales (i.e. Flynn effect). But they aren't.

You're asking me to draw a sciencey-looking picture of your favoured evidence so as to exclude counterexamples and confounders. That's pseudoscience.

 

[ApostateAbe]

Yet again - no, they don't. Controlling for SES, the lowest achievers here in the UK are native-born whites, below native-born blacks, and the highest are black African immigrants, especially Nigerian Ibo people (even without controlling for SES). The latter is also apparently the case in the US. Whatever is true of African Americans, they are no more a "race" than low SES British whites (or blacks), or African immigrants - or, for that matter, white Americans a few generations ago who scored lower than current African Americans.

This stuff isn't in Pseudoscience because its conclusions are politically incorrect. It's here because the conclusions are unwarranted by the evidence, the research supposedly supporting it is notoriously unreliable, and the plethora of counterexamples and confounders are never satisfactorily addressed. It was given a fair shake in Science and couldn't get past that.

I suggest being highly aware of the motivation to look for excuses to dismiss the data. Even if we had absolutely no idea of what causes the racial intelligence gaps, the data is far from "worthless." It deeply ties into a vast array of other racial inequalities.

Absolutely.

The phrase, "controlling for SES," means something mathematically specific. It means, after placing both blacks and whites on an SES scale, you can compare the IQs between blacks and whites. If a black with a low SES has an IQ equal to a white with a low SES, and also a black with a high SES has an IQ equal to a white with a high SES, then the racial IQs are equal after controlling for SES. This is a very easy claim to put to the test. SES is variously defined, but it is typically a derivative of a combination of income, educational achievement, and career status. The paper by Neisser et al., 1997, "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" has a section on "Socioeconomic factors," as follows. The paper was designed as the APA's anti-racist rebuttal to The Bell Curve.

Socioeconomic factors. Several specific envi-
ronmental/cultural explanations of those differences have
been proposed. All of them refer to the general life situ-
ation in which contemporary African Americans find
themselves,(...)​

No they don't and I can stop you right there and refer you back to the post to which you ostensibly respond. "Contemporary African Americans" are no more a "race" than low SES British whites (or blacks), or African immigrants - or, for that matter, white Americans a few generations ago who scored lower than current African Americans.

Yesindeedy, it's an easy claim to put to the test and it doesn't hold. If something's the case here but not there and now but not then (in timescales on which inter-group genetic variation can be discounted), you're probably looking at mostly - and possibly entirely - environmental causation. That doesn't rule out genetic causation, but ruling it in is pseudoscience.

Canard DuJour, I am not sure I am following what you are saying, and I would like to get a better idea of what you are saying, so answer this thought experiment, if you are willing: suppose you had a scatterplot of SES (horizontal x axis) versus IQ (vertical y axis), and on that scatterplot you have one set of points representing blacks and another set of points representing whites. You then draw two best-fit lines: one for blacks and another for whites. Is the best-fit line for blacks (1) below, (2) above, or (3) approximately equal to the best-fit line for whites? To be sure you understand, #1 means that the IQ of blacks is BELOW the IQ of whites after controlling for SES, #2 means that the IQ of blacks is ABOVE the IQ of whites after controlling for SES, and #3 means that the IQ of blacks is EQUAL to the IQ of whites after controlling for SES. Choose #1, #2, or #3.

Then you're asking the wrong question since what I'm saying is that "blacks" and "whites" is insufficient information to give a consistent and commutable answer. Which blacks, which whites, from where and when? The statement I challenged was "Racial intelligence differences exist even after controlling for SES". In the examples I gave, the answer would be (2). In fact blacks here are paid less than whites with same academic attainment right across the SES spectrum while the lowest attainment is among whites. If it ain't so elsewhere, then so much for racial theories lumping blacks or whites together. If you mean strictly local IQ test score differences - even assuming they measure a strictly innate difference - then they ought to be commutable within evolutionary timescales (i.e. Flynn effect). But they aren't.

You're asking me to draw a sciencey-looking picture of your favoured evidence so as to exclude counterexamples and confounders. That's pseudoscience.

I am asking you to mentally draw a sciencey-looking picture just so your ideas are specific and clear. It is pseudoscience only if it is both sciencey-seeming and you don't like it.

This is table 7A-3 on page 270 of Christopher Jencks & Meredith Phillips (ed), 1998, The Black-White Test Score Gap.

On page 267 is the description, "Appendix tables 7A-2 and 7A-3 show sample attrition in Prospects and NELS and estimated effects of being white on scores."

"Prospects" refers to the tests of Congressionally Mandated Study of Educational Growth and Opportunity, and the "NELS" is the "National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988."

The "SES" column is the set of American black-white differences after controlling for parental socioeconomic status. I believe the units are standard deviations.

This is a pattern backed up everywhere I have looked. This includes the 2015 report of the NCES, "School Composition and the Black-White Achievement Gap," this includes the 2009 article in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, "Family Income Differences Explain Only a Small Part of the SAT Racial Scoring Gap," this includes Neisser et al like I already told you, and this includes Gottfredson, 1994, "Mainstream Science on Intelligence- An Editorial With 52 Signatories, History, and Bibliography." That means option #1 is the correct answer, not option #2: the best fit line for blacks is below the white line, and blacks have lower IQ after controlling for SES. You think it is option #2 in the UK. That would be an extraordinary set of data, highly significant, key for explaining the true cause of the racial intelligence gaps, and if the evidence exists then I would love to review it. But I get the feeling that you were only taking a guess and you don't actually know whether or not the evidence exists, and it very likely doesn't exist.

 

[ApostateAbe]

I found data for the UK. It is contained in Patacchini and Zenou, 2007, "The Racial Test Score Gap and Parental Involvement in Britain," Table 5, on page 31.

The "observables" are described on page 3 as including "family structure, socio-economic status, measures of school and neighborhood quality." On page 11, it is claimed:

"The interesting result is, that although we use an impressive amount of information on individuals’ socio-economic status, school and neighborhood quality, we are not able to completely explain the racial gap on the basis of racial differences using traditional observable variables."

So, it is also option #1 in the UK, not just the USA. Not option #2. This is still pseudoscience. Why? Because you disagree with it. "Science" is whatever you believe, and whatever I believe is "pseudoscience."

 

[Trausti]

Soon enough science and facts will be thought crimes.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3404054/

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Soon enough science and facts will be thought crimes.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3404054/

I rather suspect the socioeconomic factors translate into differences in applied cognitive behavior.