Chuck at Occidentalist has been blogging up a storm lately of statistical analyses on various interesting questions. He vents:
What really frustrates me is Lazy HBD. There are dozens of public use data sets waiting to be explored from a HBD perspective. Statistical packages can be downloaded for free. All sorts of HBDish questions can be addressed: Do 2nd generation Blacks do worse on cognitive tests than 3rd+ generation Blacks? Do mixed White and Asians outperform Whites? What is the standardized difference between first, second, and third generation Hispanics controlling for SES? Does color correlate with IQ in the Hispanic population? Does color correlate with crime in the Black population? But it seems that few are interested. I don’t get it.
I'd get right on it, but I have to take a nap first.
Seriously, there truly is a huge amount of data out there. Various longitudinal studies have been going on for decades that follow thousands of individuals throughout their lives. The 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth is the most famous because Herrnstein and Murray made it the centerpiece of The Bell Curve. But there are many other ones.
Of course, it's a lot of work to do it right, as Chuck's wrestle through multiple blog posts with the old question of whether light-skinned blacks score higher on IQ tests than do dark-skinned blacks. Richard E. Nisbett argued that the lack of a correlation falsifies the theory that racial gaps in IQ are partly genetic. But the answer Chuck came up with appears to be ultimately yes there is a correlation, although it's not enormous. But as Chuck's work showed, there are a fair number of wrinkles that must be dealt with.
Meanwhile, Inductivist looks at the Add Health questionnaire data to see if respondents overrate their own intelligence versus their scores on the survey's vocabulary tests:
First, people do have a tendency to rate their intelligence correctly--self-described intelligence is positively correlated with measured IQ--but the tendency is only moderate. Next, males are not more likely than females to inflate their smarts. By contrast, blacks are significantly more likely to--compared to whites. The other racial/ethnics groups do not differ from whites.
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For the audience that will actually listen to the arguments at all, the HBD angle on intelligence and sexuality has been beaten to death.
It's good to be reminded of it, but focusing only on IQ can become a laziness of its own. Same with sexuality -- which race of chicks do dudes find hottest?!
There needs to be more focus on everything else -- creativity, personality, social behavior, religiosity, and so on. Not just for theoretical interest, but that's where we're really hurting these days -- people are smart enough, but trust, cohesion, neighbors looking out for neighbors, all that is draining out of a national wound.
Relating current patterns to the environment they're adapted to also means that people need to learn more about the differences in subsistence modes, which I rarely read about in HBD posts.
Just one recent example, where I took a stab at explaining why East Asians score the lowest in Conscientiousness and Agreeableness:
http://akinokure.blogspot.com/2011/11/why-east-asians-are-so-unconscientious.html
There's a million other topics like that, and sometimes you don't need original research, just a review of an already published paper.
You hardly ever hear about how atomized and soulless most East Asian "communities" (hives) are, so stuff like that makes the audience wiser than another review of black-white IQ differences.
Plus it should temper the enthusiasm many HBD people have for bringing in East Asians to boost the "cognitive elite."
It wouldn't be so different from deflating the enthusiasm for Jewish braininess by detailing their differences in personality, social behavior, culture vs. culture attitudes, and so on.
"Same with sexuality -- which race of chicks do dudes find hottest?!"
Of course if HBD dudes were hotties themselves (i.e. actually attracting the sexual interest of females), they wouldn't be pondering this question at all. Sad how those with a lower probability of success with the opposite sex make the goal even more unobtainable by focussing on only the best looking of the women who aren't attracted to them.
Even courses in statistics doesn't prevent this deadlock.
Epiphany: Logic is not often employed in the reasoning processes of the more logical thinkers. What hope is there for the rest of us?
Exactely why are those questions important? Or at least, important enough for someone to spend time working on them. The big HBD questions have been answered, and nobody acts on those answers. So why sweat the small stuff.
Most people aren't going to contribute much, both from laziness and lack of background knowledge/ability/time. A lot of HBD people, like most other broad intellectual movements, find the message reassuring or plausible, and so accept it without a lot of critical thought. Probably, the average HBD person has thought more about it than the average person following the "we're all equal under the skin" line, but not all that much more.
There is the small matter of there not being any institution in place that will materially support HBDers as they research these oh so important questions.
@ #3 Anon
You can fuck right off. If HBD bloggers versus anti-racist bloggers had a "post your real life sexy jpeg folder" contest I am quite sure who would win.
> Richard E. Nisbett argued that the lack of a correlation falsifies the theory that racial gaps in IQ are partly genetic. But the answer Chuck came up with appears to be ultimately yes there is a correlation, although it's not enormous.
Hardly surprising, since White ancestors of Blacks/mixeds might well have a mean IQ of 90. In principle it could be 62 for all we know.
Not to mention color is far from perfect as an index of ancestry, since a few genes control most of the variance. One is thus introducing noise that pushes the correlation down.
I'd bet that eurasians not only score better than whites, but better than asians. (along the theory that higher IQ people are more likely to marry out). Of course I'm biased, as Steve knows. (also anonymous)
"Just one recent example, where I took a stab at explaining why East Asians score the lowest in Conscientiousness and Agreeableness"
Were these self-reports? They might just be more self-critical.
I'd bet on lower Extroversion and Openness, higher Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Neuroticism
There must be data out there on the performance of black infants adopted by white parents that could end the debate once and for all by now.
But there are many other ones.
So Steve's attachment to superfluous words does not end with the oft-noted extra "of". I'm starting to wonder if Edgy Gurl might be right that Steve has been kidnapped by a cabal of sportscasters.
"First, people do have a tendency to rate their intelligence correctly"
An interesting angle on this is people can tell if someone is smarter than them which makes sense from an evolutionary point of view.
Dear Mr. Sailer !
I would like to remind to the reading public that NLSY (National Longitudinal Survey of Youth) was also non-trivially used by Ch. Murray in his 1999 AEI brochure “Income inequality and IQ”:
http://www.mega.nu/ampp/murray_income_iq.pdf
He took there a sub-sample of about 1,000 participants of NLSY (out of about 13,000 total); namely, those only, who had siblings in the same NLSY. That allowed him to study
outcomes,
and their correlation with IQ at youth,
keeping environment and genetic endowment in the pairs of comparison as close as possible. One can read the results of that study in the brochure cited above.
Respectfully, F.r.
Do white/Asian mixes outperform Whites? In what? BTW I saw a plain Jane Asian woman with her young daughter,(I assume it was her child,tho not sure) anyway the Asian woman had apparently had the girl(who was about 9) with a white man.The girl was stunningly beautiful. She was perfect.She could easily have been a child actress/model of note. I can only imagine what kind of woman she will grow into. Eurasians,baby.
Anonymous,
In my opinion, your perception is a bit skewed. The population interested in HBD isn't all made up of bitter, weak, sexually undesirable male semi-virgins. They just happen to be the embarrassing fringe of the group. They are to the field of HBD what semi-literate creationists are to the Republican Party or what the drugged out hippies are to the Democrats. I believe that most HBDers are simply interested in anthropology. The ones who provide the most interesting content on various topics, with the most logical support and evidence, tend to be married with children. More so, from bits and pieces, it seems that they are married to people whom they actually wanted to marry.
"Exactely why are those questions important? Or at least, important enough for someone to spend time working on them. The big HBD questions have been answered, and nobody acts on those answers. So why sweat the small stuff."
Why sweat anything that doesn't provide immediate practical benefits? Why ponder history or astronomy? Maybe most people who spend significant amount of time studying any given question do so for the pure love of the subject matter. The development of human kind is fascinating.
@agnostic - "There needs to be more focus on everything else -- creativity, personality, social behavior, religiosity, and so on. Not just for theoretical interest, but that's where we're really hurting these days -- people are smart enough, but trust, cohesion, neighbors looking out for neighbors, all that is draining out of a national wound."
hear, hear!
trust, cohesion, neighbors looking out for neighbors? sounds like relatedness/altruism issues. (~_^)
having said that, chuck has been looking into some quite interesting stuff. kudos to him for rolling up his sleeves and digging into the data! (^_^)
agnostic said...
"You hardly ever hear about how atomized and soulless most East Asian "communities" (hives) are, so stuff like that makes the audience wiser than another review of black-white IQ differences."
Way to dehumanize an entire race of people by calling their communities "hives." And if you mean soulless as in sleepy and boring, then all those soulless whiteopias come to mind.
"Plus it should temper the enthusiasm many HBD people have for bringing in East Asians to boost the "cognitive elite." "
As you said, they already have the IQs to succeed, so what makes you think they cannot assimilate into American culture and their supposed "autism" and "laziness" (/Roll Eyes)? Unless you think following authority and not tolerating stupid people is genetic ...
"It wouldn't be so different from deflating the enthusiasm for Jewish braininess by detailing their differences in personality, social behavior, culture vs. culture attitudes, and so on."
Great, now what do you have against the Jews? They are too cunning? Their noses are too crooked. Way to play up all the Asian and Jewish stereotypes.
This is the reason why people do not want to take HBD seriously. Ignorant people tends to conflate culture with race, and thus making all HBDers sound like rapid racists / white supramacists.
Not to mention color is far from perfect as an index of ancestry, since a few genes control most of the variance. One is thus introducing noise that pushes the correlation down.
The biggest problem is measuring skin color? The only study I'm aware of is one where the GSS 10 word vocabulary yest was correlated with self-reported skin color on a scale of 1 to 5. So here you have a poor measure of IQ and a poor measure of skin color, yet even still a significant correlation was found. In a study where skin color and IQ were measured more accurately, the correlation should be much higher.
It would be especially interesting to correlate IQ with skin color in India.
Another interesting study would be to correlate IQ with number of black grandparents.
Another study I would like to see is the correlation between IQ and genetic distance from sub-Saharan Africa. East Asians are probably the most genetically distant and have the highest racial IQ's.
This is the reason why people do not want to take HBD seriously.
I think HBD should be phrased and thought of as a way to help explain historical and present differences between racial groups, not really just to dig up dirt on non-White groups or "temper people's enthusiasm" about non-White race X.
"The old stereotypes" are valid angles for exploring these differences, provided there is some form of data support. (and it's not like "The old stereotypes" of anyone who isn't White, Jewish or East Asian seem ever to have caused anyone any major upset on this site - it's only when the people being stereotyped are White, Jewish or Asian that all the "well, they're just jealous of the superior IQ and work ethic people" comes up).
The less far we get from well measured variables like IQ and GDP the more thin the data becomes and the more difficult things become though, and the easier it gets, particularly for critics or hostile people, to say that prejudice and confirmation bias explain a result.
Another study I would like to see is the correlation between IQ and genetic distance from sub-Saharan Africa. East Asians are probably the most genetically distant and have the highest racial IQ's.
Ideally that would use a grid sampling approach and include North Asians, South East Asians and Native Australians and Papuans, and Native Americans.
Grid sampling would be best because it would be less sensitive to overrepresenting East Asian or European populations.
Of course, if such a correlation was produced and found mildly positive, I'd fully expect it to be abused by people who want to claims that Australian Abos and Pacific Islanders (and East Asians) must be cleverer than Middle Easterners because of their distance from Africa.
In particular, I've long thought that the detailed investigation of European/Asian crosses might be extremely fruitful.
First, the overwhelming majority of the crosses are pure, unlike the cases of blacks or Hispanics, who themselves are almost always of partially mixed ancestry. Also, it's turned out that in something like light skin color, the phenotypic convergence between the two groups has been a clear case of convergent evolution, with entirely different genetic pathways being responsible. It would be very interesting to what extent something similar occurred in the case of intelligence or various behavioral traits.
Finally, the supply of such subjects for investigation is large and growing, especially in elite and academic circles. Lots of grad students would be able to say "I've finally found a scientific use for my annoying little cousin!"
@Catperson wrote - It would be especially interesting to correlate IQ with skin color in India.
--
It varies, Untouchable castes are about 40% ANI, and are very non-caucasian looking and are very low IQ
Jats are around 75% ANI and very caucasian looking
While untouchable castes are very low IQ, the most caucasian caste, the Jats are only mid-level IQ.
The IQ peaks occurs in various castes between 55% ANI to 70% ANI
What one can say is that a caucasoid looking person is probably at least mid-level IQ
HBD is just a signalling mechanism for failed to launch whites and Asians. That said, overreaction to it leads to damaging policy in the public sphere, so there's that.
Also, HBD pretty much doesn't seem to remember that there are languages other than English. It's mostly for people who are a bit bright but not really clever to feel sure they'd be on top of things if not for that darned affirmative action promoting barely sentient, not genetically human NAMs.
@Catperson, google up the image of Vishwanath Anand, the current world chess champion. IQ peaks at that phenotype, and falls off as people with darker or lighter skin
rec1man, what do you mean by ANI?
Perhaps the lowest IQ Indians have not lived in India for centuries: The Roma (who average IQ 70). And they're very light skinned.
It's mostly for people who are a bit bright but not really clever to feel sure they'd be on top of things if not for that darned affirmative action promoting barely sentient, not genetically human NAMs.
I don't really get the impression that HBD fans are particularly ambitious or really feel they have lost out in life opportunities, to be honest. HBD fans seem pretty satisfied that the world is hierarchical and that they have a place in it, a place not at the top.
(Which is more than can be said for many left wingers who react viscerally badly to the idea that anyone is more well off than them because they're well, just smarter or more suited for success on a genetic level, rather than the beneficiary of luck and privilege. Who freak the fuck out about the idea that they and people in general can even be ranked on a scale of success.)
I think if anything it's more for the crowd who are conscientious about and place pride in their status and react badly to accusations that they aren't really more intelligent or talented than the teeming colored masses, but have just sort of got this privilege. Rather than people who are envious about having more status than they currently have.
To expand on my above comment about HBD being more for people who want to feel comfortable with their status and justify it, rather than envious failures...
I'm just saying that HBD fans don't react well to the idea that "Well, you're just fortunate because people have privileged you due to your White skin, your personal qualities don't actually have to do with your success, and tons of colored folks are losing out because you're privileged".
HBD says (in rough order of importance)
- people from certain ethnic groups are smarter and better programmed for some tasks than people from other ethnic groups. if you are from a particular ethnic group which is "overrepresented" in some task, that's not a sign that you have privilege rather than talent
- even if you personally are not better, regression to the mean implies that you still may be a better person to have around than some random colored person
- people have different levels of relatedness and similarity across and between ethnic groups. you actually are more self like to other members of your ethnic group, so it's OK if they treat you better - it's only human to care about yourself and so only human to care about the more self-like. left wing forces that try to erode this are anti-human.
Which all go some way to assuaging the above.
Post-noon Anon, your average HBDer is low status and often earning low pay, if they are even employed at all.
There is not some critical mass of wildly successful HBDers, which is, like, the point, dude. HBDers feel their place is definitely above the teeming NAM masses even though they often are right in the midst of them.
Sure, there are two or three professors or bureaucrats that pimp the HBD mindset, but the overall pattern still holds, and they aren't all that successful if being open about HBD would cost them a penny. Success is often insulation from things like political correctness, after all.
Maya said...
The population interested in HBD isn't all made up of bitter, weak, sexually undesirable male semi-virgins. They just happen to be the embarrassing fringe of the group.
We also spend more time on the internet! I'm not sure why. Perhaps one of the anti-racists could figure it out. No biological or genetic explanations please! Play by your own rules...
Success is often insulation from things like political correctness, after all.
James Watson may disagree.
Sure, there are two or three professors or bureaucrats that pimp the HBD mindset, but the overall pattern still holds, and they aren't all that successful if being open about HBD would cost them a penny. Success is often insulation from things like political correctness, after all.
Bureaucrats pimpin' the HBD? Name two who haven't decided to spend more time with their families after publicly supporting HBD.
Are you retarded? Autistic? A HBD-friendly trickster feeding us straight lines in an elaborate troll?
James Watson was pretty durned successful and influential. If you haven't heard of him and don't believe me, there is always the Google that you can use to find out. Hell, you might even find him mentioned in some obscure "book" somewhere or another. NEway he got Watsoned for coming out of the HBD closet.
To be clear, you think HBD is totes pretend, right? Whites are better off than blacks because whites have white privilege, and Jews are better of than whites because Jews have Jew privilege.
As for the critical mass of wildly successful HBDers, of course there is. Who else on earth could be the institutional racists behind institutional racism?
How on earth could espousing HBD be a signalling mechanism for anyone? As you said, basically everyone keeps it on the DL in real life.
How could there be an "overreaction" to HBD that affects public policy in a negative way? If HBD were not true, policies based on human biouniformity would have to be better than policies based on the lies and delusions that comprise HBD.
There is not some critical mass of wildly successful HBDers, which is, like, the point, dude. HBDers feel their place is definitely above the teeming NAM masses even though they often are right in the midst of them.
I think the median HBDer would be above median status and above median ability on average, but it is not a particularly elite movement. (For the actual mainstream scientists who have been able to study differences, it's just science and they aren't really engaged with its political implications, or lack thereof.)
Again, I don't think they are particularly bitter and envious, regardless of their level of achievement or are particularly upset about their place within the social hierarchy (unlike leftists in general). They tend to want more to feel they own what it is they have earned and to need a sense of community.
Certainly the iSteve comments section is a lot less dominated by berserk anger, entitlement and envy than say, the Guardian website comments.
We're kind of at a point where we're just making assertions at one another. I don't know how to disprove or prove either of our ideas - even if Steve made a poll, there might a sampling bias element (though it would probably be closer than what it is that we). In the absence of much evidence, I don't think I'm going to believe the unflattering theory.
As a layman, mildly interested in this stuff, I'd have to say that this topic, like so many others on the internet, seems like it attracts crazies because internet anonymity allows for some venting and stating things that we aren't allowed, for realistic if not legal reasons, to say in the workplace or in public. You don't have to be in a hormone induced rage, or a closet Nazi blaming all your petty grievances on Semites, to worry about the consequences of mass 3rd world immigration or a medical industry that ignores physiological differences between populations in an inconsistent manner (why is it only the black guys get asked about sickle cell at the military processing locations?) for political reasons. Also, why does our intellectual establishment willfully ignore a topic humans have discussed for thousands of years; namely, differences between ourselves? For a group that rambles on about diversity, they sure are afraid about humans discussing it in any meaningful way beyond cuisine or dance.
On immigration, one of the lessons I learned from Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" is that a labor glut always leads to exploitation and depravity. Immigration and anthropological interest is what led me to this area, originally. I had no idea people discussed this stuff, in college I was only exposed to the Boazian, S.J. Gould school of thought. (Don't want to ally myself with the evangelicals, btw. University is far from being a rigid Stalinist ideological training camp)
I don't doubt that there is a part of the commenting populace that are frustrated white or East Asian males, otherwise why the high degree of overlap between HBD, Evolutionary Psychology and "Men's Rights" and "game" websites. That said, to dismiss everyone in the movement, including the venters, is lazy and probably politically motivated.
Don't worry, dear centrists, however, the venting will probably go down in the future as the internet becomes less anonymous, unless people are really serious about cowl the government and multinationals. Not advocating idiotic displays of kids in bandannas and black hoodies, a couple good boycotts would do the trick far better. But we are too lazy to even think about doing something as useful as boycotting certain types of beverages.
No one bothers because the public impact of such data mining can be dismissed with a sophomoric canard: "Correlation doesn't imply causation."
AND IT STICKS!
The reason it sticks is the same reason that some idiot neocon pundit can pull out an anecdote and with it alter foreign policy in such a way as to turn tens of thousands of young men of founding stock American heritage and turn them into unmarriagable, brain damaged waste.
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