It is important to distinguish between intelligence and knowledge. The former is the means and the latter is the end. There are many gifted individuals who never cultivate and employ their intelligence, and there are many who lack such a gift and yet accumulate vast sums of knowledge. The human mind, even the mediocre human mind, is extremely powerful. The focus on natural intelligence is merely a social fetish. You’ll often hear ignorant people go on and on about their impressive IQ’s and yet they cannot hold intelligent conversations.
Not at all Esuric, as nobody ever denied IQ was potential. But there’s also the fact that IQ correlates with work ethic (ability to delay gratification for example) and is the single best predictor for life outcome available.
The main problem cultural leftists have with IQ is plainly obvious and evident for everyone to see: It damages their theological beliefs concerning egalitarianism. They do not have a problem with its methodology, as its methodology is fine and it is the best proxy for g available, that much is mathetmatically demonstrable - No, their problem with it, to state again, is a political one. Basically they do not like the fact IQ highlights innate differences between individuals, classes and races on a cognitive level.
And I don’t know whether there has ever been a focus on natural intelligence from the mainstream. For the past 40 years leftists have worked tirelessly to make sure their beloved blank slate myths were upheld in the media and the general public. Anyone who dissents is punished. Libertarians should be schooled up about heritability and intelligence as well as racial realism anyway as it’s the most potent weapon in dismantling your average leftist’s worldview (yes, even more potent than econ).
Bipedal primates with highly evolved cognitive functions.
Bipedal primates with highly evolved cognitive functions.
unless they have no legs presumably.
unless they have no legs presumably.
or aren’t adhering to the culture of moral relativism, amirite?
Chomsky is in the business of selling lies about how bad it is to trade and I can’t forgive myself that I have read so many of his books and seen so many of his lectures. That famous debate between him and Foucault was interesting though.
This does not refute my position in anyway whatever. The fact of the matter is that there simply is no direct 1-1 causal relationship between natural intelligence, knowledge, and success. If what you said were true, then the Asian race, which outperforms all other races on such tests, would not find itself in its current, and historical, destitute socioeconomic condition. It’s quite obvious that IQ is merely one variable amongst many.
Also, denying that your entire existence is genetically predetermined is not a “leftist position.” It’s common sense.
No it’s not. Economics employs pure logic and reveals that leftist fantasies are inherently self-defeating. This IQ crap is a strawman. A Leftist could respond one of two ways: (A) agree that there is a correlation between race and IQ, but show that such correlation is spurious by revealing a much stronger and statistically significant correlation between socioeconomic status and IQ, or (B) tell you that leftists have higher IQ’s relative to “conservatives.” They could site numerous studies in order to support their position. Of course, there are responses to both (A) and (B), but my only point is that economics and logic are the most powerful weapons against socialist fallacies.
Libertarians should be schooled up about heritability and intelligence as well as racial realism anyway as it’s the most potent weapon in dismantling your average leftist’s worldview (yes, even more potent than econ).
Are you familiar with Charles Murray?
Why does there need to be a 1-1 relationship? All that matters is that it shows strong predictive qualities, as is, it shows the strongest predictive qualities out of a range of posited causational factors like SES. See Gottfredson’s research, there is not a single better metric for assessing life outcome than IQ. Hell, see Ree and Earles research (1992), which shows it’s also the best predictor of job performance. Not to mention Deary’s research on how well it shows academic performance (almost perfectly) and Rindermann’s research which shows how predictive it is of economic success.
“In longitudinal analyses with various samples of nations, education and cognitive abilities appear to be more important as developmental factors for GDP than economic freedom. Education and intelligence are also more relevant to economic welfare than vice versa”
The g-factor of international cognitive ability comparisons: the homogeneity of results in PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS and IQ-tests across nations
Huh? There is no such thing as the ‘Asian race’, there are East Asians, Central Asians and South Asians - Those are the genetic cluster points. Within the East Asian group, there is the sub-racial group of Northeast Asians (Koreans, Japanese and Han Chinese). The former two of these enjoy the highest average IQs in the world, and very high living standards as well, Han Chinese may not enjoy as high living standards but they are growing year-on-year at an astonishing rate, so they’re just playing catch up after all that time under Communism.
Weren’t you just complaining about strawmen…?
Nobody believes in absolutist genetic determinism, however, if you believe you can ‘school’ a person with an IQ of 85 to become a brain surgeon then you are in for a nasty surprise.
And they’d be wrong, that argument hasn’t really been attempted by leftists since the 1980s - Their excuses these days are, as a result, getting steadily more absurd. For example a recent claim is that murder rates affect IQ. G correlates with race far more than it does SES, you need only see SAT results for that.
Also, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t refer to it as ‘IQ crap’, it may not be your thing but as candidate genes and neuroscientific factors behind intelligence begin to be discovered this is a really exciting time to be following the work of intelligence experts.
Of course.
This isn’t really telling me much. It could be the case that such tests and “indicators” are generally bad at predicting future individual outcomes. In fact, this seems quite likely. Also, how do you define “success?” If by success you mean material wealth, then the average African American, living in the U.S., is vastly more successful than the average Northeast Asian.
The standard of living in Northeast Asia, with the exception of the Japanese, pales in comparison to the developed western/European (white) world (especially true for China). Also, Asian civilization has been lagging behind Western European civilization for the better part of two millennia now, and this includes the Japanese. But now you’re breaking it into sub-groups, and sub-sub groups, and sub-sub-sub-groups.
This is my point. It’s not definitive. The logic of economics is absolute. When debating a leftist you merely reveal the fact that your arguments are the necessary deductions from self-evident premises. In doing so, you will force them to either (a) concede the point, or (b) deny that which is self-evident.
Of course not, but I doubt that you will find much variation between 110-135. Either way, my only point was that intelligence is a tool which must be employed correctly if it is to be useful at all. Some people use this tool incorrectly, and many don’t use it at all.
This seems rather absurd to me. If they are extremely good, on average, at predicting life outcome. It follows from that they will be a good metric of assessing life outcome amongst a group of individuals. It’s the same thing after all, if you mean whether there are anomalies, then yeah, sure, but they’re anomalies precisely because they defy general trends.
Your argument reminds me of the old ‘average and the leftist’ parable:
Rational person: Men are on average taller than women
Leftist: That’s not true! I know some women who are taller than some men!
Wealth.
Uh. They are? Even moreso than South Koreans? You seem to omit purposefully that Chinese have lived under a system that effectively barred material gain and natural market forces for most of the past half century. That’s obviously going to have a distortive effect.
Northeast Asians are richer and have a higher academic attainment rate in the US than Whites, Hispanics or Blacks.
And as I said, you’re ignoring the distortive effects of Communism, a forcibly egalitarian system upon Chinese.
You may want to retract that, it demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of History. China only began to lag behind the West in technological innovation in the late 18th century. So no, it isn’t ‘the better part of two millenia’ by any standard. Don’t make me drag up a list of Chinese inventions and innovations. The Han Empire even outperformed Rome in terms of agricultural innovation.
What isn’t? That there are group differences (race, class etc) in innate intelligence, the former being as a result of differing environments in which human races evolved? That is definite. It’s beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Agreed. But you seem to miss just how much of their policy is based on blank slate thinking. Look at the ‘evidence’ leftists use for ‘employers racially discriminating’ or ‘gender discrimination in the labor force’ or whatever fantasy they’re conocting as of this present time: They are ALL based around unequal outcomes. That is, they see that less women are employed in banking, or less blacks are employed in engineering and they automatically assume that there is some phantom discrimination at work somewhere, because the entire basis of their belief system is that all humans have equal capabilities. What they don’t seem to understand is that ‘equal opportunities’ and ‘equal outcomes’ are mutually exclusive concepts. So by attacking leftists by employing the work of intelligence experts (geneticists, neuroscientists, behavioral psychologists etc), you’re basically undermining the foundation of their belief: The equality of humanity on an innate level.
See Gottfredon’s compilation of Hernstein and Murray’s data, there is a large difference:
Your inability to comprehend what I’m saying is absurd. How do you define good? IQ tests may be the best indicators of future individual performance, but this, again, doesn’t say much. The fact that it is relatively better than all other indicators says nothing about its actual tenability.
This is not what I’m saying at all, so please, let go of the strawmen. I’m talking about billions of individuals, who are supposed to be the most intelligent people on earth, who are at the same time trapped in complete poverty.
Yes. South Korea’s GDP per capita is at $19,000 per year, which is below the U.S. poverty line.
No, they embraced and fought for communism. No government rules without consent of the majority. The question remains: how could the most intelligent race in the world fall for such a fallacy?
I don’t care about U.S. statistics, and leftists would respond by pointing to social variables. You’re making a universal claim about genetic predisposition. If what you say is true, then we should expect similar outcomes all over the world, and not just in the U.S.
Wrong. Greek and Roman society far surpassed Asian civilizations when it came to innovation, philosophy, government, ect. The Asian civilizations embraced mysticism while the classical’s embraced rationalism. Of course, the medieval period is seen as a period of relative stagnation, but the west made enormous strides in architecture, law, agriculture, ect. There’s no need to get into the industrial revolution and classical liberalism.
Your argument does not reveal the inherent absurdity of socialist fantasies. You will continuously point to your studies, and they will point to theirs. They will attempt to show that your correlation is spurious by pointing to social variables. But even if they conceded the point, their central arguments would remain in tact. The only thing that can unravel socialist mysticism is logic.
You can make a far more powerful argument if you appealed to economics. The socialists were refuted by Austrian economists who showed that their framework is impossible, even if all individuals were identical, and if the socialists could somehow undo and rebuild human nature.
Alright, lets look at some data, from Rinderman:
“International cognitive ability and achievement comparisons stem from different research traditions. But analyses at the interindividual data level show that they share a common positive manifold. Correlations of national ability means are even higher to very high (within student assessment studies, r = .60-.98; between different student assessment studies [PISA-sum with TIMSS-sum] r = .82-.83; student assessment sum with intelligence tests, r = .85-.86). Results of factor analyses indicate a strong g-factor of differences between nations (variance explained by the first unrotated factor: 94-95%).”
And from Deary:
“Deary took the analysis a step further however and did a little latent variable modeling. As the IQ test had three components/subtests (verbal, nonverbal, quantitative), he correlated a latent g factor with a latent academic factor using the following subtests: English, English Literature, Math, Science, Geography, French (n=12519). The correlation between the latent factors was .81. That is: 66% of the variance in latent (general) academic achievement can be explained by latent cognitive ability—measured 5 years previously.”
So IQ/g accounts for variance in academic achievement of about .75 as a rough average.
Again, you don’t think living under a system of forced equality is going to skew the data at all?
Taking different racial groups within a similar environment is far fairer a backdrop to use.
False.
Paper, belt drive, compass, exploitation of natural gas, seed drill, iron plow… These are all innovations and advancements that Han China achieved but Rome did not, the latter two allowed them to maintain a far larger population as well and that’s not counting the Tang/Song dynasties. I don’t know why you cite Greek/Roman systems of Government as superior - The Chinese at least achieved formalized meritocratic processes for officialdom (Imperial Examinations) while Rome basically used patronage instead (inferior system). Athenian democracy was a failure also and should not be admired.
Why don’t you care about them? They’re perfectly valid. And again, leftists would be demonstrably wrong. For example:
How do you explain the fact that Black students from families with incomes of $80,000 to $100,000 score considerably lower on the SAT than White students from families with $20,000 to $30,000 incomes? How do you explain why social class factors, all taken together, only cut the Black-White achievement gap by a third? Culture-only theory cannot predict these facts; often its predictions are opposite to the empirical results.
Provided that they live under capitalism, yes.
oh that’s interesting, some test for intelligence correlates with some other tests for intelligence.
All tests, so long as they have some cognitive basis to them (even reaction time tests) have a positive manifold.
It is obvious they measure some underlying, innate factor.
I have noticed, usually, that if people have a problem with IQ tests it is because of political reasons. In other words, they expose things they’d rather not hear.
most people don’t have problems with IQ tests… they have problems with how people interpret them/argue from them to other things.
Such as?
You’re referring to politically incorrect things such as racial differences in intelligence, right?
Do you agree with the way other cultural leftists bully and smear scientists who do research into such matters?
I’m referring to stuff like this:During this period, the debate was tinged with controversy when two public figures repeated in interviews the claim of Lynn and Rushton that one of the main causes for poverty in Africa is the low average intelligence among sub-Saharan Africans.
I am opposed to cultural leftist bullying and smearing scientists.