How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn’s National IQ Estimates
Isn’t It Super-Racist To Say That People In Sub-Saharan African Countries Have IQs Equivalent To Intellectually Disabled People?
No. In fact, it would be super-racist not to say this!
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to
archive: https://archive.ph/BJ6bd
In the followup
One possible answer is that the causal pathway is high GDP → lots of education → lots of practice with abstract reasoning → high abstract/symbolic IQ. I don’t think this can be the whole story, because some countries that “cheated” to get high GDP (eg oil sheikhdoms) can’t translate it into IQ points at the same rate as everyone else. I’m stuck with the boring basic explanation that maybe you need to do a lot of abstract reasoning tasks to get high GDP.
You can’t possibly be this dumb. Tfw you’re so blinded by racism you transfer yourself to the platonic realm where numbers are things in themselves.
It’s almost like when despots funnel oil money into maintaining power and self-aggrandizing megaprojects instead of basic public services you don’t see the “lots of education” part kicking in.
Meanwhile, if there are these outliers where low IQ didn’t prevent people from getting wealthy and there isn’t some kind of political economy reason for it, doesn’t that undermine the value of IQ as a metric? Like, you and I know that IQ is garbage but it’s worth noting how “maybe IQ is just garbage” is always floating at the edge of their reasoning.
Also in the comments to the followup you’ve got people debating whether believing that there are genetic differences between races constitutes scientific racism.
Steve Sailer doesn’t think so. To which Philip replies
The point isn’t that what you’re saying isn’t true, that point is that for most people who have heard of Steve Sailer, Steve Sailer is the textbook example of a scientific racist. So I think we have a good working definition of scientific racism, which is just, whatever Steve Sailer says. I say this unironically with no disrespect; I also consider myself a scientific racist.
TGGP asks
Who doesn’t think there are genetic differences between the races?
gottem
Awesome, I no longer have to link to leaked emails to convince people he’s a phrenologist, he just went and wrote a nice succinct article laying it out.
I see the title and thought you were referring to Big Cat Scott “Scoot” Henson (Rest in Power, beautiful tiger)
The follow up article where normally he retreats to the motte and cherry picks comments from the previous one is somehow worse, we’re now treating Lynn as obviously correct as “has been confirmed by later research which is harder to bias.”
Yeah, many people tried to gotcha me with claims that Lynn did this or that or the other thing wrong. Lynn tries to defend his methodology here, but I think (and tried to argue in the post) that at this point, that debate is of historical interest only - there’s too much confirmation now. One commenter brings up World Bank Harmonized Learning Outcomes as an example. Another points me to this preprint, which tries to update Lynn’s numbers using all modern standardized testing data and correlations with social development index and GDP. They find mostly similar numbers to Lynn: Malawi goes from 60 → 66, and new last place goes to Sao Tome & Principe at 62. This is by people affiliated with Lynn and scientific racism, and you can choose not to trust their judgment either, but I think at least the SDI correlations are an extremely simple regression that it would be hard to fake.
If only someone had written a pretty interesting case study in how you can use valid-looking data to prove anything, even the existence of psychic powers. And people have been trying to scientifically justify racism for just about as long as the scientific method has been a thing, while studying psychic powers didn’t really pick up until the latter half of the 20th century.
Why are these people obsessed with a measurement of people that has the worst statistical validity known to mankind? IIRC Taleb ripped IQ-obsessives to shit a couple of years ago with an extended rant / published paper on the various flaws, but even from a non-stats nerd perspective the idea that you can infer the “IQ” of an entire country from the studies that these people quote is absurd. We’re talking “I measured the IQ of a bunch of kids in an orphanage in 1968, so obviously I can infer from this the value of the entire nation” levels of absurd here. Even taking their words at face value (lol) the entire endeavour is ludicrous.
The whole thing just seems completely pointless: what’s the end goal here? Being able to line people up like trading cards achieves what exactly?
(Which leads inevitably to the depressing reality that the “why” is obvious, but unspoken of course: They just don’t want to come out and say it.)
Why
Hot take time, I think when siskind was at the age that he decided there are some things he will never again change his mind about he happened to be downstream of some flavor of transhumanism that favored gene editing instead of cybernetic augmentations and brain uploads, and things kind of escalated from there.
Spotlighting eugenics-based IQ-maxing is probably his version of going all in on summoning the acausal robot god to fix everything, and also the substack money is pretty good.
