Since both genes and IQ are mere social constructs, it’s no big deal.

But my child hopefully inherits my smart genes anyway.

IQ is a meaningless racist social construction and how dare you suggest blacks have lower IQs!

These genes do not determine intelligence, however. Their combined influence is minuscule, the researchers said, suggesting that thousands more are likely to be involved and still await discovery. Just as important, intelligence is profoundly shaped by the environment.

I’ve learned that if this disclaimer is not in the first couple of paragraphs, the chances of there being anything interesting in the article drops significantly. When you see the self-inoculation early in the piece, you can be sure some quality hate think is coming.

John Rivers on Gab commented, “man has legs blown off by bombs > Height is profoundly shaped by environment!!”

The influence of these 52 genes is miniscule, but they speculate that there are thousands more that may eventually be discovered.

These genes do not determine intelligence, however. Their combined influence is minuscule, the researchers said, suggesting that thousands more are likely to be involved and still
await discovery.

There’s a major environment influence on IQ.

Just as important, intelligence is profoundly shaped by the environment.

Variants may not predic inter-group variation, but they are applicable to intra-group variation. So if one race has certain IQ genes that another race doesn’t, it wouldn’t neccessarily imply higher/lower IQ.

But other gene studies have shown that variants in one population can fail to predict what people are like in other populations. Different variants turn out to be important in different groups, and this may well be the case with intelligence.

“If you try to predict height using the genes we’ve identified in Europeans in Africans, you’d predict all Africans are five inches shorter than Europeans, which isn’t true,” Dr. Posthuma said. …

That headline is rayciss.

Waitaminute, they only said “tie.” If they had implied a causal relationship between genes and intelligence, that’d be tantamount to calling for gas chambers. But I guess they’re in the clear.

By the way, what is this “intelligence” of which they speak? Isn’t that something only racists believe in, or a social construct invented by men in the interest of Brain Size Prejudice?

Dear God, so much science writing is in broken English.

“Despite the well-known difference in twin-based heritability for intelligence in childhood (0.45) and adulthood (0.80) …”: so do they tell us whether their subjects were children or adults? Not here they don’t, which leaves the purpose of this clause dangling in the air.

“we show substantial genetic correlation …”: of what on what, matey? I shouldn’t have to guess.

“Despite intelligence having substantial heritability2 (0.54) and a confirmed polygenic nature, initial genetic studies were mostly underpowered3, 4, 5.” Despite, because of, or indifferent to: if the bloody things were underpowered they were underpowered.

What Charles Murray did was fine work. But wasn’t the core of his argument well known a 1000 years ago? Didn’t the Chinese, Arabs, and Europeans all know black Africans were quite a bit less intelligent?

I understand he more scientifically measured the discrepancy in intelligence, but the basic observation is ancient.

” Lead in drinking water, for instance, can drag down test scores.”

Baseball bats to the head have been shown to lower musical ability and motor control.

We’re really pushing back the frontiers.

Variability across individuals in these 52 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (or SNPs) explain a miniscule proportion of the cross-individual variance in IQ, BUT there are 100 million SNPs to search over. As clinical and statistical procedures improve, and sample sizes grow enormously, explained variance can only go up and up.

Steve,

In your opinion, does the New York Times article misrepresent the importance of the study?

I think they write the”IQ exists” articles at an IQ level beyond what those with lower IQ can understand, and then write the “IQ is racist lies!” articles at the level children can read them.

Kiss of death for a high IQ is having ancestors that evolved in a tropical or subtropical environment.

You absolutely need severe winters to weed out the lesser lights, unmotivated, peeps with a “next week” at the most time horizon, and assorted other slackers.

When it’s mid 80s all the time, the lesser lights get along just fine and there’s no reason for any increase in IQ.

Sharks have had the same brain to body ratio for 400 million years, it’s all they needed to survive. The mutant sharks with big brains were no more successful than the average, so it was never incorporated as a desirable mutation….unlike humans along the 40th north parallel….

Clearly those 52 genes are racist. I wonder if the excitement of the scientists making these findings quickly gave way to Rodney Dangerfieldesque tug at the collar.

Variants may not predic inter-group variation, but they are applicable to intra-group variation. So if one race has certain IQ genes that another race doesn’t, it wouldn’t neccessarily imply higher/lower IQ.

Keep hope alive, Johnny.

They know the truth but can’t overtly say so, so they’re creeping forward with lots of waffling. It is progress though.

There was a study done on Swedish CEOs. The study found that the average CEO has an IQ of only 115. The average doctor also has an IQ of about 115.

https://lionoftheblogosphere.wordpress.com/2014/10/12/ceos-of-big-corporations-only-have-iq-of-115-on-average/

Interestingly, more than 5% of CEOs had IQs in the 70s&80s range. Another 7% had IQs in the 90s range. So overall about 12% of the CEOs were below 100 IQ.

Another 20% of CEOs were roughly around 100 IQ. So if you combine that with the 12% figure from above, about 1/3rd of CEOs have intelligence that’s average (100 IQ) or below average (sub-100 IQ). Given that American corporate culture is probably a bit less results oriented than Sweden places more emphasis on politicking/bullshiitting, I’d bet even a slightly lower IQ values for American CEOs.

For doctors, only 2% were 90s IQ or below. Another 7% of doctors are at around 100 IQ. So about 1/1oth of doctors have intelligence that’s average (100 IQ) or below average (sub-100 IQ).
I suppose this implies it’s harder for a lower IQ person to become a doctor than a CEO. Which makes sense. You can’t bullshiit your way through heart surgery. Medical doctors have to do well on their MCATs and pass licensing exams too, so 80s IQ people tend to get filtered out.

A few days ago, I was saying that lots of high-paying careers (consulting, management, finance, sales) can be done by low-IQ people. Mostly because it’s easy to bullshiit your way through in quite a few careers. Given that 80s IQ people are CEOs of companies, I think my assertion is confirmed.

For more complex technical jobs (such as scientist, engineer, programmer, doctor), my sense was that there was there was a moderately high IQ floor. However, the study suggests that even these cognitively challenging careers can be done if you’re roughly around 100 IQ. Though I’d bet you have to study really, really hard to pass your exams.

I always used to assume that it was propaganda when society told kids “you can be anything you want to be if you study hard.” However, it appears there’s some truth to that. Amy Chua’s super pushy parenting style probably would be good for a lot of kids.

Why are you highlighting these propositions?

Despite the well-known difference in twin-based heritability for intelligence in childhood (0.45) and adulthood (0.80), we show substantial genetic correlation (rg = 0.89, LD score regression P = 5.4 × 10−29).

I think what they mean is that they can account for more variance in, say IQ, than what twin-based studies would suggest (0.45 and 0.8 for adults). Their correlation (rg=0.89), if that what it is, is very large. The question is what they actually correlate with IQ? Is it just these 336 SNP’s that they identified or are there many more?

I always used to assume that it was propaganda when society told kids “you can be anything you want to be if you study hard.” However, it appears there’s some truth to that.

According to your own quotes, for the majority of people, it doesn’t look like they really can. So, no, there’s really not that much truth to it, and it is just propaganda.

That, and some bitter clinging.

Just as important, intelligence is profoundly shaped by the environment.

Is the science such that this statement of the profound influence of the environment does not require attribution, while the proposition that genes have a “miniscule” influence on intelligence does?

Earnest question.

“These [52] genes do not determine intelligence, however. Their combined influence is minuscule, the researchers said, suggesting that thousands more are likely to be involved and still await discovery.”

Since we keep revising the total number of protein-coding genes down, and we’re now at ~ 20,000, this implies that a hefty percentage of coding genes are involved in IQ. Which doesn’t surprise me. A major lesson of the downward revision has been how many different jobs single proteins can contribute to, depending on their locus-specific interactions and regulations.

That means the same proteins will turn out to be involved in tasks like cognition, aggression, patience, attention, hormone production and regulation, sweat gland function, immune responses, sexual responses, electrolyte transfer in cells as varied as neurons and skin cells, and on and on.

In other words, race is more than skin deep, beauty is more than skin deep, and physiognomy is real. Who’d a thunk?

Not necessarily.

Chandan Chisala pointed out that the children of African immigrants (who’ve regressed to the native mean) do well academically.

http://www.unz.com/article/the-iq-gap-is-no-longer-a-black-and-white-issue/

The fact that black immigrants to the United States have shown achievements that are superior to native black Americans has been a phenomenon studied since at least the 1970′s. At first it was just the Caribbean blacks who were a subject of this unexpected outcome. As black Africans kept immigrating into the US, they showed even higher levels of achievement than the native blacks. Many scholars theorized on the reasons for these differences, from Thomas Sowell’s proposal that this disproved the validity of discrimination against native blacks as an explanation for their underachievement (Sowell, 1978), to other scholars who suggested that these immigrants were just the most highly driven members of their home countries as evidenced by their willingness to migrate to a foreign country (Butcher, 1990).

What most of these theories failed to predict was that the children of these immigrants would also show exceptional achievements, especially academically. It is only in recent years, as the immigrants have stayed long enough to produce a sufficiently high number of offspring, that it has been observed that they are over-represented among high academic achievers, especially when compared to native blacks, particularly at very elite institutions. What has been missed in the IQ debate is the full logical implication of these achievements: they have effectively nullified any arguments for a racial evolutionary explanation of the well-known IQ test score gap between blacks and whites. Even more fatal for the racial hereditarian side of the debate has been the corroborating data of school children performance in the UK, particularly when the black Africans are divided into their respective nationalities and tribal ethnicities, as reported in the latter section of this article.

In the UK, blacks seem to have a mean IQ of roughly 93-94. Mixed-race blacks (half-white, half-black) were nearly at the white mean.

Nigerians did particularly well in the UK. They outperformed whites. The Igbo-Nigerians did especially well. They even outperformed Chinese and Indians.

Interestingly, a very substantial proportion of African-American ancestry is from Igbo. So it’s curious that African-Americans do so poorly in academics. I suppose you can explain some of that away by non-Igbo admixture and selective/non-selective migration (of course even selective Nigerian UK immigrants have children regressing to the population mean), but I’d bet there’s a very strong environmental/cultural component to IQ.

Much of the African-American gene pool are from Yoruba, who also do well academically in the UK.

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/2/786.full#ref-39

Comparison of the inferred West African segments of African-American genomes with contemporary West African populations (Table S3) reveals that the ancestry of the West African component of African Americans is most similar to the profile from non-Bantu Niger-Kordofanian-speaking populations, which include the Igbo, Brong, and Yoruba

They know the truth but can’t overtly say so, so they’re creeping forward with lots of waffling. It is progress though.

Exactly. To see an article like this in the NYT is huge. They’re basically acknowledging (finally) that the 100% nurture position lacks empirical support. It will be interesting to see what letters to the editor they choose to print in reaction.

other scholars who suggested that these immigrants were just the most highly driven members of their home countries as evidenced by their willingness to migrate to a foreign country (Butcher, 1990).

What most of these theories failed to predict was that the children of these immigrants would also show exceptional achievements, especially academically.

Well, actually, the theory that they were the highest IQ people of their native countries WOULD actually predict that the IQs of their descendants would also be high.

Yes, yes, I know what regression to the mean is. So save it.

Interestingly, a very substantial proportion of African-American ancestry is from Igbo. So it’s curious that African-Americans do so poorly in academics.

No, Johnny. No it isn’t. It makes perfect sense, because African-Americans are descended from people who were rounded up, almost at random, and brought here. They are not descended from self-selected people who had the intelligence to save up enough money to come here.

but I’d bet there’s a very strong environmental/cultural component to IQ.

We know. We know you think this, because it is what you want to think.

Much of the African-American gene pool are from Yoruba, who also do well academically in the UK.

Eventually, it seems like you would figure out that this kind of discredits your theory.

Keep hope alive, Johnny.

Maybe you should read the article.

Read this.

But other gene studies have shown that variants in one population can fail to predict what people are like in other populations. Different variants turn out to be important in different groups, and this may well be the case with intelligence.

“If you try to predict height using the genes we’ve identified in Europeans in Africans, you’d predict all Africans are five inches shorter than Europeans, which isn’t true,” Dr. Posthuma said. …

because they have profound implications.

They mean “cognition”… IQ EXPRESS a constellation of cognitive traits deep in technical context (knowledge of words, math, geometry). Intelligence is not a fixed entity but how (diversely) you are to manage it. Some cognitive traits is similar with personality traits because are vibratory or reactive frequencies. What seems is fixed is its quantitative levels. Also is important differentiates non fixed to flexible but permanently self undevelopable. Because qualitative levels of intelligence seems more reactive or flexible than quantitative it’s doesn’t mean it’s will be developable. Intelligence as a behavior is between the achievements and the (physical) potential. Intelligence as well personality traits: is a potential of expressivity. None born neurotic but: can born more disposed to become than others and environmental/interactional circumstances can push this disposition to the highest expression levels possible to the given individual context. But again someone who don’t born with highest levels of something it’s expected will have a lower levels of potentiality.

Also IQ tests tend to be quite biased against specialists and favor generalists.

Great comment and very interesting link!

I have come to the same conclusion, that the “sweet spot” for “worldly success” is somewhere around IQ 120:

Can Super Smart Leaders Suffer From too Much of a Good Thing? The Curvilinear Effect of Intelligence on Perceived Leadership Behavior.
Antonakis, John; House, Robert J.; Simonton, Dean Keith
Journal of Applied Psychology, Mar 30 , 2017

http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2017-14279-001/

– http://www.unz.com/isteve/nixon-and-moynihan-talk-iq-and-race/#comment-1862334

Do you have to be smart to be rich? The impact of IQ on wealth, income and financial distress

Financial distress, such as problems paying bills, going bankrupt or reaching credit card limits, is related to IQ scores not linearly but instead in a quadratic relationship. This means higher IQ scores sometimes increase the probability of being in financial difficulty. – https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2007-zagorsky.pdf

– http://www.unz.com/isteve/nixon-and-moynihan-talk-iq-and-race/#comment-1862306

This is why humanity/the world needs the patronage system and to a lesser degree tenure — not charity or philanthropy — for the advancement of civilization, in my opinion. Above-average IQ rich persons financially supporting poor or financially challenged/struggling highly intelligent persons gives humanity scientific, technological, artistic, societal/political, etc. progress, breakthroughs and masterpieces:

While sponsorship of artists and the commissioning of artwork is the best-known aspect of the patronage system, other disciplines also benefited from patronage, including those who studied natural philosophy (pre-modern science), musicians, writers, philosophers, alchemists, astrologers, and other scholars. Artists as diverse and important as Chrétien de Troyes, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson all sought and enjoyed the support of noble or ecclesiastical patrons.[3][4] Figures as late as Mozart and Beethoven also participated in the system to some degree; it was only with the rise of bourgeois and capitalist social forms in the middle 19th century that European culture moved away from its patronage system to the more publicly supported system of museums, theaters, mass audiences and mass consumption that is familiar in the contemporary world.

– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage#Arts

Pursuing and telling the truth can be a messy and unappreciated business; that is why academic tenure was originally introduced:

A common justification for tenure is the principle of academic freedom, which holds that it is beneficial for state, society and academy in the long run if scholars are free to examine, hold, and advance controversial views.

– http://www.unz.com/jthompson/the-secret-in-your-eyes/#comment-1815864

“The Igbo-Nigerians did especially well. They even outperformed Chinese and Indians.”

Vox-pop from James LaFond in Baltimore – Mobi, the Edo (aka Benin) Lyft driver

https://www.jameslafond.com/article.php?id=7679

“The British left the Hausa tribe in charge. They are the largest group and span the northern reaches of the nation. It is they who contend with Boka Horam. The Hausa are mostly poorly educated and very poor. However, the elite of the nation are Hausa, who use their common people to extract vast wealth and amass power for themselves. The character of a Hausa man is one of quiet dignity, for he carries the weapon. Hausa men are known to go about armed. They tend to be polite and do not attempt to impose their ways or their will on the other tribes. The elite run the nation in a way that does not necessarily promote cultural interference. The Hausa man does not impose on you, for he has his weapon and his dignity and if you push him he will retaliate.

The Yoruba are numerous and not necessarily disruptive in any way. However, they are known to be hypocritical. The cab driver, Boomy, by his name, is a Yoruba man. The Yoruba man, has much in common with the Hausa man and the men of my people, for we are left to our own devices, to make our way through the educational system—or not—to acquire a trade and to forge ourselves. There is a lack of societies for men to grow strong in, and in that way, Nigeria is very much like America, for the man, for he is adrift, in Life, in his own little boat.

With the Igbo man it is not so. The Igbo always thinks of his brother—”I must bring my brother along in my business, must teach my brother, must aid my brother.”

This extends to the tribe. Every Igbo man will do first and foremost for his tribe and his fellow Igbo men. I know an Igbo man in Ownings Mills. He belongs to the Baltimore Igbo Caucus. In any city where Igbo men live, they have a caucus that meets regularly to discuss concerns for Igbo men, to promote the cause of Igbo culture, to promote Igbo business. I hear the Igbo Caucus in Houston is very strong. The Igbo are very irritating in that they meddle in the greater society, attempting to shape other peoples’ culture in a way such as will suit their purposes. Igbo men are renown as arrogant and tend to control business, are very much the bargaining merchant. The Igbo are very much like the Chinese, who have a presence in every country and do not alter their ways to conform to the native society and who tend to be business-oriented, meddlesome and arrogant wherever they go. In fact—and I did not understand this clearly until now—the Igbo in Africa are very much like the Jews in the United States, in that people in host countries complain of their meddlesome manner and would rather they not impose their culture and ways so aggressively.”

Market-dominant minority?

Boomy, the Yoruba cab driver, is horrified by Baltimore and thinks thieves should be ‘necklaced’ or otherwise severely beaten, as would happen in Nigeria.

According to your own quotes, for the majority of people, it doesn’t look like they really can. So, no, there’s really not that much truth to it, and it is just propaganda.

That’s why I said there’s some truth.

You also missed this part of the statement: “if you study hard.” I wonder what percentage of kids follow that part that.

Here’s some interesting data.

I did an analysis of the General Social Survey data. I compared the income of people with 75 IQ and a college degree against 125 IQ people with no college degree. The 75-IQ, college-degree people out earned the 125 IQ, no-degree people.

I filtered for people with WORDSUM (0-2) and DEGREE (3,4). These are people with IQs of 75, but with college degrees. 78% fall in the highest income bucket.

I also filtered for people with WORDSUM(10) and DEGREE(0, 1, 2). These are people with IQs of 125, but with no college degree. 57% fall in the highest income bucket.

I filtered for people with WORDSUM(10) and all levels of education (degree, non-degree). These are the entire sample of people with 125 IQ. 70% fall in the highest income bracket.

I filtered for people with WORDSUM(10) and DEGREE(3,4). These are people with 125 IQ, but college degree. 79% fall in the highest income bracket.

So even if you have an IQ of 75, you can outearn a 125 IQ person just by finishing college. Even if you compare a 75-IQ college grad to a 125-IQ college grad, they earn roughly the same income.

Therefore, if you’ve got a 75 IQ, the best strategy is to be diligent and finish a college degree. You then get to be middle-class and have higher-IQ people as coworkers.

I read it. I also figured out that it doesn’t mean that, if your parents tell you to work really hard at being tall when you’re older, you’ll grow up taller.

That’s why I said there’s some truth.

No it isn’t. You said “some truth” because you wanted people to think it meant “a fairly significant amount of truth”.

I did an analysis of the General Social Survey data. I compared the income of people with 75 IQ and a college degree against 125 IQ people with no college degree. The 75-IQ, college-degree people out earned the 125 IQ, no-degree people.

That’s lovely.

So even if you have an IQ of 75, you can outearn a 125 IQ person just by finishing college.

But if you have a 75 IQ, you’re PROBABLY NOT GOING to finish college, are you?

Therefore, if you’ve got a 75 IQ, the best strategy is to be diligent and finish a college degree.

And the best strategy if you’re not naturally conscientious or hard-working is to conscientiously work really hard at being more conscientious and hard-working too. Kind of misses the point, as far as advice goes, though, doesn’t it?

Well, actually, the theory that they were the highest IQ people of their native countries WOULD actually predict that the IQs of their descendants would also be high.

Regression to the mean would result in their kids resembling the native mean. Whatever that native mean happens to be. So if Nigerian kids are doing well in the UK, the native mean must be a lot higher than the typical 80s range given for Africans.

Is there any proof that UK Nigerians are the “highest IQ people of their native country”? Is this true? Where’s the proof?

They are not descended from self-selected people who had the intelligence to save up enough money to come here.

If you read through that article (which you probably didn’t), you’d see the Nigerians outperform the Eastern Europeans substantially. Presumably, the Eastern Euros also had to save up to immigrate to the UK.

Personally, I very much doubt that Eastern Euros are any lower in IQ than Nigerians or White British, but their academic data don’t demonstrate good performance.

We know. We know you think this, because it is what you want to think.

Maybe you should read something.

http://www.unz.com/runz/race-iq-and-wealth/

Everybody speculates on the nature of intelligence, IQ, and g, so perhaps it would not be out of place for me to consider the subject as well. Whenever I do so, however, about the best I can come up with is the startlingly unoriginal conclusion that general intelligence is essentially the ability to abstract patterns from sensory information and to make predictions based on those patterns. This is also the ephemeral quality that IQ tests actually measure.

So why and how would this be related to genes? Strangely, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of emphasis on this question, even though it is the most important one. It’s as if people assume that once a correlation is found, all the heavy lifting is done and the rest of the details will take care of themselves. I believe that is profoundly mistaken.

A statistical correlation between certain genetic patterns and a high IQ score is consistent with any number of explanatory models, including the somewhat whimsical model which holds that a high IQ influences one’s genetics. I don’t know anybody who seriously makes that assertion, but I mention it to illustrate the point that in the absence of a theory of causal linkages, correlations can mean almost anything.

What do genes actually do that might cause them to play a role in what we know of as intelligence? Hitherto that question has been answered largely by adverting, in a very elliptical way, to hypothesized variations in the fine structure of neural anatomy, synaptic connections, neural firing speeds, and in general the physical and chemical processes of the brain. It is simply assumed that brain structure and function is the ultimate seat, or rather the substrate and source, of intelligence; and since the brain and the variations thereof are in fact the expressions of the information contained in the genetic code, therefore do genes also determine intelligence.

I think we should question these assumptions. Leaving aside for the moment any question as to what role environment and experience play in neural organization, is it even appropriate to conclude that neural organization is determinative for intelligence at all? If so, the appropriate place to begin would be to attempt to correlate observed variations in brain structure with differences in IQ, not with the genes that code for the structures. Such correlations, however, have not been observed in any high degree. Shifting the burden of explanation back onto the genes only results in making an unsolved problem even more difficult. Perhaps this whole approach isn’t very fruitful.

It is likely that neural architecture has something to do with intelligence; but that being the case, I would think the architecture of the peripheral nervous system is just as important, as well as the sense organs themselves. The acuity of the eye, the signal transduction of the retina, and the transmission of signals through the optic nerve—this all has something to do with the recognition of visual patterns. As far as the prediction of patterns goes, this involves, among other things, the IQ tester’s willingness to make a prediction, and his desire to take the test seriously and surmount it.

One way or another, the whole organism is involved in intelligence. Therefore we should expect the contributions of individual genes to be both small and impossible to deconstruct, which is consistent with the data thus far. What then should we make of the heritable component of intelligence?

I would say that intelligence should be considered teleologically as a behavior. Not that there is such a thing as intelligent behavior or unintelligent behavior, but that what we call intelligence is itself a behavior. It is a breed characteristic of the organism involving senses, instincts, and desires operating holistically, like the herding ability of the Border Collie. It is in a large measure heritable (the Border Collie is bred, after all), but it would be ridiculous to assert that it could be reduced to a handful of genes or anatomical structures. It is something “in the blood” that forms the entire organism and molds it to its purpose. As always, genes themselves ought to be treated as co-varying expressions or traits of the organism, not as the determining source or origin of its traits.

Regression to the mean would result in their kids resembling the native mean.

It means they would get CLOSER to the native mean, but that doesn’t change the fact that a smarter group of people is going to have smarter kids than an average group.

Is there any proof that UK Nigerians are the “highest IQ people of their native country”? Is this true? Where’s the proof?

I guess the fact that most of them could read before they came to the UK.

If you read through that article (which you probably didn’t), you’d see the Nigerians outperform the Eastern Europeans substantially.

That’s nice.

Presumably, the Eastern Euros also had to save up to immigrate to the UK.

Well, for one, probably not as much. For two, since people in Eastern Europe make more than $2 a day, on average, it would be easier to save up money, so more people would be able to do it. For three, life in Eastern Europe isn’t as bad as it is in Nigeria, so intelligent people probably have more reasons to stay there.

Personally, I very much doubt that Eastern Euros are any lower in IQ than Nigerians or White British, but their academic data don’t demonstrate good performance.

Aren’t the ones that move to the UK typically there to do blue-collar labor? Because of European Union laws, it’s a lot easier to move to other European countries to do that kind of job if you’re from a European country yourself, rather than if you’re from Africa.

Maybe you should read something.

Maybe you should ask yourself why it is that, for example, Somalis in Minnesota don’t have much to show, academically speaking? I mean, Minnesota schools used to be some of the best in the country, didn’t they? And the state has bent over backwards to welcome them. So why are the Somalis there still dumb? Why haven’t they shot to the top of the academic pyramid, like the Nigerians?

I’ll tell you why. Because they are descended from refugees. Random Somalis, who weren’t selected for intelligence in any way.

If you read through Chandan Chisala’s article, you’ll see that Nigerians saw a huge increase in their academic results from 2003 to 2010. The improvement is roughly 0.7 standard deviations.

Presumably their genes didn’t change much between 2003 and 2010.

Anyway, the Igbo outperform the Chinese and Indians. Both groups are immigrants who saved money too.

Fulltext: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4ahzugblv4s2474/2017-sniekers.pdf

The genetic correlation here is between genetic effects as kids and genetic effects as adults: to what extent are they the same sets of variants acting in the same way? https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/6codfs/more_evidence_for_the_links_between_genetics_and/dhw71y5/

OT: Three of the officers in the Freddie Gray case are going to be fired.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/freddie-gray/bs-md-ci-freddie-gray-internal-charges-20170522-story.html

If you read through that article (which you probably didn’t), you’d see the Nigerians outperform the Eastern Europeans substantially. Presumably, the Eastern Euros also had to save up to immigrate to the UK.

The difficulty of emigrating to a given country has an effect on immigrant IQ scores. Presumably there would be a higher average score for Mexican or other other Latin American immigrants in Spain or Portugal than in the USA. It’s easier for Eastern Europeans to move to the UK (especially from countries that have either EU membership or special work/study agreements) than from Africa, certainly in cost and procedure, but even simply in terms of proximity.

The improvement is roughly 0.7 standard deviations.

Presumably their genes didn’t change much between 2003 and 2010.

Oh, but their environments did. Sure thing.

Chandan Chisala pointed out that the children of African immigrants (who’ve regressed to the native mean) do well academically.

You don’t regress to the mean, you regress toward the mean. If Igbo are the “Jews of Africa” and have a 15 point advantage over the genetic African IQ average of about 85, that suggests they average about 100. Highly selected 130 Igbos in the UK will have children with IQs of about 120. That plus affirmative action means they will be expected to do well, but that says nothing about African IQ generally.

Thanks for the links.

According to the Zagorsky study, the education-income correlation is slightly higher than the IQ-income correlation. This is also true for the education-net worth correlation.

Blogger HalfSigma found that after controlling for education, there was no IQ-income correlation. He hypothesized that the main benefit of a higher-IQ is that it increased your probability of obtaining a degree, which is an important credential for entering a high-paying career track.

It’s his opinion that it’s the career track that determines income, not IQ. High-IQ is useful for getting on a high-paying career track (through increasing probability of degree completion), but doesn’t offer any other benefit. He found that even low-IQ people with college degrees earned the same as high-IQ people with college degrees. I did some analysis of the GSS data set. Based on the data, I confirmed his findings.

The Zagorsky study (which you linked to) showed a higher education-income correlation than IQ-income correlation. That seems to support the HalfSigma career-track theory.

I have come to the same conclusion, that the “sweet spot” for “worldly success” is somewhere around IQ 120:

According to the other study you linked to, 1.2 standard deviations (118 IQ) was predicted to be the ideal for “perceived leadership.” So that’s only slightly higher than the Swedish CEO average (115 IQ).

The key word is “perceived.” I wonder why higher-IQ people are “perceived” to be poorer leaders than the 118-IQ people. Maybe it’s not that higher-IQ people are poorer leaders, but because their excessive IQ makes it hard for them to communicate effectively with their subordinates. So the employees have a harder time “perceiving” their higher-IQ boss to be effective, even if he’s doing okay.

Igbos were cited by Tiger Mom for market dominant minority that got slaughtered. Millions of Igbo died in Biafra.

Igbo are by far the largest outbreeding tribe in Africa. I suppose the Boers outbreed also. Who else?

It boggles my mind how this article is published and circulated so nonchalantly just a few days after the collective hissyfit about Murray. What must it be like to live in a leftist mind?

I read it. I also figured out that it doesn’t mean that, if your parents tell you to work really hard at being tall when you’re older, you’ll grow up taller.

but if you don’t do your homework or study, you’re going to fail.

If put absolutely zero effort into being tall, I doubt it’d affect your height.

No it isn’t. You said “some truth” because you wanted people to think it meant “a fairly significant amount of truth”.

My GSS data analysis showed 75-IQ college grads out earn 125-IQ people. So, in the world we live, there is indeed “some truth” to the idea that studying will take you pretty far.

But if you have a 75 IQ, you’re PROBABLY NOT GOING to finish college, are you?

That depends on the effort you’re putting in.

According to the GSS, 6% of 75-IQ people have a college degree. So it’s not just possible, but it’s something that’s frequently done.

And the best strategy if you’re not naturally conscientious or hard-working is to conscientiously work really hard at being more conscientious and hard-working too. Kind of misses the point, as far as advice goes, though, doesn’t it?

If that were really true, alcoholics and drug addicts would never quit. Fat people would never lose weight.

The reverse also wouldn’t be true. Skinny people would never get fat. Sober people would never get addicted. Happy marriages would never suddenly blow up.

If everything is just fixed, people never can change their trajectory.

Except that they do.

Oh, but their environments did. Sure thing.

You never heard of moving to a different school district? Presumably these Nigerian migrants, having gotten somewhat settled in the UK, are putting their kids in better schools. Also, they have more resources to fund their child’s educational progress.

I’d assume that initially, Nigerians settled in impoverished areas. Now they’re moving to better neighborhoods. Not unusual for new immigrants.

Apparently none of those genes reside on the peer review board of Cogent Social Sciences.

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/05/19/a-new-academic-hoax-a-bogus-paper-on-the-conceptual-penis-gets-published-in-a-high-quality-peer-reviewed-social-science-journal/

The article, archived:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170520194758/https://www.cogentoa.com/article/10.1080/23311886.2017.1330439.pdf

I actually and painfully fell off the chair laughing at this:

2.2 Climate change and the conceptual penis

Nowhere are the consequences of hypermasculine machismo braggadocio isomorphic identification with the conceptual penis more problematic than concerning the issue of climate change. Climate change is driven by nothing more than it is by certain damaging themes in hypermasculinity that can be best understood via the dominant rapacious approach to climate ecology identifiable with the conceptual penis.

Intriguing thoughts. Well said.

The difficulty of emigrating to a given country has an effect on immigrant IQ scores. Presumably there would be a higher average score for Mexican or other other Latin American immigrants in Spain or Portugal than in the USA. It’s easier for Eastern Europeans to move to the UK (especially from countries that have either EU membership or special work/study agreements) than from Africa, certainly in cost and procedure, but even simply in terms of proximity.

Maybe, but are European-Americans smarter than Europeans?

Also, the UK (especially London) is a very expensive place compared to Eastern Europe. The people emigrating would need to have something saved up. It wouldn’t be nearly as much as in Nigeria, but it wouldn’t be trivial either.

The data show an academic gap (GCSEs) that’s roughly 1.2 standard deviations, in the UK, between Nigerian students and Eastern European students. That’s massive.

but if you don’t do your homework or study, you’re going to fail.

I put more or less zero effort into studying in high school, and I still passed with flying colors. This isn’t the case for everyone.

My GSS data analysis showed 75-IQ college grads out earn 125-IQ people. So, in the world we live, there is indeed “some truth” to the idea that studying will take you pretty far.

Not a very significant amount of it, though, which is what I said.

That depends on the effort you’re putting in.

You are becoming very, very tedious.

According to the GSS, 6% of 75-IQ people have a college degree. So it’s not just possible, but it’s something that’s frequently done.

94% of them don’t, which seems like a pretty good match to the word I used, which was “probably”.

Jeez…

If that were really true, alcoholics and drug addicts would never quit. Fat people would never lose weight.

No, that actually isn’t necessarily true at all. The alcoholics who quit and the people who lose weight could be the people who are naturally more conscientious and hard-working, but just let a problem sneak up on them before they realized what a problem it was.

Except that they do.

Not as often as your rainbows and unicorns view of the world, where anyone can do anything, would predict, though.

You never heard of moving to a different school district? Presumably these Nigerian migrants, having gotten somewhat settled in the UK, are putting their kids in better schools.

Oh! We should try that here! Just send the black kids to the white kids’ schools, and their IQs will shoot right up?

Jesus, why didn’t anyone think of trying that? Like, why didn’t we spend decades and millions of dollars doing something like that, that would so obviously work?

If black students in England are doing so well, why don’t they seem to gain access to the top level universities?

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/education/2016/02/why-oxford-has-so-few-black-students-and-who-blame

You also missed this part of the statement: “if you study hard.” I wonder what percentage of kids follow that part that.

And then there’s the role of genetics in the ability to “study hard”….

I did an analysis of the General Social Survey data. I compared the income of people with 75 IQ and a college degree

The fact that someone with a 75 IQ can graduate from college is really depressing. Talk about a cultural nadir….

I’m wondering if the difference between chimps and humans is 50% environmental too.

According to the GSS, 6% of 75-IQ people have a college degree. So it’s not just possible, but it’s something that’s frequently done.

6% is not “frequent.” It means that 94% (the overwhelming majority) do not get college degrees.

In the USA at least, “affirmative action” might mess up some correlations among IQ, educational attainment, and career track. A “college degree” and a “nice career” are easier for some low-IQ people to obtain in today’s society than they might be in a hypothetical color-blind society. I don’t know how easy it is or isn’t to tease the effects of AA out of the GSS.

If you read through that article (which you probably didn’t), you’d see the Nigerians outperform the Eastern Europeans substantially.

Oh, that great

RAY-CISM is such a perfid elementary SIN… it’s better discriminate people ”with” lower intelligence or anything else than such a socially construct skin color…

No doubt illibs are [disproportionally if not characteristically] delayed in every essential piece of their dirty carcasses…

They bump into any business to destroy the white race.

Remember, to do a true eugenics you must prevent [probably most of] this absolute idiots even exist like a smallpox virus in laboratory.

What’s most ridiculous in this selected part is: so ”eugenics” is a good thing [brain draining Nigeria] and keep [white] poor people out of british castle is a right thing to do*

According to the GSS, 6% of 75-IQ people have a college degree.

Who are those people? Blacks with a big assist from Affirmative Action? I’ve had my share of extremely stupid Black students……And I also know SJW profs who give passing grades to Blacks who turn in work that deserves an “F”…..

What kind of colleges and fields of study do people with 75 IQs manage to graduate from? 75 IQ was usually regarded as “borderline mentally retarded.”

Are they on athletic scholarships?

These african immigrants to the USA and european countries are mostly upper class people who left their ineffective country (among many reasons is their own inability, inefficiency and/or indifference to change their country) to live in a more successful and organized society.
Igbo are usually considered exceptional in general by westerns, but even among those 33 millions only a selected few are truly high IQ and economically successful in their own country, with enough resources to start a guaranteed, confortable lifestyle in the USA and Europe if they really want.
They are mostly catholic in the traditional sense, also really faithful to their family and ethnic ties. Since americans and europeans lost the traditional drive in their lifestyle and focus on useless social issues and unpromising careers, it’s no surprise that these immigrants would not outperform the average african-american, but also your average white.

I’ve always thought the figure 50% seems strange and harbored a suspicion that it’s an artifact of something. However, I’m not proficient enough in statistics or knowledgable enough about genetics to say anything about it.

Only, it seems to me that between chimps and people the difference must be way less than 10% environmental while between twins it must be almost 100% environmental.

This suggests to me that 50% is a population average in variation that actually disguises the effects of the environment at the level of the individual.

Maybe, but are European-Americans smarter than Europeans?

For example, the south European diaspora in wealthier NW European countries is likely to have a lower average IQ than those who went (and didn’t repatriate, except maybe in retirement) to the USA or Canada. (Although this is likely complicated by the current SE brain drain.)

As to the rest of your comment, it’s explained by selective immigration, even if not as a matter of official policy, but just as effect. The difficulties between Poles (the biggest EE minority in the UK) for ex. and Nigerians emigrating to the UK are not equivalent in any reasonable sense.

What kind of colleges and fields of study do people with 75 IQs manage to graduate from? 75 IQ was usually regarded as “borderline mentally retarded.”

I’m guessing that they are mostly Black. Remember, the Black American mean IQ is approx 85

In 1959, AAMD set the IQ threshold for mental retardation at < 85. The civil rights movement of the next decade forced psychologists to rethink this boundary, because half the African American population fell below it. In 1973, responding to this concern, AAMD (by then AAMR) changed the threshold for retardation from IQ < 85 to IQ < 70. The boundary moved south by one standard deviation! The proportion of blacks below the threshold instantly dropped from about 50 percent to 12 percent. Subsequent refinements made it still more difficult to meet the criteria for retardation.

http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/retard.htm

I knew Stephen Hawking was an idiot!

Kind of on-topic: Sam Harris begins his latest podcast, #77, by talking about… the conceptual penis hoax. After that, about 7 minutes in, he talks about the Vox article. He hits back hard, saying the article is so sloppy and clearly ideologically motivated that there isn’t much in it worth responding to. He’s also been emailing with Ezra Klein, which may have resulted in this “clarification” being added to the article:

Clarification: This article has been read to say that Harris did not ask Murray about the “Flynn effect,” the increase in IQ scores over time. That wasn’t our intent. They did discuss the phenomenon. We meant to say that Harris didn’t challenge Murray enough on its implications, and Murray’s answers on it were inadequate. The passage has been revised.

Here’s what they added to the passage (I can’t find original version to see what they took out):

… When asked about the Flynn effect by Harris, Murray responds with some hand-waving about g, a response that does not make the extraordinary fact of the Flynn effect go away.

Thanks for another great comment!

The “perception” employees/followers have of their boss/leader is an important factor to consider when it comes to workflow efficiency, i.e. quality of the work performed, and general cooperation, i.e. loyalty to a leader, etc. If (even mistakenly) a leader/boss is “perceived” to be a “know-it-all” or an “elitist snob” by his/her employees — even if what he/she says/suggest/shares is correct and sensible — this can result in a resistance to follow orders and resentment in the less intelligent employees/followers, which in turn decreases efficiency, productivity, i.e., weakens/reduces company stability/profitability, etc.

Ideally, I guess, the chairman of the board of directors of a company should be about 15 IQ points smarter than the CEO, so he/she can give good sound advice to the 15-IQ- points-smarter-than-the-workforce CEO, who in turn then effectively and persuasively communicates/translates/simplifies this high-IQ advice/perspective from/of the 130 IQ chairman of the board to the workforce without any risk of the communications being misperceived or “lost in translation.”

This study might be of interest to you as well:

Myopia and Cognitive Performance: Results From the Gutenberg Health Study
Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science October 2016, Vol.57, 5230-5236. doi:10.1167/iovs.16-19507

http://iovs.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2565722 Mirshahi et al. (2016)

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first population-based study to concurrently assess the link between myopia and cognitive performance considering the educational level as a confounder.
Our findings suggest that duration of education, which may be directly related to the risk factors for myopia, such as near-work and time spent outdoors, and thus to the direct biological pathways for the control of eye growth, is a stronger predictor of myopia compared with cognitive ability. Consequently, cognitive ability, which may have a significant genetic component, appears to be less directly related to myopia and may be associated with myopia primarily through its impacts on level of education.

– http://www.unz.com/jpetras/judeo-centrism-myths-and-mania/#comment-1849637

Remember WRDSUM and IQ don’t correlate exactly, so your methodology is pretty shaky.

Let’s say there’s an inherently smart kid with ADHD who’s never been a reader in his life. In this case, he might have relatively poor vocabulary but be able to barely graduate university based on avoiding certain kinds of classes and relying on an otherwise high IQ. This would show up as one of your “75-IQ university grads” by using WORDSUM.

In 1959, AAMD set the IQ threshold for mental retardation at < 85. The civil rights movement of the next decade forced psychologists to rethink this boundary, because half the African American population fell below it

The 85 number is kind of crazy. This would mean that about 15% of the general population would be classified as mentally retarded. If what you quote actually happened, I suspect AAMD was trying to pad the numbers to somehow get more funding, or in order to “normalize” people with actual mental retardation by putting them in the same boat as functional people.

Look for interaction terms, or condition the model on race, college education, and IQ. You can look at black versus white college graduates with IQs of 85, 100 or 115 and see what the returns are.

OT, but kind of interesting:

http://theweek.com/articles/699805/protecting-america-from-corporate-abuse-about-lot-harder

It’s basically describing anarcho-tyranny (except from the left), though of course they’d never use that word.

No, that actually isn’t necessarily true at all. The alcoholics who quit and the people who lose weight could be the people who are naturally more conscientious and hard-working, but just let a problem sneak up on them before they realized what a problem it was.

If you’re conscientious and high IQ, it doesn’t take a while to realize you’re an addict or fat. People will often point it out to you. From my experience, people quit their addictions or lose weight when they get sick of the negative externalities of their condition. People reach a breaking point, then they change.

Being “shocked” is a huge motivator for people to change.

Professor Flynn once suggested that IQ is like a muscle. The more you work your mental facilities, the stronger your IQ can be. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was also applicable to other traits (like conscientiousness, industriousness, thrift).

Lots of human behavior has changed with time. Frugality with money, sexual behavior, tendency towards homicide, racial attitudes, etc. People are not fixed constants. They’re very susceptible to environmental influences.

Not as often as your rainbows and unicorns view of the world, where anyone can do anything, would predict, though.

If 6% of 75-IQ people have degrees and 5% of Swedish CEOs are in the 70s/80s IQ range, it is theoretically possible to go pretty far in life. Fatalistic attitudes are not helpful for such an individual. I’d bet negative thinking has a lot to do with why low-IQ people fail in life.

6% of the American population is the population of NYC, LA, Chicago, Houston, and Philadelphia COMBINED. Being in the top 6% isn’t easy, but it’s not remarkably hard either. We’re not talking top 0.1% here.

Oh! We should try that here! Just send the black kids to the white kids’ schools, and their IQs will shoot right up?
Jesus, why didn’t anyone think of trying that? Like, why didn’t we spend decades and millions of dollars doing something like that, that would so obviously work

Presumably Nigerian parents, having grown up in poverty, have internalized a more appreciative attitude to education. Their suspension race in British schools is not high.

I filtered for people with WORDSUM (0-2) and DEGREE (3,4). These are people with IQs of 75, but with college degrees. 78% fall in the highest income bucket.

This seems anomalous. Can you give more detail on your analysis? Some things of particular interest: total number of matching subjects (which GSS years did you use?), which income variable, race and age demographics.

I went to https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org and tried to replicate this. Across all GSS years I see 100 matches for that WORDSUM/DEGREE condition (51 white, 7 black, 42 other). Looking at RINCOME (respondent’s income) in 2016 only I see 5 total, 1 NA and 4 in the highest bucket (>$25K, not that high), 2 whites and 3 others, 34, 50, 54, 86 (2x, other race, highest income, senile?).

Not sure how much to trust the survey data (any chance of false claims of degree or income, fake wordsum failure, or simple errors?), but regardless I think you are overinterpreting a small number of anomalous results.

One other thought, given the high proportion of Other race, is it possible many of these cases are ESL Asians?

P.S. Here is the Advanced Case Selection I used in case anyone wants to try this:
(Combined_5.wordsum IN (0, 1, 2)) AND (Combined.degree IN (3, 4)) AND (Combined.year IN (2016))

They’re a lot easier to find if you use a high-error proxy for an IQ test.

Education, social work, agriculture, music, religion, health professions, visual and performing arts, physical education, people and place studies.

Public school teacher, welfare caseworker, rehab councelor, school guidance councelor, farm manager, hen supervisor, music teacher, dentist, nurse, art teacher, professional actress or actor, gym teacher, physical therapist, minister, director of diversity

Do you have any statistics to prove this? People keep making this assertion, but is there proof? I’m not saying you’re wrong, but it’d be interesting to see evidence.

Also, from my understanding, lots of affluent Africans are the members of tribes who’ve successfully taken over the govt and looted it to help their relatives. These affluent Africans are often enriched by family connections (such as civil servant relative) rather than actual ability. Therefore, it’s not clear if an affluent African immigrant would be particularly intellectually elite.

In contrast, in regions like Indian subcontinent and China, there’s a much larger tech workforce. So affluent people, especially those that emigrate, are more likely to be from the cognitive elite. Cognitive elite Africans, who disproportionately are civil servants, might be dissuaded from emigration because it’d then cut off their clan from govt largesse.

Igbo are usually considered exceptional in general by westerns,

Igbo are outperforming Chinese and Indians in the IQ. The UK Chinese perform at 2/3 of SD above the British mean on the CAT aptitude test, so the Igbo British are doing well. There are 34 million of Igbo in Nigeria.

A large black ethnic group whose immigrants are performing above Jewish/Chinese level. That’s pretty good.

I don’t think Igbo are necessarily a super high-IQ group, but I wouldn’t be surprised if their mean IQ was around the Western mean. Perhaps the Igbo immigrants are bit above this mean (with the children regressing downward), but what matters is the environment/culture. In Nigeria, if you don’t study you starve. Igbo and other Nigerians bring this attitude to the UK.

Since americans and europeans lost the traditional drive in their lifestyle and focus on useless social issues and unpromising careers, it’s no surprise that these immigrants would not outperform the average african-american, but also your average white.

True enough. That’s why I believe that IQ, academic attainment, and human behavior are HIGHLY malleable.

I suspect most Nigerian parents in the UK didn’t grow up in poverty – at least poverty by Nigerian standards. Almost all are fluent English speakers which indicates education and access to media.

The attitude towards education among West African immigrants is pretty stunning, and frequently not career focused.

Would James Watson be allowed to give a talk about this?

In other news, does anyone know how I can get a piano to Manchester (UK) cheaply?

75 IQ college finishers and 125 no college people are both very odd cohorts. What is the n for each? Unless the data is from 60 years ago, there is going to be a lot of very odd quirks in those groups.

75 IQ college finishers may have many more athletes in that cohort and affirmative action recipients. That will skew the average. 125 IQ no college will likely include a lot of people with mental disfunction or who are from very poor areas. I wish there was more information.

Then where are the Nigeria novelists, fields medals winners and grand masters in chess? What scientific discoveries have they made and what patents do they hold? Nigeria is a poor country but North Korea, with 1/10th the GDP per capita, has made more strides in rocketry, nuclear energy, etc.

They weren’t just rounded up at random, three hundred were stowed in a slave ship, and three months later 200 reached shore. This strikes me as incredibly strong selection for tough, strong physically fit individuals.

It means they would get CLOSER to the native mean, but that doesn’t change the fact that a smarter group of people is going to have smarter kids than an average group.

If this group’s children is performing above the Chinese/Jewish mean, that’s absolutely amazing. It’s not like the British Nigerians are immigrating on any H-1b program. They’re not coming as a super elite wave.

I guess the fact that most of them could read before they came to the UK.

60% literacy rate.

Well, for one, probably not as much. For two, since people in Eastern Europe make more than $2 a day, on average, it would be easier to save up money, so more people would be able to do it. For three, life in Eastern Europe isn’t as bad as it is in Nigeria, so intelligent people probably have more reasons to stay there.

It’s still remarkable that Nigerian students are outperforming Eastern Euros by 1.2 standard deviations on the British GCSEs. Even if you’re correct that Nigerian migration is more selected, that’s a big gap.

Aren’t the ones that move to the UK typically there to do blue-collar labor? Because of European Union laws, it’s a lot easier to move to other European countries to do that kind of job if you’re from a European country yourself, rather than if you’re from Africa.

Yes. Though from what I’ve read, lots of Nigerian migrants are also in blue collar labor. My sense is that lots of Nigerian migrants are from urban backgrounds and have educated civil servant relatives, so they’re more focused on education as means to a good job. The Eastern Euros, who come from a different type of background, might see blue collar labor more positively and not try as hard.

Maybe you should ask yourself why it is that, for example, Somalis in Minnesota don’t have much to show, academically speaking? I mean, Minnesota schools used to be some of the best in the country, didn’t they? And the state has bent over backwards to welcome them. So why are the Somalis there still dumb? Why haven’t they shot to the top of the academic pyramid, like the Nigerians?

The Sri Lankan refugees in the UK are performing 0.9 standard deviations above the White British. That’s massive. What’s the explanation?

As for African refugees, there are lots of Ethiopian and Somali refugees in the Seattle public schools. The Ethiopians are 1/3 of SD below the White statewide mean in test scores and the Somalis are 0.5 SD behind. That’s not bad.

I’ve seen people who are legally mentally retarded graduate from college. How does that make fellow graduates from the same university feel? I would be ashamed.

Also, lots of 75 IQ people who graduate college are athletes.

Didn’t Jane Goodall spend 30 years in the bush trying to teach chimps how to talk? The pictures from her youth suggest she was attractive.

If Igbo are the “Jews of Africa” and have a 15 point advantage over the genetic African IQ average of about 85, that suggests they average about 100.

I find that hard to believe, because it suggests that the selection pressure in Nigeria for intelligence was just as severe as it was in Northern Europe or East Asia. However, they have had nowhere near the social complexity to deal with for as long (ie, large groups of humans competing with each other for success).

IQ isn’t like ” a muscle ” – or more accurately muscle fiber . That can be increased with a certain kind of progressive resistance weight training and high protein / carbs at the right time diet . There’s zero evidence an individual can get more intelligent – though he can get more knowledgeable within his pre-existing cognitive framework . Would love to be wrong on this – especially when you take a look at most of the modern elite of the West .

Here’s a screenshot of what I did.

http://imgur.com/a/wOcWu

I used the following variables for filtering.

WORDSUM(0, 1, 2)
DEGREE(3, 4)

WORDSUM(10)
DEGREE(0, 1, 2, 3)

I used the INCOME variable in the Row box.

… is it even appropriate to conclude that neural organization is determinative for intelligence at all? If so, the appropriate place to begin would be to attempt to correlate observed variations in brain structure with differences in IQ, not with the genes that code for the structures. Such correlations, however, have not been observed in any high degree …

Your doubts don’t preclude the possibility (some would say likelihood) that such correlations will add up and be proven to be causations in the future. “Known unknowns” becoming “known knowns,” if you will.

it would be ridiculous to assert that [behavior] could be reduced to a handful of genes or anatomical structures

Sure, but the salient point is that ‘liberal’ creationists, whether they have the temerity to “March for Science” or not, won’t concede any possible genetic influence on intelligence and behavior. The few that do, do so begrudgingly, with a motte-and-bailey retreat to “but Hitler!” with echoes of gould-gould-gould.

Carl is a very talented writer, the CliffsNotes guy for any NYT reader interested in the natural world. But I bet he feels the need to shower when he gets this close to an HBD truth. Sad.

Wordsum is the best variable we have available.

There’s a 0.71 correlation between IQ and Wordsum score. That’s pretty high. Razib Khan likes the Wordsum variable. This variable is originally from the WAIS IQ test.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/wordsum-iq/

A correlation of 0.71 is not mind-blowing, there’s a significant difference between IQ and WORDSUM as they relate to each other linearly. But I think it’s good enough to get a sense that WORDSUM is a serviceable substitute for a more rigorous measure of g in lieu of any alternatives, and not so clumsy a proxy so as to be useless. Though that call is up to you, and readers are free to disagree with the methodology of the model used to obtain this correlation. Additionally, I would point out that WORDSUM is a subset of the vocabulary subsection of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. WORDSUM is in effect a slice of an IQ test.

“What must it be like to live in a leftist mind?”

Topsy-turvy, definition:

(adjective)

·Upside down

(noun)

·State of confusion or disorder

“Oh, Gilbert! You and your world of topsy-turvydom!”

-Sullivan to Gilbert, Topsy-Turvy (1999)

I would add that AAs were not rounded up at random, but were overwhelmingly slower, weaker or more stupid than the Africans who captured them and sold them into the Western Hemisphere. I’ll not do the math for you.

We don’t know enough actually to make such a definitive statement, but yes, I’m likely to agree with you that intelligence for the most part seems to operate more like heart pumps and somatic organ function than muscle tissue, per se. For example, obesity and an extremely poor lifestyle seems to lower IQ; general fitness and aerobic training might slightly improve IQ. Lead and neurotoxins lead to poor functioning, obviously.

We’re talking about 1-2 points. I suppose you could get more extensive alterations if you could control someone’s life as if he was in an asylum, controlling for every aspect of his caloric, micronutrition, and vitamin intake; controlling for every single social or intellectual activity, etc.

But all in all, its not too realistic.

It also suggests CEOs in industries where workers have higher mean IQs should have higher mean IQs as well since the baseline you have to be slightly more intelligent than is higher. This does seem to be borne out by the techies–guys like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg would never wind up running an oil company.

Thanks. So it looks like the big difference is you used INCOME rather than RINCOME (which does not appear to affect the basic results). I need to double check the sample weighting I specified (IIRC none, just respondents) and the buckets for INCOME (I was surprised RINCOME topped out at >$25k).

Snips from your comment:

There are 34 million of Igbo in Nigeria.

A large black ethnic group whose immigrants are performing above Jewish/Chinese level. That’s pretty good.

In Nigeria, if you don’t study you starve. Igbo and other Nigerians bring this attitude to the UK.

That’s why I believe that IQ, academic attainment, and human behavior are HIGHLY malleable.

I have to ask, are you white? If so, your sunny gushing over the Igbo sounds rather cucktastic. Leaving aside their purported (beneficial? adversarial?) competitive natures, flooding Britain or any other white land with blacks of any sort is disastrous for both phenotypical and cultural reasons.

One other thought, given the high proportion of Other race, is it possible many of these cases are ESL Asians?

Good point. Let me do the GSS datasets again. This time, I’ll make several changes. I’ll only look at the data for American-born Whites and use RINCOME instead of INCOME (individual vs family income).

I filtered for people with WORDSUM (0-2), RACE(1), BORN(1), and DEGREE (3,4). These are people with IQs of 75, but with college degrees. 71% fall in the highest income bucket. I used RINCOME in the Row box. N = 17. I only include native-born whites.

I filtered for people with WORDSUM (0-4), RACE(1), BORN(1), and DEGREE (3,4). Just because I wanted a larger sample size. These are people with IQs of 85, but with college degrees. 66% fall in the highest income bucket. I used RINCOME in the Row box. N = 113. I only include native-born whites.

I filtered for people with WORDSUM(10), RACE(1), BORN(1), and DEGREE(0, 1, 2). These are people with IQs of 125, but with no college degree. 37% fall in the highest income bucket. I used RINCOME in the Row box. N = 228. I only include native-born whites.

I filtered for people with WORDSUM(10), RACE(1), BORN(1), and all levels of education DEGREE(0-4). These are the entire sample of people with 125 IQ. 53% fall in the highest income bracket. I used RINCOME in the Row box. N = 809. I only include native-born whites.

I filtered for people with WORDSUM(10), RACE(1), BORN(1), and DEGREE(3,4). These are people with 125 IQ, but they also have college degrees. Surprisingly, only 59% fall in the highest income bracket. I used RINCOME in the Row box. N = 581. I only include native-born whites.

What percent of 75-IQ American-born whites have a college degree?

3.5%.

CONCLUSION:

-3.5% of American-born White-Americans of 75 IQ have a college degree
-A degree-holding, 75 IQ person will out earn a non-degree, 125 IQ person
-A degree-holding, 75 IQ person earns no less than a degree-holding, 125 IQ person
-IQ makes no difference for income if you have a college degree
-If you’re a 75 IQ person, you can get a degree and earn as much as higher-IQ, degree holders
-If you’re a 75 IQ person, you can get a degree an out earn higher-IQ, non-degree holder

Let me put it this way for you.

I’d bet that peasant-level Chinese immigrants would, in the long-run, outscore and out earn whites. Doesn’t mean I favor Chinese immigration.

I’d bet that even peasant-level Indian immigrants could, in the long-run, outscore and out earn whites. Doesn’t mean I favor Indian immigration.

If an immigrant group are inherently superior in some way (culture, IQ, masculinity), that can often be a reason to keep them out.

However, it’s foolish to pretend that all non-white people are dumb. The world doesn’t work that way.

“Just as important, intelligence is profoundly shaped by the environment”

Yeah, f’rinstance, Gary Busey got stupider after he spilled his brains out on the road when he crashed his motorcycle.

Take that, racists!

Yeah, 25K isn’t enough. It’s the best we have.

The most surprising result is that 75-IQ people with a degree actually do well in the labor market.

You are, in fact, I think, wrong. Google “angelic inspiration”. Or from another point of view: Bottom line – once you have a minimal level of low cunning tribal sense (for example, like the people in the Little House on the Prairie, who talked to maybe 20 people a year in some years), and have access to 20k plus words (Imagine Lincoln, a not very obviously bright child, growing up reading the Bible), you have a limited (as in you will never be Shakespeare or Proust, born geniuses) but very high potential ceiling. For example, Wittgenstein, Hemingway, Eliot, and the Professor on Gilligan’s Island all recounted, I think, their feelings of being rather dull students at one point in their life – and there is no question that the philosopher Wittgenstein was by nature dull compared to von Neumann, the novelist Hemingway by nature dull compared to Joyce, the poet Eliot by nature dull compared to the poet Keats, and the Professor on Gilligan’s Island by nature dull compared to Professor Godel or even Godel’s less gifted friend Einstein – and it is likely that Wittgenstein, Hemingway, Eliot, and the Professor on Gilligan’s Island were, as far as G goes, at least one and probably more sigma (sigmata, if you read Greek) on the wrong side of the comparison subjects I mentioned – but each of them (W, H, E, and the Professor) achieved genius again and again exactly as if they had the right genes. Why? Uniquely good education; a passion for excellence stoked by unusual experiences; or angelic inspiration? You tell me. (Actually for the four I mention -except, in his very best moments, Eliot, and once or twice the Professor on Gilligan’s Island, but I forget in which episodes – I seriously doubt there was angelic inspiration – that is reserved for real artists and real philosophers and real scientists.) (E.g., Not the Alfalfa and the underrated for pc reasons Buckwheat types, no matter how talented they were, but for the more celestial Larry and Curly types. Seriously.)

Don’t confuse a mob with an individual. My guess is that the set of leftists who read the NYT’s science reporting in depth has almost no overlap with the set that shows up to riot at an academic author’s spech.

I find it difficult to believe that a substantial fraction of people with 75 IQs have a college degree. That’s well below the average IQ of high school graduates, and well below the cutoff for being allowed to join the military.

Wordsum is correlated with IQ, but I suspect that the distribution of actual IQ given a wordsum score has a pretty big standard deviation. My guess is, the guys with very low wordsum scores and college degrees are ones who got a very low wordsum score relative to their actual IQ. I’m not sure where we’d find hard data to see whethervthis is right, though.

35% of 125 IQ native-born Whites do not have a college degree. So they’re a substantial-sized group. Even if you look at the entire 125 IQ sample (for native-born Whites), the 75-IQ degree holders out earn them. Even if you look at the degree-holding 125 IQ sample (for native-born Whites), 75 IQ degree holders earn the same.

N = 17 for Degree-holding native-born Whites with 75 IQ.

I expanded to using an 85 IQ sample, degree-holding. WORDSUM (0-4). The above trends persisted even with this sample. 66% of the 85 IQ, degree-holding sample earned in the highest income bracket.

N = 113 for Degree-holding native-born Whites with 85 IQ

So it appears that it’s not just a distortion of small N.

Low IQ doesn’t hurt your ability to make money, as long as you get a degree.
High IQ doesn’t help you make any extra.

The main benefit of higher IQ is that increases your probability of a degree. However, it’s the degree that leaders to a higher income, not a degree. That’s why 75 IQ degree-holders earn the same as higher-IQ degree holders. That’s also why 75 IQ degree-holders out earn the higher-IQ non-degree holders.

If you’re a complete fool and get a college degree, you will probably enter the middle-class.

The Swedish CEO survey showed that 5% had IQs in the 70s&80s.

So not only can a 75-IQ person get a degree, he could have a very successful career.

ALLAHU AKBAR struck again, this time at an Ariana Grande concert.

“This does seem to be borne out by the techies–guys like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg would never wind up running an oil company.”

Oil companies are not kosher, hence why Jews don’t dominate that industry.

As summarized by JayMan’s site, the research actually shows little or no influence upon intelligence from the environment. But that’s a hate thought!

For the record I am unfamiliar with most gene studies, although I do read all of Steve Hsu’s posts on the subject, not to mention Bruce Charlton’s (that is where I learned Wittgenstein was not naturally all that bright) — but I thought it might be nice if someone -at last – wrote a comment on the internet incorporating both the question of whether any Gilligan Island characters ever acted with angelic inspiration, and if so does anybody remember in which episodes; and the rather older question of whether Buckwheat is, in fact, underrated in his long-ago era’s comic pantheon because of pc concerns. If you read my earlier 400 word comment and feel I wasted your time, I am sorry – may I recommend you listen to Mozart’s Romance in A flat Major if you feel that way – easily available on Youtube, but not well known – you will forgive me wholeheartedly for my 400 word waste of your time if you listen to the end to a good performance …. by the way Eliot is a good poet – he wrote some great stuff on roses and orchards and those weird bells just out of sight when you stand anywhere on the New England Coast. His younger stuff about women is all trash, though, sad to say, just as bad as Hemingway’s similar stuff. Not entirely his fault – he lacked God-given talent at the time, and was, maybe, just doing his best. Sure he could have not written any poetry at all in those days, which would have been nice, but who really thinks that way ?

You’re confusing hissyfits. The above poster is talking about the Vox article Steve posted a few days ago, I believe.

Revenge for her profaning against the Doughnut God.

They believe in that, right? Or is that Mormons?

I filtered for people with WORDSUM(10), RACE(1), BORN(1), and DEGREE(0, 1, 2). These are people with IQs of 125, but with no college degree. 37% fall in the highest income bucket. I used RINCOME in the Row box. N = 228. I only include native-born whites.

This is the group that really baffles me. Decent sample size and you can’t fake (as easily anyway) or underperform a perfect Wordsum score. How are more not meeting a $25k income threshold? Possible overrepresentation of housewives? Any other ideas?

It’s hard to say. There’s a 0.71 correlation between IQ and Wordsum.

The Swedish CEO study found that 5% of CEOs had IQs in the 70s&80s. So it doesn’t strike me as wildly implausible that there are lots of 70s&80s IQ people with college degrees.

“You absolutely need severe winters to weed out the lesser lights, unmotivated, peeps with a “next week” at the most time horizon, and assorted other slackers.

When it’s mid 80s all the time, the lesser lights get along just fine and there’s no reason for any increase in IQ.”

Cold winter?

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/unique-everybody-else/201211/cold-winters-and-the-evolution-intelligence

Brain size increased for expertise capacity, not IQ.

https://notpoliticallycorrect.me/2017/03/14/brain-size-increased-for-expertise-capacity-not-iq/

“Sharks have had the same brain to body ratio for 400 million years, it’s all they needed to survive.”

It’s called “stasis”. Once an organism becomes “adapted” to its environment through natural selection, drift, sexual selection, etc, stasis occurs and evolutionary change will only occur if the environment changes—which it’s clear that the shark’s environment hasn’t changed which is why it has remained the same.

“The mutant sharks with big brains were no more successful than the average, so it was never incorporated as a desirable mutation….unlike humans along the 40th north parallel….”

Having greater defenses may reduce the need for cognitive abilities “for constant assessment of environmental predation risk, especially in simple open environments”.

http://cyber.sci-hub.bz/MTAuMTA5OC9yc3BiLjIwMTYuMTg1Nw==/10.1098%40rspb.2016.1857.pdf

Humans needed expertise as they moved into new lands. Since people with erectus sized brains can have normal intelligence, then large brains aren’t needed for high IQ. If this is the case, then large brains evolved for another reason—expertise capacity, which would have been important in our ancestral evolution. So since brain size predicts mammalian success in novel environments, for Homo, expertise is also involved.

http://cyber.sci-hub.bz/MTAuMTA4Ni81ODgzMDQ=/10.1086%40588304.pdf

So these mutant sharks with big brains would only appear in a novel environment.

Brain size increased for expertise capacity, not IQ.

http://www.human-existence.com/publications/Skoyles%20Human%20evolution%20expanded%20brains%20expertise%20not%20IQ.pdf

“Variants may not predic inter-group variation, but they are applicable to intra-group variation. So if one race has certain IQ genes that another race doesn’t, it wouldn’t neccessarily imply higher/lower IQ.”

Considering that humans are genetically very similar to one another, you would think that the results of one group’s genes would apply to another. In fact, in this context, I’ve never heard a cogent argument why they wouldn’t. When it comes to intelligence, people just repeat that they don’t without ever providing a reason (probably to avoid mentioning the obvious: they should) that isn’t also an extreme case. Do genes for eye color produce different eye colors depending upon the person’s race? No, not at all, and it is absurd to suggest that they would; those gene variants do the same thing regardless of race as common sense would dictate. Likewise, if an allele is shown to correlate with higher intelligence in one racial group versus others that doesn’t, there is no reason to believe that those results wouldn’t also apply to another racial group.

Look fellas,

Getting a college degree these days has nothing to do with any kind of intellectual ability or performance. It’s all about the money. If you can pay the school, or somebody else can pay it on your behalf, they WILL give a degree eventually to anyone who can fog a mirror (and in Trayvon Martin’s case, even that wasn’t necessary).

Having a college degree proves nothing—nothing—about your intelligence anymore. It’s long past time to do something about this ridiculous credential. Either it has to stand for something honest, or it needs to lose its gatekeeper status. The present situation is unsustainable.

According to BBC accounts:

Today a terrible accident has happened in Manchester.

A tan Englishman was hurt in an explosion.

It appears as if his diversity fireworks went off too early.

As a result he was killed. “Others” were hurt.

He was attempting to enrich a local music festival. This is a tragedy.

As far as others being hurt: They were most likely racists anyway so they will not be missed. Let us focus on what’s important.

A message for his family? Diversity is our strength.

It means (perhaps?) that GWAS studies won’t be able to answer the question about whether racial differences in observed traits are genetic in origin.

Correction: …even if what he/she says/*suggests*/shares is correct and sensible…

It also suggests CEOs in industries where workers have higher mean IQs should have higher mean IQs as well

Yes you are correct, that is the conclusion that would logically follow from this model/theory/study.

What is important to keep in mind though, in my opinion, is to make a distinction between founder-CEOs and just regular CEOs. Usually founder-CEOs like Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg et al., receive and are shown much more credit and respect (and leniency) from their employees and from the general public — rightly and deservedly so in most cases — since they built the company, even if they are probably smarter than the average employee at their own company and therefore have a harder time to communicate their visions for the company and the future to their employees, the public, etc.; but still, financially often times a regular CEO — likely less intelligent than the founder-CEO — more successfully maximizes the performance of the workforce and grows the company than a founder-CEO:
If, Why, and How Founders Should Hire a “Professional” CEO
Reid Hoffman

Last year, Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz articulated a well-thought-out philosophy on why he prefers to back Founder-CEOs and keep them in charge as the company grows. His essay, “Why We Prefer Founding CEOs” lays out three key ingredients that great founding CEOs tend to have, and that professional CEOs often lack:

Comprehensive knowledge
Moral Authority
Total commitment to the long term

Ben’s point is that without these three key ingredients, a CEO won’t be able to maintain the rapid product innovation that is a prerequisite for success in today’s startup world. Ben cites Google and Cisco as rare exceptions where a professional CEO helped steer a company to market leadership and that the evidence is “one-sided and overwhelming” that you shouldn’t bring in a professional CEO. In other words, Ben asserts that bringing in a professional CEO should be a last resort for a founder.
[...]
Noam Wasserman of Harvard Business School has been studying what he calls “the founder’s dilemma” for nearly a decade. In his academic paper, “Rich versus King”, he looked at 460 American startups from the 2000s. His statistical analysis showed that, paradoxically, founders maximized the value of their equity stakes by giving up the CEO position and board control: “The results show that, controlling for company size, age, and other factors, the more decision-making control kept (at both the CEO and board levels), the lower the value of the entrepreneur’s equity stake.”

In another study of 212 startups, Wasserman found that it was rare for Founder-CEOs to run their companies in the long term; less than half were still CEO after 3 years, and less than a quarter of the CEOs of the companies that reached an IPO were Founder-CEOs.

– http://www.reidhoffman.org/article/2169

I’m wondering if the difference between chimps and humans is 50% environmental too.

If chimps did their homework and studied hard they could graduate from college. And then make sure their kids went to good schools.

We can close the academic acheivement gap between chimps and humans.