October 1, 2007

New York Times on IQ

More from "The New Affirmative Action" by Dave Leonhardt in the NYT Magazine:

NYT: "Even if U.C.L.A. tried to get around Proposition 209 by giving a big leg up to low-income applicants, it wouldn’t increase its black population very much. At every rung of the socioeconomic ladder, the academic record of black students is worse than that of other groups. As Taylor says: “There is a great deal of pressure to look for a proxy for race. There is no proxy for race.”"
Indeed.
NYT: "He and many other defenders of affirmative action consider this to be a self-evident fact, but there has also been a good deal of social science to support the view that the specific problems surrounding race — including discrimination — endure. One illustrative study found that résumés with typically black names are less likely to lead to job interviews than those with typically white names. Other recent studies have looked at intelligence testing. There have long been two uncomfortable facts in this area: Intelligence, indisputably, is in part genetic; and every intelligence test shows a gap between black Americans and others. For a long time, scientific research wasn’t very good at explaining this gap. But it has gotten better lately. For one thing, the gap between white and black adults has narrowed significantly since 1970, according to work by the noted researchers William Dickens and James Flynn."

No, it hasn't. According to Flynn's new book, the gap among adults is currently 16.5 points, same as always. It has narrowed among children.
NYT: "Four decades is too short a time period for the gene pool to change, but it’s not too short for environment to improve. Most intriguing, Roland Fryer and Steven D. Levitt, two economists (the latter is one of this magazine’s Freakonomics columnists), have found there to be essentially no gap between 1-year-old white and black children of the same socioeconomic status."

I always love how the New York Times is oh-so-skeptical about IQ testing in general, except when it supports something they like, and then credulity is the order of the day. Look, there is no IQ test for 1-year-olds. What Levitt did in this paper is show that a test of infant liveliness (e.g., how often the infant babbles) that has a low but positive correlation with childhood IQ doesn't show the normal differences between the races at age 8 to 12 months. Indeed, the highest IQ children (Northeast Asians) do the worst on this test of infant vivacity. With a typical Freakonomic leap of faith, Levitt and Fryer suggested that this shows that IQ differences aren't genetic but are caused by environmental differences, presumably between age 1 and the earliest ages at which IQ tests are semi-reliable.

Of course, all Levitt actually did was show that this test of infant liveliness is a racially biased predictor of IQ. Why is it racially biased? Well, there are lots more ways for something to go wrong than to go right, but one obvious possibility is that the test of infant alertness might measure traits that differ on average between the races, but aren't related to IQ differences between the races. For example, within a race, babies that babble more turn out to be a little bit smarter on average than more taciturn babies. Yet, Asian infants don't babble as much on average as other babies, but that doesn't mean they'll turn out to have lower IQs on average than babies from races that babble more. But pointing out that this test of babies is racially biased is not as sexy a story as claiming it shows Nurture Triumphs Over Nature.

NYT: "There are still vigorous debates about all this work — intelligence tests of 1-year-olds are iffy, for instance — but it points in one direction. Innate intelligence may be partly genetic, but it doesn’t seem to vary by race."

Sailer: No comment.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

30 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is there no end to this torturous liberal duplicity on race and IQ? I'm almost beginning to feel sorry for them.

Anonymous said...

University of Michigan President, Mary Sue Coleman, is also doing admirable work in thwarting the public's will on MI's recently passed law, the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (Prop 2), which bans programs in public hiring, public employment, and public education that “give preferential treatment to” or “discriminate against” individuals on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity or national origin”

Her response and argument are:

(1) Diversity makes UM a strong, great, and world-class university resulting in better learning, teaching and research and creating a rich, invigorating environment
a. How does bringing in high numbers of unqualified, underperforming students, professors, researchers and employees make UM better and not worse?
b. How does bringing in high numbers of underperformers who are radicalized in the face of their predictable struggles by their skin color and prevailing race-based preferences help create a rich, invigorating and even open environment instead of a censored one.
(2) AA has helped create diversity
a. Yes, diversity of skin color and lower standards by adding a lot of underperformers with inability to complete in most competitive fields like math, science, engineering and computer science).
(3) She will not let UM become less diverse and thus mediocre and will do all she can to preserve preferential racial preferences in admission, faculty and staff hiring, outside contracting, etc at UM
a. She will fight to ensure UM is racists in it practices
(4) Therefore she will fight against Prop 2, whose voters she is disappointed in, and “will do whatever it takes” while “comply(ing) with the laws of the state)
a. She will ignore the voter will, flaunt the law and use taxpayer monies to do so

She points to Prop 209 in California passed 10yrs prior as a horribly failed experiment in dramatically reducing diversity at CA’s most selective universities. In these past ten years, California premier universities now rank at the bottom by nearly every metric from academic rankings, publication output and patents filed. Similarly, students admitted have progressively lower GPAs/SAT and have increasingly failed to thrive both at university and in the work world.

She has assigned UM lawyers (paid with tax-payer dollars) to find any loophole to thwart taxpayer will as expressed in the law on her “crusade for equal rights”. This implies that skin color alone (not talent, motivation or achievement) is the primary criteria for UM admissions in her “crusade for equal rights”.

Anonymous said...

"Innate intelligence may be partly genetic, but it doesn’t seem to vary by race."

I lost 3 IQ points just reading that. How idiotic. Imagine if this were a discussion of animals, and the NYT was claiming that canine intelligence was partly genetic, but doesn't seem to vary by breed...

I think a lot of lefties profess belief in evolution simply because they hate Christianity and think evolution discredits it, but don't actually know or want to know anything about the theory.

Anonymous said...

I know that this has been said many times before, but, Liberalism is a religion. And a powerful one. But, as a religion, it is no different than Islam or anything else.

They are not going to print something, regardless of how true it might be, if it contradicts what they preach.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for clearing up the mystery of the "IQ test for 1-year olds."

I was thinking about blogging about this article, but then I figured that there's nothing to say about the NYT for the 10 zillionth time printing stuff that politically correct but scientificallly incorrect about IQ>

Anonymous said...

I always love how the New York Times is oh-so-skeptical about IQ testing in general, except when it supports something they like, and then credulity is the order of the day.

Well put. Yes, the hypocrisy of the NYT on this issue is apparent, but it doesn't hurt to point it out again from time to time -- maybe they'll get a clue.

Moving away from IQ, but keeping to the other themes of universities and media hypocrisy, I would like to ask: When will we see an article in the mainstream media pointing out another obvious fact -- that the recent (what seems like to me an) upsurge in criminality, even deadly violence, involving college and professional athletes almost exclusively involves Blacks?

The two latest examples:

Memphis' campus closed after lineman shot to death - the victim: Taylor Bradford.

UMass freshman stabbed after school dance - the victim: Johnny Evans.

I couldn't be the only one who has noticed this. It seems some of these schools are bringing the worst of black ghetto violence right onto their campuses, I guess in the cause of having more competitive sports teams. It must be true that many of these guys really have no business being on a college campus in the first place. It seems like a very bad tradeoff to me.

eh

Ron Guhname said...

"Diversity makes UM a strong, great, and world-class university resulting in better learning, teaching and research and creating a rich, invigorating environment."

Diversity does not enrich education; it ruins it. Four years of college education has become a steady drum beat of lies that The Big Bad White Man is to blame for the underperformance of everyone else in the world.

The whiter the classroom, the better the instruction I give them because I can get closer to an full, frank presentation of the facts. Diversity produces lies in the name of harmony and civility. The institution charged with finding the truth has become a lie factory.

Anonymous said...

Is there no end to this torturous liberal duplicity on race and IQ?

Huh? What duplicity? It's called compassion. And any frustrations you may have are a product of your own primitive outlook.

Liberals are smart. While you are obsessed with the "truth", they are building a compassionate society. That is what matters. Those are real facts on the ground on campuses across the nation. As a top Neo-Con (right liberal) administration official recently said regarding Iraq, "we create our own reality".

From Hollywood to Wall Street to the Ivy League to the Pentagon, today's progressive thinkers understand the requirement to "move the argument beyond the truth". Whether it be in academia, Iraq or the financial markets, truth is an obstacle to growth. The world economy has never been more robust and if it takes $500 trillion of derivative debt to make that happen, so be it. The ends justify the means.

Feeling "tortured" by duplicity is the outcome only for dull black & white thinkers. Complex, nuanced thinking allows that the issues are gray, not b&w. There is a higher truth here than the Bell Curve stats. That higher truth is the progressive agenda of making the world a better place. That's reality. Actual facts on the ground are created.

And that is something the dumb conservatives have never been able to grasp. They just don't have the intellectual firepower.

Anonymous said...

"Innate intelligence may be partly genetic, but it doesn’t seem to vary by race."

Ok, so if we accept Sailer's common-sense definition that race is a large human family (inred to some degree), what they are saying is that intelligence is partially genetic, but it doesn't run in families.

WTF????!!!!!!

Abe said...

Liberals might be duplicitous about the available data on race and IQ because of concern for minorities, namely, that the data would be used as a weapon by the forces of Jared Talor/David Duke to argue for segregation...as they have. To whit, if such differences are genetic, then differences are irreconceivable and the best solution to any "race" problem is seperation. Either that or they don't want to hurt the feelings of low scoring minorities--it's a form of politeness. I can imagine that liberals will not face the issue until indisputable evidence emerges for a genetic basis to the racial disparity.

Anonymous said...

No politicians have the will to fight this stuff now that it's dressed up as kumbaya diversity as opposed to reparations for blacks under the label affirmative action. We're all supposed to benefit by diversity; it's not supposed to be a quid pro quo. Of course, tell that to Howard and Wellsley

Anonymous said...

"Diversity makes UM a strong, great, and world-class university resulting in better learning, teaching and research and creating a rich, invigorating environment"

Yes, we can prove that easily enough. Why one only has to contrast the scientific & engineering acheivements of the entire history of Brazil with the wickedly poor outcomes of horribly homogenous Japan (or *gulp* Nazi Germany).

TabooTruth said...

Anonymous 9:24, you hit it on point.

Even though the concept of evolutionary psychology is painful to the right wing religious, it is just as harmful to the left's idealism. I don't know how much longer either the far left or far right can avoid hard discussions on evolution and genetics.

Also, remember that heritability INCREASES with age, so babies are affected by genetics much less than adults (this is proven by twin studies).

Keep Rushton in mind too, in the development speed disparities between races. Black children are able to hold up their head before other races, so they actually have an advantage in any infant IQ tests that use how far someone has developed as a proxy for IQ, even if those tests are valid within races.

Anonymous said...

It's amusing to watch this charade continue. The Left never stops to notice that college degrees mean less and less to employers today. I wonder why they aren't respected as much as they used to be......

Anonymous said...

"One illustrative study found that résumés with typically black names are less likely to lead to job interviews than those with typically white names."

Good hiring policies directly affect the bottom line. Even if not familiar with the details, most employers intuitively understand that group membership influences the probability of a prospective employee's success. Depending of supply and demand, the effect can vary from trivial to profound. Details have been described quantitatively, here: www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/dct.htm and here:
www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/stalkers/em_bayes.html

Anonymous said...

I think a lot of lefties profess belief in evolution simply because they hate Christianity and think evolution discredits it, but don't actually know or want to know anything about the theory.
As an agnostic atheist, I feel that if it were somehow proved to me that all races are identical in IQ, that would be proof of creationism or intelligent design. It's simply that tremendously implausible, even ignoring all the evidence against it.

Abe said...

There has been no proof capable of withstand scientific scrutiny substantiating a genetic basis for the racial IQ gap. The best that the IQists have is an argument dressed up in the fabric of science but for which we are waiting...still waiting...substantial evidence to back up. "The revolution will happen any day now!" cries John Derbyshire of the National Review every other day. Methinks he'll be waiting until he croaks.

Anonymous said...

Red wine,

Even if you are being sarcastic, your post represents one of the more honest explanations that drives a lot of elite White liberals on affirmative action even if they aren’t aware of it: the pursuit of creating a better society via the injustice of artificially bestowing institutional compassionate to some (Blacks/Hispanics) by being uncompassionate to others (middle class Whites/Asians). Black and Hispanic AA supporters on the other hand tend to just demand handouts with an angry post-colonial Marxists-type justification: from each white middle-class person according to their ability, to each black/Hispanic according to their desire as payback for historic, present and inherit future slights.

The problem with such systems of idealistic social engineering divorced from objective standards and material contributions (via talent, motivation and achievement) is they historically retard human progress, impoverish society and lead to a downward spiral of ruthless nepotism and corruption amid fights for diminishing resources between factions claiming to hold better intuitions about the one true way. Such compassionate idealism unteathered from the constraints of independently discoverable and just truths was the driving force behind some of history’s worst social organizations such as the reigns of terror in revolutionary France and Lenin's USSR. Take a look at most any Black or Hispanic-run city in America or Black dominated agencies of the federal government for examples of progressive thought clearly moving beyond truth in even limited arenas.

Derivative debt is not an example of moving beyond truth unless you lack the intellectual firepower comprehend anything but rudimentary financial concepts. Like any sophisticated tool, it can be abused but markets inevitably and ruthlessly punish inefficiencies and scams. Feeling “tortured” by reality is the outcome for dull black & white dreamers. Complex, nuanced thinking allows for the incorporation of reality with ones idealism, not the rejection of it.

Anonymous said...

First of all - wow: LGdL just posted here.

Second, Roach: No politicians have the will to fight this stuff now that it's dressed up as kumbaya diversity as opposed to reparations for blacks under the label affirmative action. We're all supposed to benefit by diversity; it's not supposed to be a quid pro quo. Of course, tell that to Howard and Wellsley

No politicians have the will to fight this stuff now that minorities have turned the demographic tide:

Of U.S. Children Under 5, Nearly Half Are Minorities

The Derb touched on this in his recent NRO Diary:

The Derb: If you’d asked me this question up to a few weeks ago, I’d have responded with a sad smile and a significant silence — or, if you caught me at a bad moment, with a blunt “Are you nuts?” But now, you know, I’m not so sure.

The reason I’m not sure is that there are signs that 2008 may be the first U.S. presidential election in which white tribalism is a big factor; and that if it is a factor, it will be to the GOP’s advantage...

As the Anglo proportion of the population dwindles, (a) the blithe confidence that Anglos have carried forward from the days — not so long ago, well within the memory of middle-aged citizens — when the U.S.A. was close to 90 percent Anglo, and (b) the feelings of sentimental, mildly guilty indulgence towards minorities that Anglos have been encouraged to hold since the Civil Rights revolution, will collide with (c) the rising awareness that continuing voluntarily to exclude themselves from the racial spoils system may not be a terrific idea...


I hate to out-pessimisize the master, but it seems to me that "racial spoils" are the least of our worries.

I see no reason whatsoever that "they" won't keep voting themselves more and more of "our" private property until there literally isn't anything left to vote themselves.

Hillary's already dangling free health insurance & $5000 baby-birthing gift certificates in their faces, and it just doesn't seem like it will be all that long before these geniuses decide to seize everything:

Zimbabwe's last white farmers face final push

Zimbabwe runs out of bread

[Parenthetically, and at the risk of sounding like a hopeless anti-semite: Does there ever come a point at which the Jews will wake up and declare, "Nope, sorry, you can't have any more of our shekels"?]

I honestly don't see a pretty resolution to any of this.

I suppose there's some faint hope that we might get a constitutionally-correct reading of the subject to the jurisdiction clause, but that's a long shot.

The more I study the numbers, the more I see a very ugly future in store for us.

I suppose you could fantasize about something like a peaceful "Red State" secession, but the last time that was attempted, it ended in the greatest carnage the world had ever seen.

Anonymous said...

Steve --

You've mentioned, in a stereotypical way ;), that those who can't cut it in engineering move on to sociology. Who has decided -- through what logic and criteria -- that sociology deserves being a dumping ground for the less talented, the clueless about science? Has anyone ever looked into this?

Why is it considered that economics is supposed to be the "smart" discipline among the "human" sciences followed by psychology (typically, the cognitive behavioral variety), then maybe by anthropology and linguistics, etc., till the reach the bottom of the food chain with sociology? Isn't it supposed to be the other way around where sociologists SYNTHESIZE the findings of biology, physical anthropology, cognitive behavioral psychology + linguistics, economics (and maybe history studied more rigorously with archeological and statistical models) etc.?

Other than economics and pyschology, human sciences cannot be "practical" disciplines since -- to quote Robin Williams whose son is studying linguistics -- you cannot open a "sentence repair shop" or invent a "socioeconomic status cure medicine." This doesn't necessarily mean those departments should act as expansion areas for universities to suck more tuition money by suckering the witless who should probably not get anywhere near a college, and who would be more useful doing "support" jobs in industry (using La Griffe'S criteria, the first group above the cut off point for the "smart fraction.")

Can we conspiratorially claim maybe the powers that be don't really want a proper human science studying our reality, an endeavour that'll inevitably reflect on everything political?

--

Detour:
One reason for the relentless fight between engineering types -- probably quite a few of the visitors of this forum -- and the human sciences types is, for most people, the "practical" aspect defines the discipline. In other words, when it comes to the "product" of an education, if you can't eat it, have sex with it, ride it, or at least sit on it or something, then it is useless.

(Detour within detour: The practical disciplines are characterized by being "INSTRUMENT"-oriented (I won't call it "object-oriented" since it is terribly confusing my coder mind :D), whereas those like anthropology are more "ECO-SYSTEM" oriented -- hence their "impracticality" since it is impossible to invent, design, build, or repair ecosystems. The more practical a human science discipline becomes, the more "instrumental" it gets: psychology - you can cure someone with CBT, an instrumental concern; economics - you can propose a plan to increase a company's revenues, an instrumental concern. Etc.)

This is probably also where the division line between the high-status sermonizers and the, ahem, bike-building chest-beaters come into the picture. The classical division between "citizens" in Greece (whom we now call the "elites") and the rest is alive and well here. Bike-builders can't stand the guts of "citizen" types, and IQ seems to be one of the intellectual weapons [*] through which they seem zealously over-eager to deride elites and dump them in favor of a more libertarian politics and economy. The "citizens," however, have a different view -- such as preaching the virtues of diversity -- and can't be bothered with mundane and "plebian" things like visuo-spatial skills.

Just a starting point for some of you to do your bike-builder... err, sermonizing. :D

--

To all: I'm throwing this bone for discussion. Please avoid agenda-ridden responses. A bit of brainstorming would help here.


JD

[*] Bike-builders are not the kind to appreciate notions like "intellectual weapon," so don't tell 'em. It probably feels "sissy" to them. A weapon has to shoot, you know. In the bike-building paradigm of history, Tyrannesaurus Rex was a more evolved creature than a modern humanities type like Daniel Larison (who seems to be writing so much "sissy" anti-militaristic things these days.)

Just teasing, guys. Impulse control, please :D

Steve Sailer said...

Right. It would make sense for anthropology to be the king of the human sciences and sociology the queen, or something like that, with economics and psychology as the jacks, but it doesn't work that way at present.

Anonymous said...

Steve:

The purpose of my posting was to spur discussion to explore why what is is what it is -- not to claim that you fail to appreciate the beauty of present-day sociology or anything. I share your frustration with the wrecking of education as I happen to suffer from it to higher degrees than most visitors of this forum. But complaining permanently that the powers that be are just stupid does not itself explain why such tendencies have emerged and are beginning to ossify.

In other words, I'm trying to understand the sociology of the current situation.

To all:

I have sensed something else while I was writing my previous comment.

It seems I was hinting at why the IQ thing does not become such a popular measure: because it is not the kind of thing that separates the CITIZEN from the PLEB.

Despite all that American Whiggism (or "populism" if that word makes you day), societies naturally tend towards Toryism. Which may be why unless American conservatism drops populism in favor of an elitist conservatism, IQ may never become popular. (A speculation, so write you responses.)

(To unfold the twists in that last paragraph: populists prefer IQ as an "equal opportunity" instrument of an allegedly classless society; no such society exists, and none can exist (I claim); the elites of all societies will resist that trend, and will deny the lower classes every opportunity for higher status; IQ is the most solid way to claim higher status; more tragically, populist "status-based" opporunity-egalitarianism leads to opportunistic status-based elitism, the most stifling version of it (as we're witnessing at the moment); ergo, unless the elites of a society feel secure in their position, they will not have the self-confidence to tolerate IQ as a measure for discrimination.)

To all of you whose brains are being poisoned by excessive secretions of testosterone as you read these lines, just think of this: would you rather have a system where your precious daughter, who has studied archeology and is now writing novels, be wedded to a bike-builder with a 135 IQ from the "Appalachians" (as an outsider, I'm probably wrong with the symbolism here, but then I'm using it only descriptively, not judgementally), or would you rather her marry someone from your own, ahem, "class?"

The most amazing thing about this preoccupation with IQ is the fact that most of us (myself included) who can appreciate the meaning of a bell-shaped distribution -- due to which, we know that, say in the context of "height," although some women are taller than some men, men ON AVERAGE are taller than women in aggregate -- and who understand that human groups have a great vested interest in cooperation via concentric kinship relations can then turn around and subscribe to the "evolution as a heathen struggle for all against all" version of Darwinism and expect social systems to be entirely individualistic and "fair" -- assuming we have all agreed on what fair is.

(To continue the reasoning above, we may tolerate discrimination based on height between men or women, but not both -- i.e. it's an XOR op. Similarly, elites will tolerate discrimination based on IQ between kids of same class, but not across classes.)

I'll infuriate you even further: if you can show me one societal example in history where a schooling system accepted parents' darlings -- regardless of their IQ levels -- being treated as equals with those they consider from "inferior" classes just because they have equal gifts, I'll print my words here and eat those sheets publicly.

(Again, a detour -- Maybe it's like this: disciplines like sociology are there so that the lower portion of the upper classes' kids get their "college-grad" status symbols while the upper portion become doctors, lawyers, and engineers. The lower portion of the lower classes become, well, screw-ups and "white trash" (only used descriptively) while the upper portion become bike-builders, and they terminally resent the lower portion of the upper classes, hence their rage against sociology students. Just a speculation.)

So, now, how do we define a "fair" system based on IQ, gentlemen? The way we pick footballers? Instrumentally, that is? Would you be offended if I said "dream on," and added that as instrument-oriented males, you have a rather poor sociological (i.e. human ecosystemic) imagination?

Alright, now you can lynch me, go ahead.


JD

Again, the purpose is to spur discussion, not to posture. I'd really appreciate if you avoided sarcasm.

Anonymous said...

Uhhh, WTF is a "bike-builder"?

Or maybe I should say, WTF is a "bike"?

Are you talking about Wilbur & Orville?

Anonymous said...

'...be wedded to a bike-builder with a 135 IQ from the "Appalachians..."'

I expect there are plenty of Appalachian-Americans reading this - I'm married to one (and I'm a Scots-Irish Ulsterman myself). Charles 'Bell Curve' Murray is Scots-Irish.

In fact I'd go so far as to say that us Scots-Irish are probably particularly interested in IQ because such meritocratic notions of worth give us a better chance to compete successfully with the higher-status elites (Yankees in USA, southern 'home counties' English in UK) who try to keep us down. Affirmative Action/Diversity has been a great way to prevent lower socioeconomic-status whites from getting to good Universities, getting good jobs etc, and the Scots-Irish suffer disproportionately from this, because we are a cultural-Marxism designated 'oppressor' group, but without the comforting wealth & status of 'elite' white groups.

Anonymous said...

Derivative debt is not an example of moving beyond truth unless you lack the intellectual firepower comprehend anything but rudimentary financial concepts. Like any sophisticated tool, it can be abused but markets inevitably and ruthlessly punish inefficiencies and scams

Just recalling that Warren Buffet once called derivatives "financial weapons of mass destruction".

fritz pettyjohn said...

As the arbiter of politically correct conventional wisdom, the NY Times now concedes that IQ has a genetic component. This is progress. To insist, at the same time, that group differences in IQ are entirely environmental is such an exercise in willful ignorance that its got to give these dopes a migraine.

MensaRefugee said...

Thing about using IQ is it has spin off benefits for society as a whole.

Using Elite Power Structures tends towards stagnation. Embracing change and avoiding stagnation is much more "eco-system" friendly in my book than "Instrument" friendly.

Contrast The Former Soviet Union with the United States to examine the differences.

There, I got my sarcasm and seething rage in in an intellectual way. Im off for KFC. Cheers!

Anonymous said...

"Therefore, it is only logical that blacks reach sexual maturity 1 to two years earlier than whites, and might even be smarter than whites or asians during their first years of life. Since their potential is lower, they reach it earlier."

By that logic, delaying puberty will increase intelligence. Your reasoning might be somewhat on target relating specifically to females & ability to do math but you'd have to do some research - i.e. find women who major in Engineering & find out when they reached puberty. Brains are still developing after children reach puberty & body type might affect when this happens. I haven't read any studies saying that most geniuses are ectomorphs. And at least among girls this group would be the more likely to be late bloomers b/c of lower body fat.

Speaking of discussions of IQ, I think it's funny that the high IQ types can be so brutal about how intellectually challenged certain races are but then respond so emotionally when something derogatory is said about one of their favored racial groups or even about geniuses in general. Really, you must be more rational! Of course you offend people. You must expect them to respond as if offended. I myself have a relative belonging to one of your lower IQ groups. She's no longer living but I loved her dearly. While she probably wasn't all that smart, I'd take 20 of her over one of most any of your geniuses. ; )

Geniuses or is that genii, you have no gonads and no interpersonal skills, yet you want to rule. This isn't going to happen, ever. Go back to your dens and your labs. Do some differential equations, ponder the number of angels on the head of a pin, whatever, just stay out of sight and out of mind before you annoy some poor hard working, half-witted soul who hasn't done you a bit of harm.

MensaRefugee said...

Anon's facade of smiley faces is breaking down...

And theres a big difference between the talk of lower intelligence people loosing out and High IQ loosing out.

Namely one of justice - no one hurt the lower IQ peeps. No one is obligated to help them. Charity is a different matter- but its just that- charity. It can be rescinded or modified if it is too onerous or leads to adverse consequences (like the Lower IQ having a 'right' to have as many children as they want even if those kids couldnt build the very society that fosters them).

On the other hand the anti-High IQ stuff is someone hurting someone else for their own personal gain (dumb people who want a free ride, elites who want moral superiority, etc). A completely different matter

You want what you said and I quote "you have no gonads and no interpersonal skills, yet you want to rule." to come to pass in the sense that High IQ peeps take advantage of low IQ (and elites) the way low IQ and elites are taking advantage of High IQ today?* I guarantee you, the results wont be in your favour.


*[in the way taxes and non-diverse Educational system etc take a toll on the High IQ and benefit others by a transfer of either direct resources and opportunites, or possible resources, and yes, even prestige and social standing :) ]

Anonymous said...

Let's face it - the whole point of this coddling article has nothing to do with IQ or actual scientific reasoning...but apologetic Anglo guilt and residual reactionism against Nazi eugenics.

The problem with all this government meddling is that it unlevels the playing field between different rK mating strategies - and in this case...subsidizes and enables r-type mating. Which basically shifts the future demographics of this country to low-IQ breeders. Ergo, we are already losing our technological edge and outsourcing to Asia...