Race, Intelligence, and Gould's variation of Pascal's Wager

[ApostateAbe]

Partial agreement. I expect that significantly increasing the social level of respect bestowed on career paths needing only lower intelligence that yield lower income will be difficult, as I do think that such hierarchical thinking is hard-wired instinct, existing in every human society for that reason. The solution of fixing the problem with only consideration of truths, to encourage realistic pursuits of careers as high as psychometrically plausible, would be more convincing on the whole.

Hard-wired instinct? We're talking about the relative status of professions most of which didn't exist a few hundred years ago - and when thy did, they more often than not had a quite different status from the one they have today. Or are you claiming that the ancient Egyptians were hard-wired to honour scribes while we today are hard-wired to look down on typists?

It is not about the specific activities of the respective professions. It is about (1) the wealth acquired from such professions and (2) the competitive talent required to succeed in such professions. Controlling for those, maybe the social respect bestowed on professions is culturally malleable, but I think it is nearly impossible to make a typist as respectable as an engineer or a college professor. Ancestral humans were hierarchical, we remain so, and I believe hierarchical power was always a function of charisma, talent and wealth-acquiring abilities.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

What needs to be asked is the "why?". What is the gain of this study? Intelligence is a vague metric to measure in the first place. And in general, there does not appear to be a drastic difference in intelligence among races to begin with and some people seem destined to split hairs to find some.

So why is this being forwarded? What is the gain? Blacks do worse than whites on SAT's. However, they don't bomb the SAT's. We don't have an entire nation of blacks in the US that are doomed to grunt labor because they can't work a computer, can't even get themselves dressed.

There seems to be a lot of effort to try and notice a difference in the measurement of a metric (intelligence) of which we still don't quite well understand or know how to measure accurately... and to do so based solely on race. Why is that?

The "So we've spent some money and we've encountered some frustration" quadrant of Gould's cost/benefit analysis would be based on the hypothetical assumptions, contrary to Gould's position, that IQ really is an informative measure of intelligence and that measures of intelligence really are relevant causal variants of academic and social success. Like I said, I am less inclined to debate the science behind those assumptions in this thread (other threads about it have now all been dumped in the Pseudoscience forum), but I am willing to discuss the cost/benefit analyses given the respective sets of assumptions.

Seeing there is no benefit, it seems like a nil sum game.

 

[ApostateAbe]

The "So we've spent some money and we've encountered some frustration" quadrant of Gould's cost/benefit analysis would be based on the hypothetical assumptions, contrary to Gould's position, that IQ really is an informative measure of intelligence and that measures of intelligence really are relevant causal variants of academic and social success. Like I said, I am less inclined to debate the science behind those assumptions in this thread (other threads about it have now all been dumped in the Pseudoscience forum), but I am willing to discuss the cost/benefit analyses given the respective sets of assumptions.

Seeing there is no benefit, it seems like a nil sum game.

I have discussed the benefits in the OP and other posts.

 

[exodiasrightleg]

Hard-wired instinct? We're talking about the relative status of professions most of which didn't exist a few hundred years ago - and when thy did, they more often than not had a quite different status from the one they have today. Or are you claiming that the ancient Egyptians were hard-wired to honour scribes while we today are hard-wired to look down on typists?

It is not about the specific activities of the respective professions. It is about (1) the wealth acquired from such professions and (2) the competitive talent required to succeed in such professions. Controlling for those, maybe the social respect bestowed on professions is culturally malleable, but I think it is nearly impossible to make a typist as respectable as an engineer or a college professor. Ancestral humans were hierarchical, we remain so, and I believe hierarchical power was always a function of charisma, talent and wealth-acquiring abilities.

The charisma and wealth-acquiring abilities of the inbred children of aristocracy are pretty well-documented. Mostly, those abilities consisted on managing to get lucky on the succession line and gouging the (obviously stupid and uncharismatic) peasants for tribute.

 

[Nice Squirrel]

It is not about the specific activities of the respective professions. It is about (1) the wealth acquired from such professions and (2) the competitive talent required to succeed in such professions. Controlling for those, maybe the social respect bestowed on professions is culturally malleable, but I think it is nearly impossible to make a typist as respectable as an engineer or a college professor. Ancestral humans were hierarchical, we remain so, and I believe hierarchical power was always a function of charisma, talent and wealth-acquiring abilities.

The charisma and wealth-acquiring abilities of the inbred children of aristocracy are pretty well-documented. Mostly, those abilities consisted on managing to get lucky on the succession line and gouging the (obviously stupid and uncharismatic) peasants for tribute.

This has always been my family strengths. And the inbred nature...

 

[ApostateAbe]

It is not about the specific activities of the respective professions. It is about (1) the wealth acquired from such professions and (2) the competitive talent required to succeed in such professions. Controlling for those, maybe the social respect bestowed on professions is culturally malleable, but I think it is nearly impossible to make a typist as respectable as an engineer or a college professor. Ancestral humans were hierarchical, we remain so, and I believe hierarchical power was always a function of charisma, talent and wealth-acquiring abilities.

The charisma and wealth-acquiring abilities of the inbred children of aristocracy are pretty well-documented. Mostly, those abilities consisted on managing to get lucky on the succession line and gouging the (obviously stupid and uncharismatic) peasants for tribute.

Aristocracies are not the pattern of human evolutionary history, fortunately.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Seeing there is no benefit, it seems like a nil sum game.

I have discussed the benefits in the OP and other posts.

Umm... the intelligence difference really isn't that notable. Get three dumb people from different races or three smart people from different races, not going to notice a difference.

 

[ApostateAbe]

I have discussed the benefits in the OP and other posts.

Umm... the intelligence difference really isn't that notable. Get three dumb people from different races or three smart people from different races, not going to notice a difference.

There are intelligent people of every race and dumb people of every race, but the difference in averages makes a big difference. The average Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence is estimated at 110 to 115, meaning at least two thirds of a standard deviation above whites. Personally, you are free to discount it. In reality, it means that much larger proportions of Ashkenazi Jews are Nobel Prize winners, chess grandmasters, and billionaires, because the right-tail-end of their IQ distribution is much thicker than whites at any point above 130. The further you go to the right, the thicker the relative difference gets. The lower-IQ races, in turn, have the opposite problem. It makes a big difference.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Umm... the intelligence difference really isn't that notable. Get three dumb people from different races or three smart people from different races, not going to notice a difference.

There are intelligent people of every race and dumb people of every race, but the difference in averages makes a big difference.

Oh. So that is why they got that 4 racial sets of random people into a room, had them answer questions and then had people grade the tests and determine which group represented which race they were?

 

[ApostateAbe]

There are intelligent people of every race and dumb people of every race, but the difference in averages makes a big difference.

Oh. So that is why they got that 4 racial sets of random people into a room, had them answer questions and then had people grade the tests and determine which group represented which race they were?

Not sure what you mean. Are you saying that the racial gaps in g-loaded tests may not really exist and it is all just bad science or something?

 

[Canard DuJour]

In 1994, after the publication of Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve, a symposium of academics and political leaders set up a two-hour denunciation session for the press. Nominally, it was intended to denounce The Bell Curve. In reality, they denounced not only The Bell Curve but also the established facts of the mainstream science on intelligence.

The video is here:

[video]

Stephen J. Gould was among them. At the time range 1:36:10-1:37:53, he spoke as follows:

Now the main thing I wanted to say in here, and I credit my good friend Alan Dershowitz with putting it this way in a private discussion, and I think this captures both the moral and the practical point beautifully, and that is: we really don't know the causes of these differences. We really don't. That's the only honest statement, but think of it this way, since we don't know [...] suppose Herrnstein and Murray are right. But, since we don't know that, we continue to try our very best to help out even though it can't be totally effective. That's one scenario. Suppose, however, that we're right, and that these are substantially remediable because the immutability assumption of those four is wrong, but we follow Herrnstein and Murray's recommendations. You see the differential results is so great... after all, if they're right but if we do our program, what's the result? So we've spent some money and we've encountered some frustration, but to think of the tragedy involved if they're right and we follow their program, because then we have extinguished the human spirit in millions of people where it could have been acknowledged and nurtured, and that's ultimately on any cost/benefit analysis or moral argument where it comes down! Since we do not know, all we can do is follow our program, which I expect is correct because the consequences of not doing so are so horrendous, if we're right.​

At first I thought maybe I misheard Gould when he spoke those last few words: "...all we can do is follow our program, which I expect is correct because the consequences of not doing so are so horrendous, if we're right." It is the most direct and plain statement of the fallacy of  appeal to consequences. He doesn't stop at the cost/benefit argument, but he stated that he expects he is right because of the potential consequences. I suspect that this ideological fallacy [..etc]

Hang on..

The Pascal's Wager analogy only makes sense if you realise Gould means 'right' course of action when we don't know what's true. As, indeed, he'd just spelled out at some length. Yet you suddenly switch to interpreting him as meaning some contention must be true.

That's very strange. I can only imagine you forgot what you were talking about a few sentences into this latest scientific enquiry. Otherwise anyone who didn't know you were a martyr to truth facing down Marxist persecution would think you were being dishonest.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Oh. So that is why they got that 4 racial sets of random people into a room, had them answer questions and then had people grade the tests and determine which group represented which race they were?

Not sure what you mean. Are you saying that the racial gaps in g-loaded tests may not really exist and it is all just bad science or something?

I'm saying that this can clearly be proven by dragging in 100 random Hispanics, 100 random Blacks, whites, etc... and have them each do a test. Then look at the results and have someone determine which groups of results was for which test.

 

[ApostateAbe]

Not sure what you mean. Are you saying that the racial gaps in g-loaded tests may not really exist and it is all just bad science or something?

I'm saying that this can clearly be proven by dragging in 100 random Hispanics, 100 random Blacks, whites, etc... and have them each do a test. Then look at the results and have someone determine which groups of results was for which test.

That would be the case if each racial IQ distribution was a square block not overlapping with the other square blocks. But, since the distributions are bell shaped, there is plenty of overlap. An interesting point in Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve is, without correcting for population shares in the USA, the black American IQ distribution almost completely overlaps with white American IQ distribution, so you really would not know given a single IQ score whether it is white or black. For every black American, there is a white American with an equal IQ. The unfortunate point, though, is that the black distribution overlaps only with the left most part of the white distribution, so, given an IQ of 85, it is significantly more likely to be black than white, than a score of 115. The overlap does not do much to whitewash the reality of the differences in averages and their implications.

 

[ApostateAbe]

Here is that figure from Herrnstein and Murray so you know what I mean.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I'm saying that this can clearly be proven by dragging in 100 random Hispanics, 100 random Blacks, whites, etc... and have them each do a test. Then look at the results and have someone determine which groups of results was for which test.

That would be the case if each racial IQ distribution was a square block not overlapping with the other square blocks. But, since the distributions are bell shaped, there is plenty of overlap. An interesting point in Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve is, without correcting for population shares in the USA, the black American IQ distribution almost completely overlaps with white American IQ distribution, so you really would not know given a single IQ score whether it is white or black. For every black American, there is a white American with an equal IQ. The unfortunate point, though, is that the black distribution overlaps only with the left most part of the white distribution, so, given an IQ of 85, it is significantly more likely to be black than white, than a score of 115. The overlap does not do much to whitewash the reality of the differences in averages and their implications.

I didn't say IQ test, I said a test. You said this is for the benefit of students. People don't typically work in the IQ test world, so a real test, math, science, logic, language, history. Not trivia, but technical enough to warrant giving the test. According to you, race is important in determining whether we should expect students to learn this stuff.

So the results of the tests should easily be able to give the reviewers an identity of those taking the test.

 

[ApostateAbe]

That would be the case if each racial IQ distribution was a square block not overlapping with the other square blocks. But, since the distributions are bell shaped, there is plenty of overlap. An interesting point in Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve is, without correcting for population shares in the USA, the black American IQ distribution almost completely overlaps with white American IQ distribution, so you really would not know given a single IQ score whether it is white or black. For every black American, there is a white American with an equal IQ. The unfortunate point, though, is that the black distribution overlaps only with the left most part of the white distribution, so, given an IQ of 85, it is significantly more likely to be black than white, than a score of 115. The overlap does not do much to whitewash the reality of the differences in averages and their implications.

I didn't say IQ test, I said a test. You said this is for the benefit of students. People don't typically work in the IQ test world, so a real test, math, science, logic, language, history. Not trivia, but technical enough to warrant giving the test. According to you, race is important in determining whether we should expect students to learn this stuff.

So the results of the tests should easily be able to give the reviewers an identity of those taking the test.

"According to you, race is important in determining whether we should expect students to learn this stuff."

Not sure what you mean or how I said that. Race is important for explaining population differences, but it is not so important for individuals. You can make very rough probability estimates of individuals based on race, but the best way to evaluate the cognitive abilities of a person if to give the appropriate test, to reduce the error of measurement from 15 IQ points to more like 3 IQ points.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I didn't say IQ test, I said a test. You said this is for the benefit of students. People don't typically work in the IQ test world, so a real test, math, science, logic, language, history. Not trivia, but technical enough to warrant giving the test. According to you, race is important in determining whether we should expect students to learn this stuff.

So the results of the tests should easily be able to give the reviewers an identity of those taking the test.

"According to you, race is important in determining whether we should expect students to learn this stuff."

Not sure what you mean or how I said that.

, it excessively punishes students with shame if they don't succeed in school, it excessively punishes parents with guilt for failing to raise smart children

You are saying that we need to show this because it'll help explain why some races are dumber.

Race is important for explaining population differences, but it is not so important for individuals.

Which is why you randomly test 100, 1000 as a group.

 

[ApostateAbe]

"According to you, race is important in determining whether we should expect students to learn this stuff."

Not sure what you mean or how I said that.

, it excessively punishes students with shame if they don't succeed in school, it excessively punishes parents with guilt for failing to raise smart children

You are saying that we need to show this because it'll help explain why some races are dumber.

Race is important for explaining population differences, but it is not so important for individuals.

Which is why you randomly test 100, 1000 as a group.

Still don't quite follow. Are you suggesting that we will get different distributions of test scores if we randomly test 1000 people of each race?

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

, it excessively punishes students with shame if they don't succeed in school, it excessively punishes parents with guilt for failing to raise smart children

You are saying that we need to show this because it'll help explain why some races are dumber.

Race is important for explaining population differences, but it is not so important for individuals.

Which is why you randomly test 100, 1000 as a group.

Still don't quite follow. Are you suggesting that we will get different distributions of test scores if we randomly test 1000 people of each race?

Based on your pleading that black students are failing in school cause they are genetically less smart, yes. Your premise implies that a random selection within each race should give you breakdowns that will be easy to assess which race had which results.

Honestly, it seems such an easy test to prove a conclusion that I'm surprised it hasn't been done yet. People that think intelligence is racial must be black and not too smart.

 

[ronburgundy]

Duke Leto, I know these topics are offensive, and I am not obliging you to read my threads. Feel free to ignore them. You may even put me on your ignore list, and I will not hold it against you.

Actually, I want you banned.

You are already on the ignore list except for those occasions when I remove you to enable reporting you for spam in contravention of the TOU. It frankly astounds me that you are so damned stubborn that you persist in posting this garbage.

Nothing Abe has said is remotely as anti-reason, harmful, or offensive as you advocating him being banned for saying it.