if anything OP is helping dismantle it by releasing OS code that we need but isnt maintained by a massive conglomerate that is literally integrated with the US Federal Government.
Looks like there's no actual QKD happening on the QKarD, so, if someone were to replace the “TA does QKD with a satellite” part with a “TA generates a bunch of random bits”, nobody would even notice.
>It is no secret that American students overall lag their international peers.
An interesting opinion that I've heard from a person who's made a huge contribution to US education is that if you take high school students from some US minority group, say, American Scandinavians, they'll turn out to be doing better than Scandinavians in Scandinavia, and the same goes for most other minority groups (apparently including American Chinese), as well as for white Americans vs the population of most other countries. What brings the average down, however, is the fact that there are so many (mostly) South American immigrants who are forced to study in a language other than their native language, which is not the case in most other countries.
I have not fact-checked this, but it is an interesting perspective.
The first things you say are correct but then it goes subtly wrong.
Yes, studying in a foreign language is a hindrance -- but somehow it seems to be less of a hindrance for European and East Asian immigrants than for South American immigrants with little European admixture. In fact, even native English-speaking pupils/students of South American (and African) descent tend do rather bad.
There is an alternative theory that this is mostly an IQ issue -- and that IQ is heritable, largely genetic, and that one should expect different populations to have different mean IQs (given vastly different historical evolutionary pressures and a belief in evolution itself). This is extremely well backed with research.
I'd expect there to be a higher proportion of intelligent immigrants via controlled immigration. Those who merely have to just hop the border are less likely to be engineers, doctors, etc., while Europeans and Asians have no choice but to deal with the legal system which can vet them.
Yes, but not today as I'm tired and can't brain. I am at a christening tomorrow after which I am going to be really tired. I also have appointments Monday and Tuesday. It might take me several days to get back to you. Remind me at <username> @ gmail if I don't.
To help me write an answer that helps you, can you tell me a bit more about where you come from in the meantime?
In the battle between Righteousness and empirical studies, I am firmly in the latter camp. I hope you are, too.
From what I gather on education the work of an individual teacher is the far most important factor when comparing outcomes. I.e. if one compares "average" student bodies with varying backgrounds within the same cultural contexts and one is taught by an encouraging teacher and the other by a non-engaging and non-encouraging type I would bet the former group would usually provide better learning results. I fail to see how IQ measurements would help in this when the key to is to get teachers to be engaged and encouraging - and, non-discriminating.
From this point of view there seems to be little value in using any "population average IQ" scores to guide educational policies when the best approach is always to empower the individual teacher to be empowering and encouraging. The corollary to this view that massive government control of teaching through massive testing etc. is kinda pointless beyond setting certain national targets for the minimum body of knowledge to teach. And, that the quality of the teachers is the most important deciding factor.
Extremely low IQ that would warrant special assistance is another thing entirely, of course.
Sounds like a bold claim in an area of controversy. Do you have recommendations for publicly available online articles that substantiate your claim that are:
It's only bold because there is a large number of people (often state founded, often controlling at least the lower levels of education, often with major influence on media) who strongly feel otherwise -- with no numbers to back them up, of course.
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If you actually do want to get to the bottom of it, I can heartily recommend Ian Deary's "Intelligence: A Short Introduction" as a place to start.
There's a paper I can't find at the moment that looks at almost 4000 non-related people, give them an IQ test each + scan their DNA for typical SNPs with a DNA chip. That gives us almost 8,000,000 pairs where we know how similar their IQ score and DNA was. That gives us almost 8,000,000 points we can plot into a 2D coordinate system (and we can of course also throw statistics at them). It turns out that there is a clear correlation between measured IQ and measured SNPs (i.e., the point cloud is denser along a line). In other words, there is a statistical relation between DNA and IQ. This is a result that is extremely hard to explain away if one believes in nurture, SES, microaggressions, racism, ESL difficulties, etc.
Since it is such a rhetorically important paper, I hope somebody else can chime in with a proper citation (I can also swear that even though I downloaded it at a university library, it has somehow also ended up somewhere in the neighbourhood of Emil Kirkegaard).
This paper only gives us points at the lower end of IQ/DNA similarity, of course. We already have numbers at the higher end where we know that the points still fit -- but it was possible to explain it away with nurture, SES, and all that. There has been a longer chain of arguments for about a hundred years that counteracted that (adoption studies, parents who die when their children are young or unborn, divorce and remarriage, etc.) -- but since it was longer, it was easy to ignore.
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Ian Deary runs the Lothian Birth Cohort study which is really interesting if you are at all interested in how people's outcome in life differ and why (and to what degree it can be predicted and bad outcomes be prevented).
The "Newsletters" links in the sidebar gives you access to PDF's for the newsletters they send to the participants in the studies (and their relatives/caretakers). They are very easy to read/skim compared to normal research papers.
Definitely well worth reading if you are at all interested in education, intelligence, and outcomes (especially if you don't really believe in intelligence yet, i.e. if you are a flat-earther/creationist/timecubist).
All three do active research on intelligence (Emil mostly in the form of contributing statistical know-how).
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There's a lot more but this is what I'm going to dig up for now. You are basically asking me to find a short text using small words that is on the internet and tailored to precisely your beliefs (false or true), precisely your background knowledge, that describes thousands of well-done studies apparently without difficult maths and lots of numbers AND that is "reputable" in "an area of controversy", which means you give yourself permission to dismiss anything if whomever you choose to hold in authority doesn't like it. That's a tall order, especially since there are so many dimwits within education "research" who believe false things and who can't do statistics.
A more forthcoming query from you that 1) showed that you had done your homework (you clearly haven't), 2) told me what you know and don't know, and 3) told me which precise points you don't understand or aren't yet willing to believe would -- naturally -- have produced a more useful answer from me.
I can tell, though, that a degree in education doesn't seem to make a difference in the efficacy of the teacher. But their IQ does. The IQ of the students matter, too. The discipline and noise level in the class also matters. It certainly also matters that the teacher knows the subject he or she is teaching. There is also a correlation between how long a teacher has taught and how well he or she teaches -- probably a combination of a selection effect and a training effect but I don't think anybody yet knows how much each matters.
There's a paper I can't find at the moment that looks at almost 4000 non-related people, give them an IQ test each + scan their DNA for typical SNPs with a DNA chip. That gives us almost 8,000,000 pairs where we know how similar their IQ score and DNA was. That gives us almost 8,000,000 points we can plot into a 2D coordinate system (and we can of course also throw statistics at them). It turns out that there is a clear correlation between measured IQ and measured SNPs (i.e., the point cloud is denser along a line). In other words, there is a statistical relation between DNA and IQ.
As always, correlation does not imply causation. Since clearly nurture has a very strong effect on IQ, unless you control for the background of these subjects, I don't think it means anything. It's clear that for a random sample of people in the world today, there will be a clear correlation between race and background.
> Since clearly nurture has a very strong effect on IQ
It actually hasn't, however clear it might be to you.
(Well, it does have on childhood measurements of IQ but then it tapers off to practically nothing. Adopted children end up with adult IQs similar to that of their biological parents, not to that of their adopted parents.)
> A more forthcoming query from you that 1) showed that you had done your homework (you clearly haven't), 2) told me what you know and don't know, and 3) told me which precise points you don't understand or aren't yet willing to believe would -- naturally -- have produced a more useful answer from me.
Actually, this response is already sufficiently useful. This is not an area that I have researched, nor is it one that I intend to spend much time on, so I appreciate the list that you've put together. I listened to most of Stephen Hsu's talk and liked it (he sounds like he's well-versed with the research, and he used sufficiently "small words" to be understandable).
There's a nice Scientific American blog post about this hypothesis by John Horgan; the essential argument is that this research question is a pointless area of inquiry because the answer should make no difference in a non-evil society:
>I'm torn over how to respond to research on race and intelligence. Part of me wants to scientifically rebut the IQ-related claims of Herrnstein, Murray, Watson and Richwine.
(for example, the claim it's "extremely well backed" that IQ is both "heritable" and "largely genetic", when both are hotly contested, the former is impossible to have decent evidence for given all of the confounding variables, and the latter ("largely") is definitely not true, even given the necessarily poor state of evidence on this question:)
> For example, to my mind the single most important finding related to the debate over IQ and heredity is the dramatic rise in IQ scores over the past century. This so-called Flynn effect, which was discovered by psychologist James Flynn, undercuts claims that intelligence stems primarily from nature and not nurture.
> But another part of me wonders whether research on race and intelligence—given the persistence of racism in the U.S. and elsewhere -- should simply be banned. I don't say this lightly. For the most part, I am a hard-core defender of freedom of speech and science. But research on race and intelligence—no matter what its conclusions are—seems to me to have no redeeming value.
> Far from it. The claims of researchers like Murray, Herrnstein and Richwine could easily become self-fulfilling, by bolstering the confirmation bias of racists and by convincing minority children, their parents and teachers that the children are innately, immutably inferior. (See Post-postscript below.)
> Why, given all the world’s problems and needs, would someone choose to investigate this thesis? What good could come of it? Are we really going to base policies on immigration, education and other social programs on allegedly innate racial differences? Not even the Heritage Foundation advocates a return to such eugenicist policies.
> Perhaps instead of arguing over the evidence for or against theories linking race and IQ we should see them as simply irrelevant to serious intellectual discourse. I'm sympathetic toward the position spelled out by Noam Chomsky in his usual blunt fashion in his 1987 book Language and Problems of Knowledge:
> "Surely people differ in their biologically determined qualities. The world would be too horrible to contemplate if they did not. But discovery of a correlation between some of these qualities is of no scientific interest and of no social significance, except to racists, sexists and the like. Those who argue that there is a correlation between race and IQ and those who deny this claim are contributing to racism and other disorders, because what they are saying is based on the assumption that the answer to the question makes a difference; it does not, except to racists, sexists and the like."
Doesn't Chomsky make a pretty big assumption there? I feel that he chills intellectual inquiry in this area by calling anyone interested in these questions racists and so forth.
It seems that there are legitimate questions that could be informed by this line of inquiry. For example, research might affect one's opinion about race-based affirmative action programs mandating that the admitted student body mirror the overall population (assuming that IQ is a relevant factor in college admissions). In the scientific realm, if IQ were indeed heritable and if there were substantive differences across large groups of people, wouldn't people be curious why, and by figuring out the pathway, perhaps be able to design supplements or lifestyle changes to raise people's IQs?
I'm not saying that this area of research should be given priority, but it does seem legitimate. As Horgan concedes, this overall sentiment does seem to go against the grain of freedom of scientific inquiry.
> For example, research might affect one's opinion about race-based affirmative action programs mandating that the admitted student body mirror the overall population
No, because affirmative action programs operate from an absolute commitment to diversity and/or a recognition of systemic violence against certain communities in recent history. Those commitments hold (or not) regardless of genetic variation.
> In the scientific realm, if IQ were indeed heritable and if there were substantive differences across large groups of people, wouldn't people be curious why, and by figuring out the pathway, perhaps be able to design supplements or lifestyle changes to raise people's IQs
There's a whole field of research called "Education" that studies essentially this question, but not unnecessarily confined to IQ as a sole metric.
And yes, many education researchers investigate the effectiveness of interventions in the context of communities (include racially-defined ones).
The race/IQ correlation question is totally irrelevant to the discovery and evaluation of assessments among subcommunities.
How could knowledge of racial differences in IQ possibly do to push forward education research? Everything we know about differences between subcommunities points to behavioral interventions being effective, and nurture aspects playing a dominate causal role.
And even if you want to go full on eugenics / genetic engineering, we have some comparatively stronger hypotheses about some genetic causes for IQ variation that are absolute (i.e., genes that effect IQ but are not correlated with race).
So even in a crazy futuristic (I would say dystopian) world of genetic engineering for things like intelligence, investigating racial theories is still a waste of time.
> I feel that he chills intellectual inquiry in this area by calling anyone interested in these questions racists and so forth.
Well, duh? Chomsky's explicitly trying to chill discussion/research into hypothesis.
First because it has no intellectual value -- it's like asking whether red is a better color than purple. Even if there were an answer to such an odd question, it would be useless. Hence, the answer is more likely to be used as a rhetorical sword in political debates than for e.g. effective interventions (which are pretty difficult to imagine short of eugenics in any case).
Second because he doubts it's a sincere inquiry. He questions, I think, whether the outcomes of this research will be scientifically grounded and used for good, or more likely to be taken on face value (no matter how confounded/weak) and become an excuse to validate overtly racist eugenics/immigration policies.
In other words, Chomsky is calling bullshit on this line of "research" being either "intellectual" or a sincere "inquiry".
> suppress lines of thought that have political outcomes that I don't like?
Do not fund lines of thought where the harms outweigh the potential benefits, and/or where ethical commitments are violated.
That policy is neither particularly strong or particularly uncommon. It's the guiding principle behind IRBs, which are pervasive. (In fact, as Horgan points out, one of the primary motivations for IRBs was racist scientists conducting downright evil experiments on black men.)
There are two components to this analysis.
First, do benefits outweigh harms? This is easy because there are no benefits. Suppose there is a correlation between race and IQ. What non-evil thing, pray tell, would you have us do with that knowledge?
Second, are there any ethical violations? Also easy. Racial superiority theories aren't "political outcomes that I don't like." They are fundamentally Evil; for god's sake, this is one of very situations where the motivation behind Godwin's Law doesn't apply.
It appears that you consider, among other things, Singapore's rise over the last 50 years to be "evil". This puts you at odds with practically the entire economics profession, and just about everyone else in the world trying to actually improve conditions in poor countries instead of burning perceived witches and warlocks.
You mean conducting eugenics experiments on low-income women?
Or did you mean encouraging only educated people to have children?
If you really think sterilizing and performing experiments on the poor without consent constitutes social progress... I don't really know what to say.
Anyways, it's a pretty far stretch to say that Singapore's eugenics program had anything at all to do with its economic performance over the past 50 years. More-over, the changes to reproductive rates in Singapore are pretty uniform throughout the population. So even if population control has helped Singapore, it was just the population control -- not the class-centered eugenics schemes.
And all of this is discounting the fact that it's not even effective when judged on its own terms... turns out governments don't make for very good PD controllers.
> with practically the entire economics profession
This is obviously not true. It is not the case that the majority of practicing ecnomists support eugenics...
Second, even if this were true, it would be irrelevant. Economists are not geneticists, biologists, anthropologists, etc. They are absolutely not trained to make the sort of assessments I'm talking about above.
Most economists agree that Lee Kuan Yew did a better job at increasing his people's prosperity than almost every other developing-country leader of his era. An increasing number of African leaders (Rwanda's Paul Kagame is an especially vocal example) see him as a primary role model.
You are free to believe that LKY's worldview was totally inaccurate and that he owes his success to a ridiculous amount of luck. (As you note, his views on human group differences were not a random eccentricity, they had a major impact on his policy choices in several domains.) Fortunately, those who are doing the most to increase African prosperity today reject your position, and tens of millions of people are benefiting.
> Suppose there is a correlation between race and IQ. What non-evil thing, pray tell, would you have us do with that knowledge?
Stop affirmative action? Let it influence immigration policy? Let it inform crime policy?
It is in fact possible to find it evil to NOT do so...
> Racial superiority theories aren't "political outcomes that I don't like." They are fundamentally Evil; for god's sake, [...]
They are exactly "political outcomes that I don't like". Treating people like individuals ought to be considered non-evil but belief in racial equality leads to people NOT being treated like individuals.
Affirmative action is motivated by either an absolute belief in diversity being good (e.g., there are benefits for economic minorities that apply ragardless of race), and/or as an intervention meant to correct for structural violence in recent history.
The racial question is irrelevant to either of those issues.
> Let it influence immigration policy? Let it inform crime policy?
Immigration and crime policy written under the belief that some races are genetically superior to others...
Didn't I ask for examples that aren't fucking evil?
In any case, EVEN IF there is a correlation (after controlling for the hundred of obvious things and god knows what else), other factors (including variation that race doesn't explain and environmental factors) are so extraordinarily dominant that racial variation is more an excuse for racist bullshit than an objective justification for it.
Which is exactly why we don't even need to know the answer to the question.
> Treating people like individuals ought to be considered non-evil but belief in racial equality leads to people NOT being treated like individuals.
I have no idea what this means.
WRT affirmative action this is barely an intelligible position, because anyone with half a brain will realize that there are massive environmental factors that definitely dominate any difficult-to-even-validate racial causation.
WRT crime and immigration policy: writing either informed by a barely statistically significant correlation that's probably impossible to even actually prove because of thousands/millions of latent variables is pretty fucking far from treating people like individuals. Especially when that "science" conveniently validates white superiority theory.
That comment was obviously not benign, and you were all breaking the guidelines—not necessarily equally, but that doesn't much matter. What matters is that the thread is not the kind of discussion we want here.
First, moral frameworks exist for a reason and aren't the realm of "church-lady hyperventilation". For example, most plausible instantiations of the crime policies suggested above are blatantly unconstitutional.
Second, there are plenty of objective arguments in my posts here that any racialized theory of intelligence is not worth to studying, and you're ignoring all of them. As one small example, over multiple posts, you and peterfirefly have failed to name one concrete policy option for which an answer to this question is remotely necessary.
If anything here is irrational, it is your insistence on studying a correlation that has no value beyond justifying racially motivated policies. If the last 2000 years teach us anything, it's that for any concrete social problem you'd want to solve, a solution motivated by the belief that one race is superior to another is not going to be the optimal solution.
> pretending that race is some utterly inscrutable field
Belief in superiority on a collection of phenotypes roughly correlated to what we call "race" today pre-dates Darwin by 100+ years. AS a matter of historical fact, the "scientific" notion of race today came about as a post-facto characterization of latent racial superiority theories that existed prior to the scientific era.
So yes, race is inscrutable from a scientific perspective because it is not -- at base -- an idea of scientific origin.
Here is what we do know.
We know that Every. Single. Time. any society has made a decision motivated by the belief that one race is objectively better than another race, the result was a social order that could not be described with any word other than evil.
We know that for hundreds of years, crackpots of varying scientific literacy and persuasiveness have evoked the en vogue scientific ideas of the day to claim the inferiority of a group of people with an astoundingly invariant set of latent racial characterizations. And we know that at every point in history, their crackpottery is eventually identified -- even if science doesn't advance enough to demonstrate the crackpottery until years later. (the somewhat pathetic aspect of the crackpottery displayed in this thread that rjkyle is so kindly addressing is that it all has already been disproven, and yet... so don't pretend this is about "scientific truth" or "intellectual inquiry")
We know that even if it were reasonable from to outset to choose a given phenotype over all others to study, it would go against the grain of everything we have learned in the last 2000 years to use any notion of inferiority between races as a basis for decision making.
We know that even if that characterization had a causal link to intelligence, there are far better and less noisy predictors of intelligence.
So, there is no reason to study this correlation. Not today, not yesterday, not tomorrow. Nothing good can come of it. If history is a guide, not even intellectual understanding.
Anyways, I'm done engaging with you and peterfirefly now. The belief that one "race" is superior to another is detestable, and to claim that there could exist definitive scientific evidence for such a claim fundamentally misunderstands what science is and ignores a rich history of such claims in the history of science
> For example, most plausible instantiations of the crime policies suggested above are blatantly unconstitutional.
No. Perhaps it's even the other way around: police and courts should not be hindered in fighting crime, just because too many of the criminals seem to be black. Don't black people in black neighbourhoods have a right to protection against criminals? Is it constitutional to deny them said protection?
> Second, there are plenty of objective arguments in my posts here that any racialized theory of intelligence is not worth to studying, and you're ignoring all of them.
No.
> As one small example, over multiple posts, you and peterfirefly have failed to name one concrete policy option for which an answer to this question is remotely necessary.
No.
> We know that Every. Single. Time. any society has made a decision motivated by the belief that one race is objectively better than another race, the result was a social order that could not be described with any word other than evil.
We know that ideologies that pretend people are equal have gone terrifyingly off the rails -- especially when they succeeded in controlling what was allowed to be said.
> We know that even if that characterization had a causal link to intelligence, there are far better and less noisy predictors of intelligence.
Absolutely. We can measure it directly, for example, on individuals.
What? I don't know what rock you've been living under since the 1960s, but overt and blatant racial discrimination in policing or sentencing is a) a blatant violation of the fourth and fourteenth amendments to the United States Constitution; b) illegal under and number of federal and state statutes; and c) something we've already tried (both constitutionally and unconstitutionally) throughout the years and it's never worked. (BTW, I'm repeating myself and this is called an argument.)
>> Second, there are plenty of objective arguments in my posts here that any racialized theory of intelligence is not worth to studying, and you're ignoring all of them.
> No.
Name one concrete policy proposal motivating this research. One way in which the world would change if we had an answer (which, BTW, we already do -- the effect is negligible even setting aside the fact that the question doesn't even make sense).
I've already explained Affirmative Action is more about reconciliation for pre-civil-rights era structural violence, or just a carte blanc commitment to diversity. Neither of which is informed by the proposed research.
(BTW, I'm repeating myself and this is called an argument.)
I've explained numerous times that history (i.e. as close as we get to empirical evidence in societal decision making) suggests that making decisions based upon these beliefs is a bad idea. (BTW, I'm repeating myself and this is called an argument.)
And of course the fact that we've already made racial discrimination in law enforcement both unconstitutional (in multiple ways) and illegal (in multiple ways) because of the observed harm these policies caused (BTW, I'm repeating myself and this is called an argument.)
> We know that ideologies that pretend people are equal have gone terrifyingly off the rails -- especially when they succeeded in controlling what was allowed to be said.
Frist, what harm? The only concrete harm I've heard from anyone so far is Johnny McSuburb (believing he was) turned down for a college scholarship because some black kid from the hood matched his test scores. Calling that a real harm is ridiculous when stacked up against e.g. the "scientifically" justified sterilization programs of the 1950s. And that's limiting ourselves to some of the more benign examples of the policy impacts of racialized "science". Far worse has been done in the name of "scientifically proven" racial superiority theories, even just in the United States. (BTW, I'm repeating myself and this is called an argument.)
Second, restricting IRB approval isn't "controlling what was allowed to be said". It's controlling what federally funded researchers can try to validate using public money. So I fail to see what concrete harm you're referring to. (BTW, I'm repeating myself and this is called an argument.)
The fact is, espousing "scientific proof" of claims that one race is intellectually superior to another is not new. Similar claims have be made and then used in the past to commit outright atrocities. It is difficult to see how the demonstrable harm done by taking these claims seriously outweighs the basically non-existent benefits we would get from having an answer.
jmorphy88 - You pretend like there's no danger here, but we're short on examples of "scientific" evidence being used as a justification for killing off or harming huge portions of populations, even here in the US.
The attempt to paint racialized theories of intelligence as objective scientific inquiries lacking in prejudice is also not new, and those exact theories whose inquiry was justified in this exactly same way ("you moralizing buffoons, we're doing science!") have been used to justify undeniable evil in the past, even in this country.
So yeah, jeer. But eugenics sterilization campaigns in the 50's had this origin and were Fucking Evil. No other word is fitting for forced sterilization, and those campaigns were justified by "science" that "debunked" people who were overly-"moralizing" societal planning.
Also, the original parent isn't even doing the latest rhetorical trick of not talking about races but about "demarcated populations" or "collections of phenotypes". He specifically mentions "Africans". So, no, this isn't about defending Science. This is about using science to defend overtly and obviously unscientific bigotry.
> but somehow it seems to be less of a hindrance for European and East Asian immigrants than for South American immigrants with little European admixture.
Stormfront? Is that you?
Everything you claim is utter tripe.
Students from low income families consistently, regardless of ethnicity or race,
score well below average. [1]
Most research into academic performance associate poverty and the risk factors of systemic poverty as the main contributor to poor academic performance even after race is accounted for.
> that IQ is heritable, largely genetic, and that one should expect different populations to have different mean IQs
There's so much wrong and 1/2 truths in this statement. First, while IQ does have a genetic component it is not crystalized. The genotype is a range of IQ whose phenotype is influenced primarily by...yeah, poverty and risk factors associated with poverty. Environment can influence a person's realized IQ by as much as 12-18 points.[2]
To put this in perspective, the average IQ of college graduates is 115. Of STEM graduates is ~125. So environment can mean the difference between not graduating from college and being a Physicist, Computer Scientist, Doctor, or Mathematician.
But, probably the most absurd claim you make is that we should expect the genetic variation to adhere to arbitrary identifiers like skin tone.
Why would you assume the color of skin is somehow a higher indicator of relatedness than height, or hair color, or nose length? In fact, it's actually a far worse indicator of relatedness than many metrics.
An East African can be more genetically related to Northern Europeans than to a West African regardless of similarity in skin tone. The concept of race that you're portraying; one where you can look at someone's skin color along some spectrum and by that attribute group them into categories of more or less genetic relatedness is unscientific garbage.[3]
Read. The article's results confirm what I said. They found that 60% of the variability in crystallized IQ and 49% of variability in fluid IQ are due to environmental factors.
Considering that IQ variability between African American's and American's of European descent has closed to 0.33 standard deviations and one standard deviation on the Stanford-Binet is 15 points the variation we see can be accounted for entirely by variability due to environment.
> You are also flirting with Lewontin's Fallacy
The wikipedia article you link provides quite a bevy of publications, professional groups/committees, and journals that do not agree with Edward's interpretation of the data while there is little to none to be found that do agree.
Further, Edward's is arguing against a data set and assertion made 40 years ago while all the aforementioned critics in that wikipedia article and the articles I linked are using current data, methods, and techniques.
Far from an old, untested hypothesis the negation of race as a clearly demarcated, global, and distinct genetic classification is the current well researched position of all fields touching on the topic and the overwhelming majority of researchers within those fields.
Something is not a fallacy just because one guy calls it such.
Most of the environmental impact on IQ comes from nutrient deficiencies and diseases (especially in childhood). Most of the variation that isn't explained by biological heridity is simply unexplained at the moment. It is wrong to attribute all of it to the environment in the normal sense of that word. My guess is just noise during the construction of the brain.
(And of course races are not clearly demarcated. Duh! There are still populations, though, and there tend to be differences, big and small, between them.)
To be clear, I think my other reply to this comment should be read at a meta-level. I'm frankly astounded that HN is a moderated community and yet comments containing an overtly racialized (S America / African) causal theory of intelligence aren't flagged away.
These ideas don't hold any capital in scientific communities. There really is no intellectual debate to be had here. More-over, allowing these comments to stay (in the presence of a moderation mechanism) is extremely unwelcoming.
Despite the continued presence of crackpots claiming the existence of empirical/scientific evidence that women are inherently feeble-minded in mathematics, in science, or in general, I've seen such comments get down-voted to oblivion or flagged away. So why are equivalent comments about South Americans and Africans tolerated?
> An interesting opinion that I've heard from a person who's made a huge contribution to US education is that [...] What brings the average down, however, is the fact that there are so many (mostly) South American immigrants who are forced to study in a language other than their native language, which is not the case in most other countries.
Well, if that's really an opinion on US education from "a person who's made a huge contribution to US education", that's pretty sad statement for US education, even before considering the more detailed claims. South America isn't a particularly significant source of immigrants to the US (even if you only consider immigrants for whom English is not their first language.)
When the most basic, obvious, and widely known facts are this badly messed up...
Don't (US) Americans often think of Mexico as part of "South America"?
North or Central America would be more correct geographically but the major divider in practice is the US/Mexican border, isn't it?
We (in Western Europe) also called some of the Central European states "Eastern Europe" for a long time because the Iron Curtain was the thing that mattered, not the actual East/West position.
> Don't (US) Americans often think of Mexico as part of "South America"?
I've lived in the US for my whole life -- more than four decades -- and this is literally the first time I've seen this abuse of "South American", so I'm going to say, no, its not that common.
> North or Central America would be more correct geographically but the major divider in practice is the US/Mexican border, isn't it?
Well, the US/Mexican border is the "major divider in practice" between US and Mexico, but not between North and South America (when a common term for the Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking countries of North and South America is needed, "Latin America" is the usual collective term.)
Heck, even ignorant Americans abusing a term will just call everyone who seems like they might be Latin American "Mexican" rather than "South American". (Which, wrong as it is in general, is a far better approximation when you are talking about US immigration.)
I also do not have specific data, but when almost 1/10th[1] of the student body is learning in a second language, it's obvious that test scores will be lower and resources will need to be stretched a bit further and certain groups(such as gifted) will not receive the best possible education for their unique abilities.
