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.
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.
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.)
IQ-anon.
Btw, I love that China always has higher than average IQ, wonder if somebody there went ‘well this seems important to the capitalistpigdogs, lets give them a little bit higher average than they have numbers, just to fuck with them’.
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.
I hate that I read this. This kind of thing only seems convincing to someone who already believes the core hypothesis (IQ and race science real), but for someone of the correct opinion (IQ and race science not real), it’s total garbage.
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.
Lies, damn lies, racist statisticians, but P-VALUES ARE THE TRUTH I TELL YOU
did scoot at one time have the mask on
no, he scooted by on people’s good faith
and bullshitting and dogwhistling and obfuscation
I definitely don’t have the spoons to read this most recent of his emanations (yes, I am picking that word), but from just the start of it alone… god
the orange man isn’t even in the seat yet and all these motherfuckers are loudly shouting who they are
I see the title and thought you were referring to Big Cat Scott “Scoot” Henson (Rest in Power, beautiful tiger)
it’s a bloody biweekly caliper gentlemen’s club meeting in the replies there
“come closer, my child, I must feel your bumps and measure your cranium”
Steve Saller is in the comments calling himself moderately reasonable. Also woke enabled pakistani rape gangs in the top comments.
Cracker Johnny calls this ‘an unironically stunning and brave article and I’m here for it. I appreciate your post.’
TTLX thinks we should move to the obvious next step and finally start talking about how this is affected by deliberate sexual selection, combining inceldom and eugenics in a way that shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. Siskind chimes in to say that seeing results in 2-3 generations is unlikely unless you get real hardcore about it and only allow the top 10% IQ havers to reproduce, otherwise more like 20-30 gen for 15 points, because that’s how it worked for Askhenazis and also something something china.
E. Kirkegaard and his shitrag appear to be the sum total of his sources and he’s still trying to do the enlightened centrist thing of couching everything in ‘this is what people (who I implicitly consider qualified) have come up with to explain Lynn’s {absurd bullshit}’, which I guess at this point might possibly fool some of his Nepal-based readers (average IQ of 42 according to Lynn).
Uncharacteristically short post by slatescott, best he could come up with to explain how Lynn’s results are worth considering once we choose to ignore his vibe based research methodology and how he’s downstream of nazi money appears to be that:
- Lynn’s research is in fact anti-racist because US blacks not being uniformly mentally disabled supports nurture over genetics wrt IQ and
- really low IQ scores achktually fail to capture mental disability because it is comorbid with all sorts of impairments besides low IQ, and it’s really surely entirely possible to have a chat with a person who scored 60 on an IQ test and only realize something’s off when you try to discuss the finer points of HPATMOR with them, so having a functional country where the median IQ is several standard deviations below normal shouldn’t be out of the question.
Siskind doesn’t give a shit. If we take the above at face value the obvious conclusion is that IQ is garbage at what it’s supposed to be useful for, but the comment sections is currently full of HBD enthusiasts excited to finally be feeling seen and probably eager to send subscription money his way.
It isn’t just Kirkegaards shitrag btw, a while back some other race and IQ like paper who tried to prove that people didn’t all come from Africa or something had calculations which assumed the earth was flat. (prob not because they are flat earthers, but because they didn’t get the math).
Btw, on the really low IQ scores thing, this is an average. So if the bellcurve holds, this means there is a large amount of people in Africa with a sub 60 IQ. All of whom seemingly can function normally without needing assistance. Which means that either the measure is useless (and all these people with an IQ of 30 are doing fine (and in Nigeria are using the internet to scam IQ 130 westerners), and variants in IQ are meaningless (sorry to the 130+ average SSC reader), or the measurements are wrong (and also useless). Also, due to the bellcurve, university level IQ people from Africa should be so rare there is also just a handful of them. Which, considering we had a group of students from Africa (forgot which countries sorry) means I met all of them. (E: of course the supposed bell curve distribution of intelligence also doesn’t hold if you look at this graph and notice that there simply are no 140 IQ countries while there are 60 ones).
To me it doesn’t pass the sniff test, which makes me feel sorry for Scott, after all the extreme precautions he took to not get covid, it still blasted away his sense of smell.
They basically invent a special new type of mental impairment to apply to brown people to sidestep the need to explain why entire swaths of the global south aren’t desolate wastelands of barely functional people trying to converse in grunts, as predicted by Lynn’s research.
That the statistics of a mean IQ of nothing imply that you should be able to fit every current African university graduate in a room together seems pretty valid as a reductio ad absurdum of the whole affair, surprised I didn’t see it mentioned before.
I’ll admit, even I was not bold enough to simulate this one.
When you encounter a situation where Abort, Retry, and Fail are all solid options.
BEEP BOOP WHAT THE FUCK
I suppose the grey tribe pride parade is imminent.
Wow. Just, wow. (I actually clicked on the link to see if the title was accurate, and not just snark.)
To paraphrase one of South Park’s more infamous jokes (because I’m not giving this shit any dignity):
Looks like we’re getting a lotta sneer material here! The topic is “People Who Annoy Scoot”.
