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deleted 11 points ago +34 / -23
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john1234 5 points ago +5 / -0

Unfortunately "genetic regression to the mean" is a real biological phenomenom

Even if you pick out the outlier, a very, very well-mannered, intelligent person, your children are going to get genes that are closer to the average of the population / race, than the genetic-lottery-winning outlier

That is why you ALWAYS have to consider populations, relatives, "race" and other things, in addition to the "individual"

The same goes with every single feature or trait. For example, professional athletes and olympians do not produce only olympians. That is because of genetic regression to the mean. The individual traits of a professional athlete might be caused by in a large part by genes, but are not nearly as much heretidary. The top individuals are just a product of genetic lottery. For example, Jordan's kids are not good, at all, in basketball. Gretzky's kids didn't succeed in hockey.

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AJoeDD 1 point ago +2 / -1

The logic is sound here, but I'm suspicious of the data on the topic and ability to make accurate assessments of these considerations. Mainly, I wonder about the population distribution getting sampled in IQ tests reflecting an entire race sufficiently, and reflecting possible subgroups. I've come across racial IQ literature links in convos like these before, but a lot of it seemed to come from a small sample. Like, compared to a modern clinical trial, the scale is way smaller, and even clinical trials end up missing various parts of the true population distribution in their sample. E.g., the city within a country tested probably has a gigantic influence. I'm inclined to believe this is a real barrier for drawing conclusions, because the numbers and SD given for groups on the bell curve seems to be highly variable from study to study.

On the topic, if we bring genetics into it, we wouldn't really be using race as something to connect to genetics. A scientific classification would probably be something like the mitochondria DNA of different population groups that yields tons of subgroups in race. There will be some overlap with population group associations and race associations, but it's really crude to lump all people of one color or continent together. This together implies there will be intraracial groups that can be exceptions, rather than only outlier individuals. That argues against racial generalization. Except in a case where the racial effect is extremely robust and strong, I suppose.

While I believe IQ measures something real that can be used to make predictions, that may just hold true at an individual level, given the limited data we have. Might be many other issues, given there are probable major confounding factors that co-associate with race. Frankly, I don't know real IQ tests enough to know whether they can compensate. Most of us in these conversations are only familiar with something like an IQ test you can get online and SATs (that are said to correlate well). Anyway, it would be nice if someone can address this point, but as I've heard IQ data does meet the best standards of psychology research, I'll ignore my concerns about the test for now.

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john1234 1 point ago +1 / -0

"I wonder about the population distribution getting sampled in IQ tests reflecting an entire race sufficiently, and reflecting possible subgroups. "

If you believe the tests have too small samples, check out the statistics that correlate VERY strongly to IQ / intellectual success in general, and that have even the entire population as samples. Things like:

-SAT tests

-PISA tests

-education level

-income

-wealth (correlates better than income)

-crime statistics

Every single one of those tell the exact same story: there are differences between countries and races, and the differences are very similar to those that have been observed in the IQ studies (for example the adoption studies)

"On the topic, if we bring genetics into it, we wouldn't really be using race as something to connect to genetics"

Yes, we would. Even the AI's of computers have catogorized people of the world to races after getting the genomes of people around the world

"Race" is a very real thing. The genetic studies say so, and even about 99% of people themselves know very precisely which "race" they are, or which exact nation they belong to, even before getting a DNA test to find it out.

The genetic studies on intelligence have already found hundreds of genes linked to higher intelligence - and that those genes are found more often in the "races" that have been scoring higher in the IQ tests

So yes, "race" is real, the sample sizes are large enough, and the differences are partly due to real hereditary genetics (and not just due to the environment, poverity etc).

This of course does not mean some people should be given up on from the gate. But it does mean we shouldn't be wasting any resources trying to secure equality of outcomes

The "Kansas City school experiment" showed once and for all, that trying to destroy the IQ gap by throwing money & resources on the "problem" will not solve anything. Hundreds of millions were wasted, and the gap remained:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-03-27-me-51685-story.html

You can't really fill a bucket any more once it's already full.