Race differences in intelligence

What Hacker News says

1. A4ET8a8uTh0Jun 2022
   I am mildly amused that you decided to skip over the questions and refer me back to the website, which I already indicated am not perceiving as an authority on the matter.

   Still, as a show of good faith, I did just that. Needless to say, I was not impressed, but I would be more than happy to discuss my contentions.

   Separately, I also allowed myself to dig deeper under ESI-0307843 that funded this project and one of the first things that came up was an evaluation of the website.

   You will note that under 'expectations not fulfilled' some complaints do stand out(1):

   -"There are no clear definitions of terms or comparisons of biological race v. social race, ethnicity, etc" -"I expected to find more scientific studies about races, at least as a complement." -"Maybe some more information about the concept of ethnicity and 'clear' definitions" -"I expected a professional explanation given to a public audience as happens with so many effective professionals associated with museums, freshman teaching or public programs in the social sciences and humanities." -"Everything was about self-reflection and self-confirmation about American conceptions and categorization. I expected a step beyond that." -"I expected to find a mention of R. Lynn's Race Differences in Intelligence (Washington Summit Publishers, 2006) for an important exposition."

   (1)https://www.informalscience.org/sites/default/files/RaceWebs...

   Can you show me the same good faith and engage in a frank and honest intellectual debate?

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2. thaumasiotesMar 2022
   > Any good sources on the verbal issue?

   I can provide some low-effort citations:

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   The Bell Curve has this to say:

   > East Asians living overseas score about the same or slightly lower than whites on verbal IQ and substantially higher on visuospatial IQ. Even in the rare studies that have found overall Japanese or Chinese IQs no higher than white IQs [...], the discrepancy between verbal and visuospatial IQ persists. For Japanese living in asia, a 1987 review of the literature demonstrated without much question that the verbal-visuospatial difference persists even in examinations that have been thoroughly adapted to the Japanese language and, indeed, in tests developed by the Japanese themselves.

   > This finding has an echo in the United States, where Asian-American students abound in engineering, in medical schools, and in graduate programs in the sciences, but are scarce in law schools and graduate programs in the humanities and social sciences.

   > [Philip] Vernon's overall appraisal was that the mean Asian-American IQ is about 97 on verbal tests and about 110 on visuospatial tests.

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   Richard Lynn discusses the pattern in Race Differences in Intelligence:

   > [Row 16] shows an exaggerated version of the typical East Asian pattern of high reasoning IQ (108), higher spatial IQ (114), and weaker verbal IQ (92).

   > Two conclusions can be drawn from the studies summarized in table 10.1.

   > The first is that all the East Asian IQs are a little higher than those of Europeans, except for the Chen et al. (1996) studies of general information in Japan and Taiwan, and the Georgas et al. (2003) result for South Korea, all of which give East Asians an IQ of 100. [...] The median IQ of the studies is 105 and should be taken as the best estimate of the IQs of indigenous East Asians.

   > Second, eleven of the studies contain measures of verbal and visualization abilities and in ten of these the visualization IQ is greater than the verbal IQ (the study in row 36 [finding a verbal IQ of 121 [!?] and visual of 109 in 454 Japanese children in Nagoya aged 5-7 years] is the exception). The mean and median differences between the two abilities are both 12 IQ points. This difference appears in a variety of tests. The finding of the stronger visualization abilities and weaker verbal abilities is so consistently present and so large that it appears to be a real phenomenon.

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   I'll editorialize here to note that an average 12-point difference between Asian verbal ability and Asian visuospatial ability dwarfs the average 5-point difference between Asian ability overall and white ability overall. This is a case where the point estimate for IQ has lost significant, valuable information.

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3. mechanical_fishFeb 2008
   From this "analysis":

   "This time around is better. Taking the regression equations produced by running the numbers in the data table put together by Richard Lynn in Race Differences in Intelligence... "

   Hm, that would be this book by Richard Lynn:

   The IQs of the races...can be explained as having arisen from the different environments in which they evolved, and in particular from the ice ages in the northern hemisphere exerting selection pressures for greater intelligence for survival during cold winters...

   -475, Inane and Racist. This is the mother of all trolls. Do not feed it.

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