JC Denton wrote on Jul 11^th, 2012 at 3:39pm:


You're lucky!

I loooove races. 

But you know what they say - before you can love another race, you must first love your own...or something like that.

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She must be very understanding, it's bad enough you're drunk let alone posting on the internet. 

Paki gob on a stick wrote on Jul 11^th, 2012 at 6:16pm:



No Im not caucasian.  I've never even been to caucasia.
I am of black* descent.

I'm interested in the results in that book. Or at least, the ones in the wikipedia article about it. Are they real? The differences seem huge. And the more important question - are they genetic?

... wrote on Jul 11^th, 2012 at 9:52pm:


Are we all going to be slightly arrested?

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what do you mean?

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well in all honesty that's a myth to begin with. we use all of our brains - it'd make no evolutionary sense for the most metabolically voracious part of the body to have grown so extensively beyond the part of it that we actually use if that was the case.

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i'm four square with you on this one, don't worry. iq aint everything in our head and nor do people who administer iq tests pretend so. iq tests measure a generalised capacity to perform certain cognitive work, that, despite being undeniably important, and highly related to an enormous number of social variables, is not the 'only' thing that matters.


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sort of. in terms of iq, the general idea is that the mental aptitudes that the tests attempt to quantify are all highly inter-correlated to such an extent that it can be said that they all derive from the same mental processes and physiological structures. (which theoretical and empirical literature indicates is not unitary within our brain). what blew me away was the extent to which these correlations would manifest on the most highly divergent tests - for example, verbal tests less highly correlated between themselves than a particular verbal sub-test correlated to something completely not related to words at all, a sub-test that requires the subject to arrange red and white diagonal cubes to patterns presented on stimulus cards. it can be said that the reason for this is because these two sub-tests drew on the mental processes taht constitute the key ingredient in proper performance on iq tests. this ingredient is abstract and unrelated to the superficial characteristics of the test items themselves.

i don't know about your einstein anecdotes. there are exceptions here and there, such as mental savants who demonstrate extrodinary ability in highly specific domains. a lot of the time however, it is just a product of somebody who is so extrodinarily good at something and not quite as good as sometihng else that they tend to underestimate that they're also extremely good at that other thing, too, due to the contrast between the two in their own head. i had a friend who was brilliant verbally but felt she was retarded when it came to mathematics and such, but testing in she still was over the 90th percentile in math. mental abilities that iq tests attempt to quantify or predict performance on are intercorrelated. we're still not entirely sure why, of course.

here's a really good video you can watch that gives a handy way to conceptualise intelligence.



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agree, but where do we draw the line at that? should the u.s army stop administering the AFQT (armed forces qualification test - a highly iq related test) because some dull person somewhere might actually make a decent soldier? should colleges stop asking for grades and test scores? the whole point is screening devices such as iq tests are invaluable tools for boosting efficiency, mitigating harm to individuals, reducing waste, and so on. judging somebody on their individual worth is of course different and i agree, though that's all subjective really.

personally, i've always thought that the people who judge other people by their intelligence most frequently are those that are the first in line to declare how little intelligence genuinely matters. 

finally, as i said before, not all group differences are the same. case in point are effects such as the protestant effect and the deaf child effect. in some europaen countries between religious groups of people of the same ethnicity, it has been found that protestants score somewhat higher on iq tests. likewise, deaf children who are born deaf do extremely poorly on verbal sub-tests of iq batteries for obvious reasons. so, are these group differences (catholics-protestants, deaf-hearing) genetic? examining the psychometric properties of these gaps reveals the answer, probably not. for reasons i can't really explain here readily and succinctly, the psychometric/statistical properties of these gaps do not behave in the way you would expect a gap predicted by a hereditarian hypothesis to behave.

Soren wrote on Jul 12^th, 2012 at 8:46am:


Now now, old boy. I seem to remember another thread where you said we shouldn't talk about our grandparents like that.

They have feelings too, you know.