below_freezing
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I knew this discussion would go too far. Discussions like this evitably turn personal, so I’ll throw in some caveats with regards to race and IQ.
IQ distrubtions like many things in nature follows a Gaussian distribution and the IQ number quoted is the just a mean (average) of the curve. This number says nothing about the range or how IQ’s are distrubuted about the mean.
When comparing IQ’s between groups of people, it is important to remember even with significant difference in average IQ ie a 20 point difference there is still a very very large overlap.
What this means is, IQ of races is almost a worthless indicator of job performance, societal status, and wealth, given that other factors can affect these to a much greater extent (things like socioeconomics status at birth, access to higher education, pushy parents that expect a lot, how hard an individual works, etc.)
BUT this is not to mean that the things listed above (nurture) will increase Raw IQ (it just doesn’t). Evolution is what determines intelligence. Intelligence is what makes us humans and race difference is just tiny compared to evolutionary intelligence difference from great apes to tool using pre-humans to modern humans.
Evolution of human intelligence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(in fact you can often judge fossiles of prehumans and where they fall on the evolutionary chain by measuring cranium volume)
Lastly, I want to state that examples like how many scientists are chinese, or how many doctors are indians in America are invalid evidence for supporting IQ and race. These are heavily distorted by selection bias.
selection bias - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com
The people who often travel abroad are often a self-selecting group with a higher percentage of professionals. This phenomonon actually has a name, Model minority. One example would be Canadians assume all chinese people are good at math (not true, I hate math) but it is a stereotype that does get carried by people.
Model minority - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
So really it is worthless to say anything about how many patents chinese scientists hold or how many Indians work at the JPL, they are a self selecting group and god knows the talent pool for both China and India is HUGE due to population size. (it would be a travesty if our peoples didn't succeed aboard given the number of people we have)
this is a very good explaination. a lower than average IQ for a bulk population does not actually imply that the total number of people with above a certain IQ in that lower population is very low.
the selection bias things are also important.
I'd also like to talk to speeder about the Israeli Jew thing: Israeli jews being dumb because they're from europe doesn't make sense either, as the average IQ of all european countries, including Russia, is higher than Israel.