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from the maybe-they-only-surveyed-the-nimnobs dept.
Why can we talk about PISA results, comparing the performance of students in school, but we are not allowed to talk about differences in IQ? Bring this subject up, and you are immediately accused of racism. And yet. And yet, if there are substantial differences in intellectual capability, might this not explain some of the world's problems?
An update of a massive "study of studies" is underway; this article summarizes the work to date, and provides links to the work in progress. A quick summary of the answers to the questions no one dares ask:
- Eastern Asia (Japan, China): IQ around 105
- Europe/North America: IQ around 98
- Middle East: IQ around 85
- Africa: IQ around 70
In the first instance, it doesn't even matter why there are differences. They may be genetic, or disease related, or nutrition related, or something else. If these differences are real (and the evidence is pretty strong that they are), then we need to deal with them. Imagine if the low IQs in Africa turn out to be fixable - what would the impact be, if we could raise the IQ of an entire continent by 30 points?!
Sticking our collective heads in the sand, because the topic is not PC, is not going to solve any problems.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday November 02 2017, @07:03PM (10 children)
This is more than not PC. This story can far too easily be interpreted as saying that the darker you are, the dumber you are. It's raw meat for white supremacists. Even if the original material does not say that, the way it is presented is terrible.
Even so, the entire idea is extremely suspect. Is this really measuring innate intelligence, or is it measuring education that's full of European bias? We are all the same species. What evolutionary forces could possibly be driving Europeans and Asians but not Africans to greater intelligence?
There's an old idea that the challenge of handling harsh winters pushed extra-tropical people into becoming smarter, that the tropics are a paradise and life is very easy there, which meant no one had to be a smarter bear, so to speak. Seems like this study could be recycling that old idea. It's complete bull. The opposite is the more likely probability. The tropics are no paradise, rather the opposite. They can be a hypercompetitive dog-eat-dog jungle. Life is very hard there. If you're not laid low by one of the hundreds of horrible tropical diseases, one mistake and you're cat or crocodile food, or snake bit, or a casualty of the many rivalries between tribes. There's no time or leisure to study science when you have to fight for your life every day. In Africa, big cities are a big liability, perfect ways to spread disease. Consequently, most Africans customarily live in small villages. Without cities, it's much harder to advance. It's the people who got out of the jungle who found time, leisure, and opportunity to advance knowledge.
The Confederacy pulled a lot of bull to support their racist ideology. They claimed blacks were too stupid to learn reading and writing. To support that notion not only did they not educate slaves, they did all they could to suppress any slaves learning anything on their own, even stooping to the murder of slaves just for knowing too much.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Entropy on Thursday November 02 2017, @07:38PM
Asians do the best, blacks the worst. Asians are not white... So it's good for Asian supremacist movement I guess. And of course it's not PC to say anything that doesn't jive with the black supremacist movement, but that's the real reason people tend to downplay IQ tests.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday November 02 2017, @08:23PM (5 children)
Virtually anything can be misinterpreted. Are we to simply quit discussing all facts that can be misinterpreted? What do you imagine would be left to talk about?
"What evolutionary forces could possibly be driving Europeans and Asians but not Africans to greater intelligence?"
Wait, what? Why did you jump from variations in test scores to the assumption that it has something to do with evolutionary forces? An enormous jump with no apparent justification.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Thursday November 02 2017, @11:47PM (4 children)
I don't remember where I heard this theory, but I did remember it because it sounded interesting: The strategy for Europeans and Asians has for many generations been to have fewer children but raise them well (teach them important survival skills). While the strategy in Africa was to have more children, but put less effort in teaching them. Maybe because in Europe survival meant having to store or at least find food for the next winter, so more complex planning skills were required.
I heard that theory in a youtube video discussion but sadly I couldn't find it anymore, I wanted to post a link here but I'm not even sure in what language it was.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Friday November 03 2017, @12:23AM
As to the meat of your comment, this is a common meme and as often happens it's not *entirely* false. It's certainly not entirely correct Either. It originates in a comparison of certain parts of the enormous regions mentioned. It's a valid comparison for specific parts. Both Africa and Eurasia are much, much too big and 'diverse' (I hate that's become a buzzword but it's exactly the right word here) for any comparison that broad to be anything but nonsense, however.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RedBear on Friday November 03 2017, @02:53AM (2 children)
It's much simpler and less racist than that. The populations of entire continents do not actively decide on such "strategies". What happens is when the women in a culture have access to self-agency (living on their own, making their own decisions, having jobs), higher education levels and access to contraception options, and the infant mortality rate isn't 90% due to easily treatable diseases, the population growth nearly stops or even goes negative. I don't know exactly what planet you've been living on but people in Europe and Asia and the West have all been having lots of babies until fairly recently.
In other words, if you're one of those people constantly freaking out about uncontrollable overpopulation, your solution is not genocide but supporting womens' rights around the world and donating to a charity like Water.org that helps the developing world acquire access to clean water and sanitation. When girls have time to go to school and can stay in school past the onset of puberty, and most children aren't dying of simple intestinal diseases before the age of 5, overpopulation becomes a non-issue. And when you only have one or two children they tend to be treated much better.
I made a much longer post elsewhere on the page about the fact that IQ tests don't measure intelligence and how the premises being put forward in the summary are entirely bogus and racist. I won't repeat it all here. Suffice it to say that the average IQ scores of the continents are very different but the "intelligence" potential of the average individual on each continent is nearly identical within the bounds where we can measure actual intelligence. People of 100% African descent who grow up from birth in countries with modern school systems have the same IQ test results as everyone else in those cultures. If this was an actual problem with the intelligence potential of a genetic African it would be extremely obvious and all genetic Africans anywhere outside of Africa would be widely considered mentally disabled by default. Are they? Or do they work and go to school as equals right alongside those of 100% Asian and 100% European descent, achieving the same results? The continental IQ differences are a cultural and economic issue, not a genetic one, and the summary makes extremely racist conclusions. I'm disturbed that it was posted at all.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday November 03 2017, @03:29AM (1 child)
There's good answers to these issues in Guns, Germs, and Steel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel [wikipedia.org]
In a word, location. Location, location, location. Europeans came out on top by virtue of their ancestors starting in a better location thousands of years before. Asians also benefited from that. A further feature that turned out to be an advantage was Europe's difficult terrain that made empire building much harder than in Asia, keeping Europe fragmented into smaller states constantly competing with each other.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday November 03 2017, @10:17AM
What a bunch of plausible half-truths concealing deeply flawed assumptions.
"Europeans came out on top"
This is a huge and glaring one, and I particularly like to pick on it because both left and right seem to be about equally suckers for it.
This is the end of history meme. Like, ok, we did the race, now for the results!
Yeah, no. Whatever 'race' we're dealing with here it isn't over. This is the outlook of a historical illiterate.
Civilizations have risen and fallen and they continue to do so. Europeans are 'on top' in a few senses, at the moment, and were 'on top' in many more senses two or three hundred years ago, but there is certainly no 'came out' in perfect aspect, there is no final score. We have not come to the end of history, it's a defective concept not a real thing.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @08:45PM
Don't forget the selection and survival biases of the people who actually did successfully leave the 'continent.' Think of all the people you know from your high school days. How many stayed more or less where they were born? How many moved, especially to distant places? How would you generally relate the intelligence of the two groups? The fact that this is so evident today with minimal noise, even in microsamples -- as any given individual's experience, is something that I think is quite telling. Anyhow, the anthropological reasons are really not that relevant. What is relevant is that such differences do exist and can be readily measured.
I don't entirely know what this means, but I do find it somewhat cruel to continually try to encourage somebody to do something when they might simply not have the facilities to achieve what you're telling them they can. How would you feel if society as a whole kept telling you that you can do it, you just need to try a little bit harder, here we'll even give you a little help, come on I know you can do it! And know matter how hard you tried, no matter how much you worked at it, you just couldn't manage to achieve what everybody said you could and by implication should be able to do. Self doubt, insecurity, frustration, irritation, anger would just be scratching the surface. What a lovely set of emotions we inflict on massive groups of people all to let us imagine our world is a more pleasant and fair place than it truly is.
Perhaps the most desirable alternative is to simply start treating people as people instead of skin colors and genders. I mean we live in a world where most of every American would love to have dinner with a Neil deGrasse Tyson or a Michael Jordan. Set skin color aside and start trying people like people. Let everybody rise or fall on their merit and achievements alone. I think Morgan Freeman put it very well in this [youtube.com] interview asking him about his opinion of black history month. By focusing on race and gender, even when trying to make things better, we are tautologically perpetuating a focus on race and gender!
(Score: 2) by srobert on Thursday November 02 2017, @10:41PM
This was broken down by nations rather than race. One of the smartest people I know is from a little African country but now lives near me here in the U.S. To which nation is his IQ score counted in the average. He now holds U.S. citizenship. The fact that smart people generally do not wish stay in the country he was born in is likely driving down its average.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday November 03 2017, @06:44AM
as one of the oldest topics in human psychology, it's one of the most researched, and *b design* it's supposed to be the former, that's the whole point of it.
Quite why nobody's asked a bunch of Bronx intellectuals to create an innate IQ test that the don't think favours whites, and then test a bunch of Notting Hill residents with it, I don't know. The Notting Hill smarty-pants can also create an innate IQ test that doesn't favour whites, and some South Africans can be tested with that one. The South African academics can create an innate IQ test that doesn't favour whites, and people in Egypt can be tested with that. Finally, test the Bronx with an innate IQ test created by the Egyptian propeller heads. Of course, white, yellow, and whatever colour represents Ashkenazi Jews will also be testedon these same tests, and we'll see if the complaints that have been levied can be levelled.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves