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The research on IQ heritability is abundant. You’ll get death threats if you point out the research though. It’s inconvenient and correlates with SAT performa

The research on IQ heritability is abundant. You’ll get death threats if you point out the research though. It’s inconvenient and correlates with SAT performance. Hence the big push to get rid of the SAT to try to hide the disparities in general cognition within groups and between groups. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-biosocial-science/article/abs/social-mobility-and-iq-components/EA9C417B74DD404D48E3ABC49058CCDE https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-biosocial...

whynotminot 4y ago
I was asking more about class divides becoming IQ based. Do you have a citation for that.
- lliamander 4y ago
  That's the whole thesis of The Bell Curve and also Coming Apart, both works by Charles Murray. There's plenty of citations in those works as well. Edit: but beyond that, IQ-based class divides seems like a rather logical consequence of the following: 1. The heritability of IQ 2. Assortative mating 3. IQ being a significant determining factor of success in a given society
  - whynotminot 4y ago
    Maybe. I'm just more than a little skeptical given that GP has a scant post history, and spends his other posts railing on about CRT being marxism. There's a lot of people pedaling this kind of IQ stuff to justify blatant racism, so you'll forgive me for wanting to see the data and not just letting statements like that fly by unchallenged.
    - lliamander 4y ago
      > Maybe. I'm just more than a little skeptical given that GP has a scant post history, and spends his other posts railing on about CRT being marxism. I do think the comments about CRT were a bit off-topic from this discussion. However, I do agree that CRT is Marxist and I doubt the original formulators of CRT would object to that characterization. The people I've seen most vigorously object to that characterization have been classic Marxists who object that CRT rejects the materialism of Marxism. From just about every other perspective, there is a great deal of overlap. > There's a lot of people pedaling this kind of IQ stuff to justify blatant racism, so you'll forgive me for wanting to see the data and not just letting statements like that fly by unchallenged. Fair enough. However, most of the misinformation about IQ is coming from the skeptics of IQ[1]. I'm aware that IQ research is sometimes used by racists, but that's only possible because certain political interests have done their level best to make IQ as radioactive as possible. It makes it hard for anyone not already on the fringes of society to engage in the research. [1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/
      - runarberg 4y ago
        To be frank IQ research is getting less and less relevant, and I suspect it has less to do with politics, and more to do with the fact that it has failed to further our understanding of human behavior and the human mind for the past 80 years. Much more interesting research has come from other fields of psychology, including (in order of peak popularity) behaviorism, cognitive psychology, social psychology, neuro-psychology. Unlike IQ works from these fields have made predictions in unrelated fields and inspired lasting paradigm shifts inside psychology. For example social psychology has provided very useful constructs used in economy, behaviorism in criminology, neuro-psychology in medicine, cognitive psychology in computer science etc. Scientifically IQ is a dead end. It only makes predictions inside the field of psychometrics, it correlates only with related constructs, the only place where it is used in an unrelated field is when racists are trying to excuse ludicrous statements. Note: This is not entirely true. IQ was (is?) used to assess cognitive disability in individuals, but today we have a lot better tools for that (thanks to cognitive and neuro-psychology), so it’s usefulness has been surpassed by other fields.
        lliamander 4y ago
        > To be frank IQ research is getting less and less relevant, and I suspect it has less to do with politics, and more to do with the fact that it has failed to further our understanding of human behavior and the human mind for the past 80 years. That's a fairly bold claim. Honest question: how did you come to that conclusion. > Scientifically IQ is a dead end. It only makes predictions inside the field of psychometrics, it correlates only with related constructs, the only place where it is used in an unrelated field is when racists are trying to excuse ludicrous statements. That's patently false. We already know it predicts academic ability (which is why MIT is reinstating the SAT requirement. It's an IQ test). And we also know it to be one of the best available[1] predictors of performance in cognitively complex work - like programming (Google's HR has publicly discussed this in the past). [1]"best available" here doesn't necessarily mean great, just better than the competition. In domains like psychology that have a high degree of causal complexity, you rarely have any single factor that explains more than 50% of the variance in some subject - heck even 10% is pretty good.
    - runarberg 4y ago
      You are right to be skeptical. Charles Murray is not the most reputable of scientists, and his book The Bell Curve is full of bad science to say the least, used to advocate for conservative (if not racist) policies. A fairly quick summary is available on the Wikipadia page for this book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Reception) where you can dive deeper by looking into the reference (I particularly recommend S.J. Gould which addresses scientific racism in length in the book Mismeasure of Man). There is also a long video essay by Shaun (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo) —if you have 3 hours to spare—which does an excellent job of summarizing the bad science and political agenda of The Bell Curve.
      - lliamander 4y ago
        Making a big deal of the controversy around The Bell Curve and then going on to recommend The Mismeasure of Man is deeply ironic. And why bring up the alleged racism when we are talking about class? The Bell Curve barely mentions race, and I'm not sure if Coming Apart does at all. I'll watch the video at some point as it actually reviews The Bell Curve but I urge readers to seek out what Murray has himself said (both in his books and in interviews). The smear of him as being a racist and political hack is quite without merit.
        runarberg 4y ago
        It is true it is a bit unfair to claim that the policies Murray were racist without providing context. Some of the research he used to back up his case definitely were but the policies he advocated for were for sure conservative but only racist by association (which is why I put it in parenthesis). Conservative values in the 1990s America were really really connected to race. The whole debate about “inner city crime” and the notion of the “welfare queen” were largely a dog whistle. And conservative policies which advocated for “tough on crime” and welfare elimination were most often doing so against a largely racialized group. I admit this is far fetched and maybe unfair. However I’m hardly the only one to accuse this book of being racist. The Wikipedia page is full of accusations, ranging from the aforementioned data from racist studies used unapologetically, to its advocates receiving funding from organizations associated with white-supremacy. EDIT: I also want to address why it is totally fair to advocate Mismeasure of Man as a counterargument to The Bell Curve. There is a level of scientific rigor which The Bell Curve fails and Mismeasure doesn’t. For example the studies used in The Bell Curve were—to put it bluntly—bad. The Bell Curve failed to go through peer-review, it misused concepts, relied on unbacked assumptions, reached a conclusion unrelated to the premise, etc. You might find that some of these criticism applies to Mismesure, but hardly all, and not nearly on the same level. As an objective—albeit arbitrary—measure, just look at the ratio of the Wikipedia articles for each book which is devoted to criticism and controversies. Almost the entire article about The Bell Curve goes into some controversies. If both books were criticized and surrounded in controversies, one was definitely worse then the other.

whynotminot 4y ago

I was asking more about class divides becoming IQ based. Do you have a citation for that.

lliamander 4y ago
That's the whole thesis of The Bell Curve and also Coming Apart, both works by Charles Murray. There's plenty of citations in those works as well. Edit: but beyond that, IQ-based class divides seems like a rather logical consequence of the following: 1. The heritability of IQ 2. Assortative mating 3. IQ being a significant determining factor of success in a given society
- whynotminot 4y ago
  Maybe. I'm just more than a little skeptical given that GP has a scant post history, and spends his other posts railing on about CRT being marxism. There's a lot of people pedaling this kind of IQ stuff to justify blatant racism, so you'll forgive me for wanting to see the data and not just letting statements like that fly by unchallenged.
  - lliamander 4y ago
    > Maybe. I'm just more than a little skeptical given that GP has a scant post history, and spends his other posts railing on about CRT being marxism. I do think the comments about CRT were a bit off-topic from this discussion. However, I do agree that CRT is Marxist and I doubt the original formulators of CRT would object to that characterization. The people I've seen most vigorously object to that characterization have been classic Marxists who object that CRT rejects the materialism of Marxism. From just about every other perspective, there is a great deal of overlap. > There's a lot of people pedaling this kind of IQ stuff to justify blatant racism, so you'll forgive me for wanting to see the data and not just letting statements like that fly by unchallenged. Fair enough. However, most of the misinformation about IQ is coming from the skeptics of IQ[1]. I'm aware that IQ research is sometimes used by racists, but that's only possible because certain political interests have done their level best to make IQ as radioactive as possible. It makes it hard for anyone not already on the fringes of society to engage in the research. [1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/
    - runarberg 4y ago
      To be frank IQ research is getting less and less relevant, and I suspect it has less to do with politics, and more to do with the fact that it has failed to further our understanding of human behavior and the human mind for the past 80 years. Much more interesting research has come from other fields of psychology, including (in order of peak popularity) behaviorism, cognitive psychology, social psychology, neuro-psychology. Unlike IQ works from these fields have made predictions in unrelated fields and inspired lasting paradigm shifts inside psychology. For example social psychology has provided very useful constructs used in economy, behaviorism in criminology, neuro-psychology in medicine, cognitive psychology in computer science etc. Scientifically IQ is a dead end. It only makes predictions inside the field of psychometrics, it correlates only with related constructs, the only place where it is used in an unrelated field is when racists are trying to excuse ludicrous statements. Note: This is not entirely true. IQ was (is?) used to assess cognitive disability in individuals, but today we have a lot better tools for that (thanks to cognitive and neuro-psychology), so it’s usefulness has been surpassed by other fields.
      - lliamander 4y ago
        > To be frank IQ research is getting less and less relevant, and I suspect it has less to do with politics, and more to do with the fact that it has failed to further our understanding of human behavior and the human mind for the past 80 years. That's a fairly bold claim. Honest question: how did you come to that conclusion. > Scientifically IQ is a dead end. It only makes predictions inside the field of psychometrics, it correlates only with related constructs, the only place where it is used in an unrelated field is when racists are trying to excuse ludicrous statements. That's patently false. We already know it predicts academic ability (which is why MIT is reinstating the SAT requirement. It's an IQ test). And we also know it to be one of the best available[1] predictors of performance in cognitively complex work - like programming (Google's HR has publicly discussed this in the past). [1]"best available" here doesn't necessarily mean great, just better than the competition. In domains like psychology that have a high degree of causal complexity, you rarely have any single factor that explains more than 50% of the variance in some subject - heck even 10% is pretty good.
  - runarberg 4y ago
    You are right to be skeptical. Charles Murray is not the most reputable of scientists, and his book The Bell Curve is full of bad science to say the least, used to advocate for conservative (if not racist) policies. A fairly quick summary is available on the Wikipadia page for this book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Reception) where you can dive deeper by looking into the reference (I particularly recommend S.J. Gould which addresses scientific racism in length in the book Mismeasure of Man). There is also a long video essay by Shaun (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo) —if you have 3 hours to spare—which does an excellent job of summarizing the bad science and political agenda of The Bell Curve.
    - lliamander 4y ago
      Making a big deal of the controversy around The Bell Curve and then going on to recommend The Mismeasure of Man is deeply ironic. And why bring up the alleged racism when we are talking about class? The Bell Curve barely mentions race, and I'm not sure if Coming Apart does at all. I'll watch the video at some point as it actually reviews The Bell Curve but I urge readers to seek out what Murray has himself said (both in his books and in interviews). The smear of him as being a racist and political hack is quite without merit.
      - runarberg 4y ago
        It is true it is a bit unfair to claim that the policies Murray were racist without providing context. Some of the research he used to back up his case definitely were but the policies he advocated for were for sure conservative but only racist by association (which is why I put it in parenthesis). Conservative values in the 1990s America were really really connected to race. The whole debate about “inner city crime” and the notion of the “welfare queen” were largely a dog whistle. And conservative policies which advocated for “tough on crime” and welfare elimination were most often doing so against a largely racialized group. I admit this is far fetched and maybe unfair. However I’m hardly the only one to accuse this book of being racist. The Wikipedia page is full of accusations, ranging from the aforementioned data from racist studies used unapologetically, to its advocates receiving funding from organizations associated with white-supremacy. EDIT: I also want to address why it is totally fair to advocate Mismeasure of Man as a counterargument to The Bell Curve. There is a level of scientific rigor which The Bell Curve fails and Mismeasure doesn’t. For example the studies used in The Bell Curve were—to put it bluntly—bad. The Bell Curve failed to go through peer-review, it misused concepts, relied on unbacked assumptions, reached a conclusion unrelated to the premise, etc. You might find that some of these criticism applies to Mismesure, but hardly all, and not nearly on the same level. As an objective—albeit arbitrary—measure, just look at the ratio of the Wikipedia articles for each book which is devoted to criticism and controversies. Almost the entire article about The Bell Curve goes into some controversies. If both books were criticized and surrounded in controversies, one was definitely worse then the other.