Kind of boggled that Arnold spends so much time wailing about how women have ruined the world based on nothing more than his feeeeeeeeeeeeelings about what feminization must mean only to write two absurdly naive posts questioning incredibly consistent data on race and IQ.
So here's two very clear, easily established data points that anyone can look up to establish what Amy Wax means by "hardly any blacks".
The black average LSAT score is 141.7 with SD of 8.97. That means that a 4sd score for a black person is 177.5
The white average LSAT score is 153.18 with an SD of 9.27 A 3rd sd score for a white person is 180.
If you consider that a 175 is generally considered necessary to get into an elite law school--well, for whites and Asians, anyway--a 175 is the 99.1% for whites and at (according to an online calculator) 100% for blacks--that is, the probability that a black will get a score of 175 is functionally 0.
The top 5 law schools are 11% black, with a high at Columbia and Harvard of over 30% and a low at Yale and Cornell of 11%. If they were accepting purely on lsat scores, there would be functionally zero, although I imagine there would occasionally be an outlier.
Another stat:
Generally speaking, a 1400 SAT score is considered necessary for elite college acceptance, say top 50 schools. This is the equivalent to a 31 ACT.
The SAT is very obliging on scores and race. 2711 blacks scored a 1400 or higher in 2019. Nearly 76,000 whites did. The ACT is not revealing at all, and there are students who take both, so I took the number of students getting 31 and over, assumed the same percentages as the SAT in terms of racial distribution and then assumed 15% overlap. These are made up numbers but close enough.
So an estimated combined population of 1400 SAT/31 ACT scorers is about 117K white and a little under 4200 black.
If you just go down the colleges by ranking and see how many blacks and whites they actually accepted, the schools have accepted nearly 4400 blacks by the 28th ranked school. Meaning they are completely out of blacks with the necessary score. Meanwhile, they've used less than 25% of the whites with that score (and only about 18% of the Asians).
I've done the calculations to the 36th school on the list and they've already accepted 150% of the blacks with a 1400, 100% of Hispanics and only 38 and 27% of whites and Asians.
I'm not sure where the data will end up, but assume for now that the top 100 ranked colleges or more could effortlessly fill themselves with whites and Asians getting 1400 or higher, and those schools combined would only have 4200 blacks and 17000 Hispanics.
In reality, by the time you get to the 30th ranked school, they're taking close to 70% of their kids from below the 1400 standard. Such is the bullshit that the fiction of grades allows.
Once again: if colleges used a simple metric with no grades to lie about, the top 100 schools would be overwhelmingly white, somewhat less Asian, and there'd be 4000 blacks total.
But one of the comments on the article says that the number 30% is due to a calculation error. And when I looked at the ABA report that the comment cited (https://www.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/2022-12/Std509InfoReport%20%2814%29.pdf), it confirms what they said. The report says that 46 out of 409 students are Black (about 11%). Still much higher than it would be under a more meritocratic selection process. But it's at least in-line with affirmative action standards at most elite university admissions.
Arnold also said, "When I look around the economics profession, I do not see 250 whites for every ultra-high achieving black." From your numbers, if he looked around at Harvard Law School students, he wouldn't see 25, or heck, 5.
It seems a bit naïve to think one can draw reliable inferences from that observation about the normal distribution of intelligence as opposed to, say, the political distribution of goodies.
That is, the obvious reason one don't see the predicted ratios is that no expense or effort deviating from meritocratic selection has been spared by the people who make the calls precisely in order to prevent one from seeing those ratios.
What can calling Stanley Fischer "Genghis Khan" mean except that getting the opportunity to be an ultra-high achiever in the economics profession is a function of the fact that social favoritism plays some significant role in distorting the outcomes of the selection processes?
Jewish hard science Nobel laureates (Physics, Chemistry, Science) were almost 25% of the world's winners down through history up through 2011, the last time I checked. That's about the single most impressive statistic I know.
I don't believe there has ever been a black winner of a hard science Nobel. (The hard science Nobels appear to have been better than most institutions at resisting the DEI demand for Plaques for Blacks due to the colossal prestige of the Nobel brand.)
In general, the Jewish vs. black dichotomy in hard science Nobel laureates appears at least as vast as a 23 point (or whatever) average IQ gap would suggest.
With the current Plagiarism Panic, let me point out that "Plaques for Blacks" is from Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel "The Bonfire of the Vanities:" the Ed Koch-like mayor of NYC asks his chief of staff what's on the agenda this morning, and the chief of staff says "plaques for blacks." The mayor considers this in bad taste, but he's dependent upon his razor sharp staffer to stay organized, so whaddaya whaddaya?
1.a. The most important statistic about intelligence-related statistics is that the intelligence threshold for being consistently competent at doing statistics is amazingly high.
1.b. The second most important statistic about intelligence-related statistics is that, ironically, no cognitive capability makes a more powerful case against the statistically-robust 'single factor' thesis of intelligence, than the capability to be consistently competent at doing statistics, because that thesis is hard to square with what we observe, which is that some people just 'grok' it and some people just can't seem to grok it and so keep fouling up, no matter how good at other maths they are. Andrew Gelman's blog will provide you with Exhibits A through ZZZ, heh. "Thinking in terms of exponential growth" is also apparently very unnatural, though not as uncorrelated with high intelligence as advanced statistics, which, as I mentioned in a comment to another post, is a surprisingly young field. The point is, the 'skill stack' of being both above the 1.a threshold and also having the mysterious 1.b gift from Athena is really rare, and if you are not getting numbers from someone like that you are reasonable in putting your shields up.
2. There are two ways people are using the normal distribution to argue these matters.
2.a. The first way is to try and make bold claims or predictions about human reality using math, and they usually are reporting numbers that are too precise, too confidently (i.e., without showing big confidence intervals) because they are not being honest or accurate about wide errors bands when extrapolating to extremes, or propagating those errors through the steps of calculation in the statistically appropriate manner. It's reasonable to be skeptical of the precision of these numbers, though usually not about whether they are in the right order of magnitude ballpark.
2.b. But the second way is to merely make a basic demonstration of the natural fact that for anything that tends to have something like a normal distribution, when comparing the proportional representation above some threshold of two sets with difference means, that proportion changes and tends to grow rapidly the farther away one gets from the means. And you have to make this demonstration over and over and over both because of 1.b and the 'unnatural' feel of it for most people, and also because the left's Narrative and political formula adamantly denies this fact and the impersonal, blameless naturalness of these proportions.
There is simply no better way to start a rigorous defense against those antisocial libels than to demonstrate by means of statistical principles that it is not merely theoretically possible but in fact *the usual case* that disparities in set representation will be much larger at the extremes than in the center. All the caveats about things not actually being normally distributed don't really chip away at this insight because it's robust against all kinds of modifications you could make to the basic bell curve model that aren't completely bizarre and unnatural mathematical constructs.
Here is the point about statistics. With the political and legal logic of 'disparate impact', the left is making a *mathematical* claim that the very existence of these large disparities are red flags which provide *strong statistical evidence* of unjust discrimination, and that the existence of this discrimination can be presumed with the burden of proving innocence and the absence of discrimination properly being shifted to the defendant.
That's bad enough, but could be worse under a standard of "strict liability" for which one can make no defense. But even worse than a strict liability regime that at least tells people there is strict liability, is a strict liability regime that *lies* about that and pretends to be merely a "rebuttable presumption" / "prove your innocence" regime.
But *how* can you prove your innocence when the adjudication system has deemed the statistical truths which must constitute the very heart of any such defense to be inadmissible untruths? To call this a rigged game is an understatement, and lately this kind of dishonest and time-wasting invitation to appeal or apply with the implication that it is actually possible to prevail when in fact the rejection was decided from the start has become alarmingly common throughout USG.
But again, the *statistical* point here is that there is simply no good alternative except for courageous and influential people using whatever protections or positions they enjoy to prove the truth about it over and over and over until just maybe it becomes embarrassing for a purportedly educated person to reflexively reject it in the manner of a proud know-nothing. Murray hoped for this once, especially as better genetic insights were discovered and accumulated, but alas it has not yet come to pass, as politically-indispensable beliefs have become impervious to counterargument in what passes for our 'intellectual' culture.
3. "I would regard method (a) as reliable, as long as the samples were large enough." - We have had had many, huge, reliable samples for a long time. The results of method (a) are easily available for anyone to look at, often for free. We have even have some solid genetics results now (e.g. Stephen Hsu's work), these are the opposite of secrets (e.g., Connor and Pesta: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.14.444173v2.full.pdf)
Look, I totally get why it has to be done sometimes. And I'm certainly not going to do what the progressives do and yell, "The Science Is Settled! SETTLED!!!" But it is simply not accurate to write about these matters as if this kind of research has not yet been done or not in sufficient amount and thus that there is still so much empirical uncertainty about these matters that really nobody can say anything with any confidence yet and it's reasonable to stay agnostic or on the fence about it, etc., etc. That is just not the case.
"... it is not merely theoretically possible but in fact *the usual case* that disparities in set representation will be much larger at the extremes than in the center."
I wondered about this in re AK's statement that only 8% of American billionaires are Jewish. I would have imagined the number was higher, although I don't have a clear sense of billionaires and IQ particularly; but what I was vaguely recalling turned out to be a piece that went through the Forbes top 100 list of wealthy people and concluded that 1/3 were Jewish or half-Jewish.
That's correct. It seems Arnold's numbers are off on that one.
And, point in favor of the intelligence normal distributionists, 1/3 is indeed reasonably close to Arnold's 1/2 with, "But since Jews are only 2.5 percent of the population, there should be about one Jew for every non-Jew in an ultra-high achievement category."
"So, 35 of the first 100 on the 2019 Forbes list are, more or less, Jewish. If you sum up my weights, the first 100 make up 33.25% of the Forbes 100, or just about exactly 1/3. This appears to be about the same fraction as when I previously looked into the question in 2013. Jewish organizations usually report that Jews make up 2.2% of the U.S. population, so being about 1/3rd of the Forbes 100 is impressive."
"I looked up on Wikipedia the backgrounds of the top U.S. billionaires on last October’s [2019] Forbes 400 list, and six of the top ten and nineteen of the top 50 appear to be half or more Jewish. Among the top 100, 35 seem to be significantly Jewish:
"Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison (Italian father, but raised by his Jewish mother’s aunt and uncle), Larry Page (half), Sergey Brin, Michael Bloomberg, Steve Ballmer (half), Sheldon Adelson, Michael Dell, Jim Simons, Leonard Lauder, Len Blavatnik, Stephen Schwarzman, Carl Icahn, Donald Bren (half), Steve Cohen, Donald Newhouse, David Tepper, Dustin Moskovitz, Jan Koum, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, George Soros, Micky Arison, David Geffen, Leon Black, Ronald Perelman, Stephen Ross, David Shaw, George Kaiser, Robert Kraft, Steven Rales, Eli Broad, Israel Englander, Marc Benioff, Daniel Gilbert, and Bernard Marcus."
While all these big lists would probably show the same output, it seems a waste of time to be debating whether this or that of 400 people has a Jewish enough name.
The broad elite has millions of people in it. And the UMC tens of millions. That's a huge dataset, and you don't have to worry about small sample sizes or weird tail shapes in it.
It's also what most people think of as "elite" and has political salience. Nobody knows what a Clark medal is. Even regular people will notice if there isn't a single black doctor in a hospital (which could happen if they are only 1% of physicians).
Not every superhigh-Q person wants to just make as much money as possible. Many are drawn to significantly less lucrative professions: mathematicians, theoretical physicists, nuclear engineers, classical musicians.
Indeed, part of the advantage of being a superhigh-Q'er in a low-odds-of-success profession is that you might just be smart enough to figure out how to make it both work, and make it stay working, no matter how much you have working against you, as long as sufficiently few enough of your competitors are at your intellectual level.
I think you may be making an incorrect assumption about the etymology of "race realism." I've always understood the term as being analogous to "moral realism," i.e. that race has a real, biological basis, and is not merely a social construct, as is routinely claimed by blank slatists.
To steelman the social constructionists, I think they do understand that there's a genetic basis for racially characteristic physical traits such as skin color and hair texture, but subscribe to a sort of dualism where they believe that these have negligible correlation with genetic influences on cognitive and personality traits, or believe (contrary to evidence from twin studies) that variation in these traits is overwhelmingly attributable to environmental factors, with genetics explaining very little of the variance.
To be honest, though, I'm skeptical that more than a handful of those who assert that race is a social construct have any kind of coherent model of what "social construct" actually means in concrete terms or how that might be reconciled with evidence from behavior genetics.
It is possible that the IQ distribution for black Americans has a fat right tail due to selective immigration, intermarriage with whites and Asians, and/or assortative mating, so I agree that we shouldn't be too confident in naive Gaussian estimates.
But while we can quibble about the numbers, Wax's overall point stands: Without the thumb (or whole arm) on the scale that is AA, descendants of antebellum slaves are going to be greatly underrepresented, perhaps by an order of magnitude or more, in positions with high cognitive demands. There will be some, but not nearly enough to satisfy social constructionists. This is in fact what we see in highly selective tech companies, despite the fact that they practice a form of soft AA.
I wouldn't put too much stock in the Clark medal. As noted, it's awarded on a subjective basis. There are only two black recipients in your sample, which gives us huge error bars. And while I hate the fact that this is a reasonable suspicion, it is worth noting that one of these was the first Clark Medal awarded after the George Floyd Riots. I'm not saying he's not a great economist (I'm not personally familiar with his work), but how confident are we that race wasn't a factor in the decision?
You can't even separate social construction from the biological reality of race. Evolution isn't something that just stopped happening to humans 60,000 years ago. It happens every generation. That's why online DNA tests are able to tell whether you're Irish, Scottish, Welsh, or English, and at what percentile level, with reasonable reliability, even if you yourself have never so much as visited the British Isles.
Maybe instead of “race realism” they could go with “race assumption-ism”? Or maybe “race presupposition-ism”? Or maybe--for ease of speech--they could just go with “race-ism”?
There is a vast data pool on IQ and equivalent measures out there- is it really doubtful what the distribution at the extremes is? Your entire essay here is based on the assertion that it is unknown what that distribution in the tails is.
I think there are plenty of other problems with "race realism". And, for that matter, any other theories that depend on "race" in making any measurements and predictions.
For one, given the amount of historical intermarriage across races, it's devilishly difficult to define who belongs in which racial category. This challenge will continue to grow as intermarriage becomes more common.
For two, inter-racial comparisons don't seem to be consistent across time and location - the black-white gap in IQ scores has been narrowing over time, for instance.
For three, the methods and conclusions often seem to match those of the "scientific racists" of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which seemed to start with the conclusion ("my race is superior") and then find examples and reasoning to support the conclusion.
For four, even if you could demonstrate some racial difference, excluding environmental and cultural influences, using data and methodology that were fair and replicable, it wouldn't really matter. If you want to choose high-achieving people, all you need do is define "high-achieving", and then select people who meet your criteria, so racial characteristics are irrelevant. If you want to justify racial differences in "high achievement", there are innumerable explanations you could offer without really contributing any knowledge or understanding.
Edit to add:
For five, such racial theories are almost perfectly useless for any good purpose. But they can be (and have been) used by bad people for very bad purposes. We're really better off never using them for any purpose. Although I don't impugn the motives of people who keep trying to find some truth in them, I can wish they'd use their efforts for something more productive.
The problem is that the racial gaps are not going away, and people demand an explanation for why. We end up making public policy decisions on the implicit assumption that all groups are equal in average cognitive ability. When these policies fail, new theories are invented for the failure which end up causing even worse decisions to be made.
A perfect example would be schools getting rid of advanced classes because not enough non-Asian minorities are enrolled, after numerous previous programs to improve enrollment failed. The entire popularity of "racial equity" only came about because of the failure of previous programs to get rid of racial gaps.
A sane solution would be a healthy agnosticism on the issue of cognitive equality.
"The problem is that the racial gaps are not going away, and people demand an explanation for why."
I disagree - the number of people demanding an explanation is very small, and almost entirely limited to Social Justice Warriors. These are the people who end up making the bad policy decisions, and then compounding the bad decisions with worse decisions, because they are obsessed with readily measurable metrics, rather than solving problems that would matter to actual people.
A healthier solution would be to strive for fair treatment of everyone, allowing them to participate and achieve according to their interests and abilities. You can always find inequalities of outcomes between different groups, no matter how you draw the lines between groups. For instance, no one seems to worry that Hindus and Jews have much higher incomes than Jehovah's Witnesses or Baptists. Probably because the woketariat considers religion to be a voluntary choice - any Baptist could choose to become a Hindu and reap the associated benefits.
This seems like some very wishy washy words. People are told from birth that everyone is equal and that racism is the worst thing ever.
How are they going to be "agnostic" about things like blacks being 10x more represented in bad things and 10x less represented in good things?
Blacks will vote 90% for whatever side promises to try to "do something" about that. And lots of whites will get jobs and funding "doing something" and otherwise get to feel good about themselves. That seems like a winning electoral coalition to me, especially as you keep adding more client vote banks outside blacks.
Look, after The Bell Curve Charles Murray published a ton of books full of "healthy agnosticism" and totally not mentioning race, and it did nothing to move the needle.
If your explicitly saying that you think "healthy agnosticism" is a political strategy, we can debate its odds of success. I could see pros and cons. But as a statement about reality? It seems pretty insulting to reason and empirics at this point. Can't we agree amongst ourselves on "the truth" and then debate about popularizing strategies?
Expand the universe of things, perhaps; and deprive the universities - not just Ivy, all of them - of their pride of place in the universe of things?
Sometimes people act like there are but three arenas of success in the world: money, entertainment-world celebrity, and sports. Maybe they do this in part to supply the examples of both blacks and whites doing great, which is assuredly true. But mainly I think they do it because those 3 categories represent the degraded state of America, with regards to values, and to materialism.
That state is the trouble, as I see it. Trouble for everybody across the board. And of course, trouble for the things I personally care about (natch!).
My own heroes don't fall into one of those categories.
A shift in values would open up - some would argue, return us to - a state of affairs where there's a recognition of more "good things" open to everybody.
"Blacks will vote 90% for whatever side promises to try to "do something" about that."
I think this is wrong. Polling consistently shows that most people, including most Blacks, do not support the policies (preferences, set-asides, speech restrictions) that are being enacted to "do something about that." The support for race-conscious policies is narrow, while the support for basic fairness is broad.
The best polling you can get on affirmative action is phrasing it as "not considering race". Even with that neutral wording blacks strongly net approve of considering race in things like admissions and hiring, and they express the highest approval of all racial groups. Black college grads support even higher approval for affirmative action then blacks overall.
If you use more strong racial wording, like giving blacks an advantage rather then neutrally "not considering", support rises (support also rises amongst hispanics if you say hispanics benefit).
Another good proxy is support for racial reparations payments. 77% of blacks support such payments.
Bottom line, in every place and every campaign, they support the DEMs pretty consistently around 90% or so. That doesn't seem like the kind of thing that people come to after considering all the issues and determining what is best for the entire citizen body. It's the kind of thing you do if you know papa DEM gets blacks the goodies and you really just give a shit about your fellow blacks.
You can of course find some instances where blacks don't agree with every single plank of the DEM platform or they give contradictory answers to different phrased questions. But time after time, they know what lever to pull.
I'm not sure what you mean by "best" polling. Fairest wording? Most favorable answers?
I think that, prior to the Students For Fair Admissions cases, most Americans thought that "considering race in admissions" meant some small bonus leading to accepting well-qualified Black applicants over equally-qualified white applicants. There are probably still many people who think this. But, this doesn't describe affirmative action as practiced at US colleges.
"meant some small bonus leading to accepting well-qualified Black applicants over equally-qualified white applicants."
I don't know about this. It was obvious to me back in high school that the advantages were vast. Cases made it to the Supreme Court. But I will move on.
Polling on affirmative action varies considerably based on how it's phrased. If it's phrased in a way that implies race neutrality and no quotas then it polls better. If it's phrased in a way that implies racial advantage it polls worse.
With the following exceptions:
1) If you specifically say that "race X" will do better under the system, then support from race X increases.
2) The more a race traditionally benefits from affirmative action, the higher it will poll for any given phrasing.
So a common example is that if you say "should people consider race in admission" that will poll badly across the board, especially amongst non blacks.
But if you say "race should be considered for admission to help black and hispanics" then it will poll much better amongst blacks and hispanics.
You have to remember that a lot of hispanic/black people, especially working class ones that don't really interact with AA that much, think "consider race" means "discriminate against us." They believe the system is racist against them, and want to end that discrimination. Most Blacks sort of understand "the score" with these questions, but it flies over the heads of non-blacks often. Sometimes you have to explicitly say "your race will benefit from this" before they will support it, which is illegal to say so a lot of effort goes into finding a way to phrase it that gets the message across. Hispanic support varies a lot based on whether Hispanics think it will benefit them or not (if its only for the blacks they have no interest).
Even Asians will increase support for AA when it specifically states that Asians will benefit from it (like with minority business loans).
Pretty much only whites recoil at specific set asides for their own race on the basis of race.
Often a lot of racial set asides don't need to take the form of explicit AA. For instance, nearly every urban political machine delivers benefits for specific ethnic groups based on a spoils system. A black ward boss or the mayor of a majority black city won't even pretend they are looking out for the general welfare, they make a specific deal with their clients.
"Given the amount of historical intermarriage across races, it's devilishly difficult to define who belongs in which racial category."
It isn't difficult, it's trivially easy. Stanford Medical School study published in American Journal of Human Genetics:
"The study consist[ed] of 3,636 people who all identified themselves as either white, African-American, East Asian or Hispanic.... For each person in the study, the researchers examined 326 DNA regions... Without knowing how the participants had identified themselves, Risch and his team ran the results through a computer program that grouped individuals according to patterns of the 326 signposts. This analysis could have resulted in any number of different clusters, but only four clear groups turned up... [O]nly five individuals had DNA that matched an ethnic group different than the box they checked at the beginning of the study. That's an error rate of 0.14 percent..."
Niel Risch, Stanford genetics professor who led the study: "This shows that people's self-identified race/ethnicity is a nearly perfect indicator of their genetic background."
It's not really "devilishly difficult to define who belongs in which racial category." If there was, people would get their own racial category wrong from time to time, right? But nobody logs on to ancestry.com one day after a lifetime of thinking they're white and then realizes "oh, I'm actually 50% Pakistani." Doesn't happen. There's some unexpected mixing, sure, but that's not the same thing, and even so, this does not mean the categories themselves are not meaningful or useful.
A forensic anthropologist can usually tell you the race (excuse me, "ancestral group") of some unknown individual with good confidence with just a few pieces of the skull, for example, the area immediately posterior to the bregma, which is "under the skin", as they say.
Naturally this easily provable fact was an inconveniently inconsistent irritation to the "There's no such thing as ... " crowd, so after Flyod's death they began to attack it in the literature in articles using political nonsense words with titles like - get this - "decolonizing ancestry estimation." Because it's racist to estimate ancestry.
When the NYT reported the publication of this garbage, they stated matter-of-factly as if 'settled science' that biological race was a myth which had been debunked, and felt it necessary to note that the field of forensic anthropology was 87 percent white which is important for readers to know about a field we are accusing of fraud and racism for, uh, reasons. They do the same awful thing when they don't like the verdict coming from a mostly white jury, and for the same awful reason.
"Goes too far" goes too little. Taleb is just not reliable on this subject.
He kicked off a mini-obsession with the topic about 5 years on Twitter, and of course people who were much more familiar with the literature and who actually knew better started taking apart his arguments one by one, and Taleb being Taleb, he patiently responded to each of these devastating criticisms in a civil and professional manner with counterarguments well-supported by logic and evidence and by citing a number of the latest research articles on the subject and ...
Lolololol, just kidding.
Taleb just called them insulting names, refused to seriously engage or counter any of their strongest arguments, moved the goalposts repeatedly, and blocked them all by going on the greatest epistemic bubble wall erection spree in human history. It literally would not have been more intellectually embarrassing had he put his fingers in his ears and yelled, "La La La! I can't hear you!"
I've read that Jews are 139 of the Forbes 400, and other statistics showing much higher then 8%.
One thing we could do here is start debating exactly how many Jews (or blacks or whoever) there are amongst some tiny group of people (award winners, the rich, athletes, etc). While this could be useful, I think it's really beside the point. I suspect that HBD would hold up to their exercise, but I don't think its a very good use of this post (its been done to death).
When we are talking about race realism and affirmative action, we are basically talking about the broad elite. How many blacks are going to be able to get into medical school, or other professions that require +1SD or +2SD IQs? How many are going to get lucrative computer programming jobs. Etc. There are a million practicing physicians in the USA for example, and I think most people wrote define "medical doctor" as a pretty elite profession.
I think this is also a good test case because a google search for the relevant statistics on this flooded my search bar with "Eliminating bias from medical school admissions - Less reliance on MCAT and GPA scores, and a more holistic view of the whole student, could drastically increase the number of Black medical students, one dean argues" and some such things.
Black applicants were 6% of the total, despite being 13% of the population. Asians were 19% despite being only 6% of the population. Even though this already should have biased things in favor of blacks, it is still the case that blacks applicants have an MCAT of 497 with an SD of 10. The final average MCAT of matriculants was 512 white whites and 514 for Asians. Let's say 513 with an SD of 6. So what % of black applicants will reach the 15th percentile of their white and Asian colleagues (the absolute bare minimum, these are poor performers)? 15.87%. So 15.87% of applicants which makes up 6% of the population or 0.95%.
So if we stopped shoving incompetent black doctors through medical school we would be at 0.95% black physicians. Which is...around the % of the black population that the bell curve says should have IQs over 130.
So let's say we just did it. We cut black medical school admission from 6% of the pop to 1%. People would ask questions. What are you going to tell them:
1) Well, that's about what the bell curve says for IQ, so it can't be that off. Nothing to see here.
2) I knew these two nice black economists once, so maybe the far tail curve of for blacks is wildly flatter and longer then for every other race, so these MCAT scores are caused by some failing in our society that we all need to feel bad about and do something about.
You've got to be in the top 15% of black test takers to score at least as well as a white/asian at the 15th percentile. And this is after the test taker pool already selects for top blacks relative to population.
The link is pretty descriptive.
Another way of looking at it is the acceptance rate for a given level of MCAT performance:
The same MCAT score that would result in a ~7% acceptance rate for a white/Asian will result in a 56% acceptance rate for a black. The same MCAT score that would result in a ~25% acceptance rate for whites/asians would be 81% for blacks.
And of course if you measure black performance as physicians its markedly lower then whites/asians, indicating that this process literally graduates incompetent doctors that kill people. Hospitals with lots of black doctors are generally considered death traps. ICE Cube made a rap song about how getting sent to MLK hospital was a death sentence.
I hope I made plain in the comments yesterday that in my view, everybody - like the whole country! - should just stop talking about this stuff so much. *Too much talking* about something you can't do anything about is unwise. Least said, soonest mended - could be amended to - least said, soonest moved on to other things. Because at least we can all agree? - we have somehow gotten well and truly "stuck" on this rather crude topic. I blame the left, of course, but y'all do you.
But I would turn AK's question - "Is 'race realism' realistic?" - around and ask another one: "Is it okay for people/peoples (and yes, races) to be different?"
As my *Southern* grandmother-in-law liked to point out: it would be a dull world if we were all the same.
And I would argue that it is the left that answers "no" to my question. And in the process they try to make fairy tales come true in the real world, like making "show" appointments such as the one we all witnessed the sad collapse of this month - owing to the efforts of a Jewish billionaire who claimed he had no idea - none at all! - an ideology of which he said he explicitly approved, had in it the seeds - indeed, the saplings - of anti-semitism.
I say "sad". Yes, to me the episode is sad. Sure, some of you have jumped up to say - well, she engaged in witch hunts of her own, against Roland Fryer or whomever. Fine - you are not sad. I understand that some of you have to deal with workplaces, as I do not, and may be worn down by DEI as by a daily Two Minutes Hate; and ready to see some people get their comeuppance. Somehow, though, the comeuppance never quite falls precisely where it should ...
It is sad to me for this reason: once again the left has done something self-flattering, and yes, race-flattering, indeed race-baiting - and somehow the end result is the public embarrassment of a prominent black woman in a position which inhabited by any other person would not have attracted America's notice, but now has been national news, day after dreary day for like 3 weeks.
And all of this effort has the one solid result: making race relations worse! - worse than they used to be, worse than they needed to be again.
I first read about Harvard's investigation of economist Roland Fryer out of curiosity precisely because it contradicted everything I thought I knew about AA at elite universities. I would have been surprised if they had launched an investigation against him had he actually engaged in sexual harassment, but my impression from the first article I read was that the case against him was flimsy. I have firsthand experience with sexual harassment in academia, and I have heard secondhand accounts from other women of such harassment (which I define as a professor soliciting a student for sex in exchange for some type of assistance), and it was news to me that the off-color remarks and bar room atmosphere in Fryer's lab (which after all was optional for the grad students who worked with him) constitute sexual harassment in contemporary academia. I have not read Fryer's work, nor do I have an interest in doing so, but I have heard through the 'econ grapevine' that he is the real deal. I haven't looked, but I would be surprised if there are any other members of Harvard's economics faculty with PhD's from an x-tier university like Penn State. I also understand him to be arrogant, but that was normal for hot-shot male economists before the 'feminization' of economics. The video posted on Loury's Substack (linked in Cochrane's piece) suggests that Gay and another black faculty member punished Fryer because his research on black education undermines the claim that the relatively poor black performance is the result of systemic racism, but I can't help but think that they also went after him precisely because he is smart and achieved his position through merit.
Like you, I am exhausted by the topic of race relations. The problem has only gotten worse in my lifetime, it won't be solved in what remains of my life, and there is nothing I can do about it, nor do I want to. I left academia for other reasons, but it is certainly one of the aspects of academia that I don't miss. At the same time, I believe that, if there is any way of improving the situation, it has to come from within by people like Roland Fryer. The problem with DEI is not only that it discriminates against non-diverse people with high IQs, but it is also used as a weapon against people like Roland Fryer.
“I hope I made plain in the comments yesterday that in my view, everybody - like the whole country! - should just stop talking about this stuff so much.” I second that. Let’s move onto things we have more control over.
The curious task of race realism is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about the factors that go into living a successful life. For example, consider
Literally every single positive character trait is correlated with 'g'. It's even more depressing to consider that people with low IQ are also more likely to be deficient in practically every desirable moral trait.
It's literally in "The Bell Curve". There are whole chapters on it. A huge part of the book was about how low IQ people are more prone to various anti-social behavior.
If you want to go further there are people that have done further research to prove that it's not correlated with some other factor but IQ itself. I posted a link to several HBD blogs that discuss this in the last post.
To give the shortest answer, low IQ means that people have a hard time understanding the consequences of their actions or imaging themselves far into the future. This leads to lower time preference and conscientiousness. They steal more. They cheat more. They abuse substances more. Etc. They fail the "marshmallow test".
Among the most firmly established facts about criminal offenders is that their distribution of 1Q scores differs from that of the population at large. Taking the scientific literature as a whole, criminal offenders have average IQs of about 92, eight points below the mean. More serious or chronic offenders generally have lower scores than more casual offenders. The relationship of IQ to criminality is especially pronounced in the small fraction of the population, primarily young men, who constitute the chronic criminals that account for a disproportionate amount of crime. Offenders who have been caught do not score much lower, if at all, than those who are getting away with their crimes. Holding socioeconomic status constant does little to explain away the relationship between crime and cognitive ability.
High intelligence also provides some protection against lapsing into criminality for people who otherwise are at risk. Those who have grown up in turbulent homes, have parents who were themselves criminal, or who have exhibited the childhood traits that presage crime are less likely to become criminals as adults if they have high IQ.
These findings from an extensive research literature are supported by the evidence from white males in the NLSY. Low IQ was a risk factor for criminal behavior, whether criminality was measured by incarceration or by self-acknowledged crimes. The socioeconomic background of the NLSYs white males was a negligible risk factor once their cognitive ability was taken into account.
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In COMING APART in which Murray argues with the low IQ are godless fat lazy hedonists criminals and deadbeat divorced parents that watch TV all day. But he only talks about whites, just so people can't call him racist.
I'm being unfair to Murray there, who means it in a loving way and wants to help, but those are the basic facts of what he's discussing.
To clarify, I don't need reassurance that our kids are intelligent. As a reading specialist I have observed a couple kids with the same pattern. Maybe the answer is that group intelligence predicts individual intelligence better than IQ scores, or maybe IQ tests have changed.
Hi, it took me a while to get through this reading, and I was very interested in the topic.
I think the general positive correlation to intelligence is true. But I know many people of high intelligence who have other disabilities. My own children have not scored well on IQ tests. But the one with the below 100 IQ was writing essays in third grade and reading adult level books and doing advanced math. So I can't figure out why my family doesn't seem to fit any of those heuristics.
The premise that real world performance is tightly correlated to IQ is silly at best, and when generalized by race, with all of the socioeconomic differences between racial groups in the US, its worse.
The question of race based preference is one thing, and I support race-neutral hiring, but to use a race and IQ argument in a discussion of what is essentially an example of Woke excess, is just wrong.
Wisdom and effectiveness cannot be measured by a test score.
I say that as a high IQ individual. I'm a four time college drop out. My greatest accomplishments were to manage the computer network in my wife's business and to design and build our home.
My wife comes to me for help with understanding financials and other complex problems, but she is successful because she has perseverance, patience, and compassion, all of which I lack.
“Four Time College Dropout”—hey, that has a ring to it. Does it have a memoir yet?
Thanks for your comment. You bring up an important point: men are increasingly dropping out, and not just out of college, but of participation in general.
More men are giving up on the path that leads to a culture of conformity, contradiction, untruths, mental illness, censorship, high tax rates, long sedentary commutes, exorbitant college tuition, and frustration. Too often it leads to woke hell; woke academia; woke corporate; woke bureaucracy. It leads to dark blue cities and dark blue states. It leads to social justice fundamentalism. No shame in dropping out of that.
As much as we value grit, the better choice when faced with these outcomes is quit.
Once we quit, we can re-evaluate. Let’s start at the end and work our way backwards to the present. Where do we want to end up?
We want peace of mind. We want respect from people that we respect. We want to build and create the world around us - one that is healthy, virtuous and beautiful.
So let’s de-emphasize the metric that leads to those dark blue places, especially the SAT, ACT and similar IQ tests. At least temporarily, we should—that is, until there are higher education and corporate options that we respect and that demand very high test scores. Until then we need to be building these institutions from the ground up.
I say we focus on fixing red culture, starting with ourselves.
For this we won’t need 12 years of gearing up for standardized tests. We’ll need real world skills. No more signaling to blue America our high status credentials and stellar IQs. We aren’t trying to fit in over there. We’re building a new community for ourselves, which means thinking about which factors will bring about real world performance and real fulfillment.
We should start with ourselves as husbands and fathers. We are the protectors, thought leaders, visionaries, warriors, peacemakers, builders and providers. It is our responsibility to say enough of this progressive-dominated career path. Let’s look at the big picture and talk about what’s really important, especially in red counties.
Let’s start by talking about education tailored for boys and men.
I had the pleasure of being an intern teacher at a high achievement private school recently. One of the more prominent features of these classrooms was the difficulty boys had relative to girls, sitting for 6 hours per day. These boys didn’t come from “struggling” families either. They were paying 15K per year in tuition; most probably from conservative leaning families.
Boys need a more physical world than is currently being offered them. They need more outside time. More rough play. More pick-up games. More real work. More responsibility. More fitness. More hands-on building. More male role models. More character education. More technology. We need to build a new American man, starting with a new American boy.
I think this really goes to the heart of a big problem in our culture - too much emphasis on test scores—particularly high SAT and ACT test scores for college.
The public school monopoly has damaged our country deeply. The neighborhood school paradigm with its great emphasis on test scores has narrowed our focus away from more important things in life.
IQ is indeed a poor measure for admin work. But a key issue on Woke lies is because of the false belief that Black & White IQs are about the same.
They're not. The Woke BS is an attempt to solve the fake problems which are assumed to be the cause of the difference in average group outcomes, believing* IQs are the same.
Plus excluding shame for promiscuity - none can be called sluts, nor slut-jerks.
We need more K-12 classes for boys.
We need more jobs for low IQ folks.
We need to give more status to virtue, and virtuous behavior, and less to test scores; tho we also need meritocracy where the top do get medals, tho all can get participation diplomas.
Is a society managed by elites who are aware of the truth likely to be better managed than a society managed by elites who live in ignorance of the truth?
Likeli-er, but not guaranteed. There are indeed plenty of awful things that could be done by a society that recognizes IQ as both real and valid. ("Look how high the Jews are scoring! This must be some sort of devilry! Let's kill them all before they take over the country!")
But it should still be fought for all the same. Especially because the doomer scenario I outlined isn't really worse than what's happening now. ("Look at all the money the Jews have! This is white supremacy in action! Let's kill them all and free Palestine!") Indeed, there's every reason to think it'd be better. People are less resentful of others when they know their talent is both a real thing and something they were born with.
Besides the intellectual mistake of over-emphasizing IQ in life’s outcomes, it shows poor taste.
“Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you're doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”
"Method (b) is often erroneous. In finance, Nassim Taleb and many others have pointed out the poor performance of calculations based on using the formula for the normal distribution at the extremes. Events that should occur less than once in a thousand years have occurred often in our lifetime. The problem is that approximating probabilities using the normal distribution tends to break down at the extremes. Phenomena that appear to be normally distributed close to the mean are not actually normally distributed across the full range."
Well, using Taleb's methodology, when you're talking about wealth for example (or finance), you're in the realm of extremistan, where one or small number of data points can have big influence on the mean.
IQ scores belong in mediocristan, where the values at the tail of the distribution don't have a big effect on the mean.
And why do we need to assume anything? There's been a lot of testing done in USA through the years (IQ test and other g-loaded tests). Isn't IQ data by race available, since everyone references average IQ scores by race and the gap in scores?
Even still, the question isn't about the extreme values, but about the shape of the curve. The normal distribution is a very specific shape, and small deviations drive you away from that shape and into something else for which you will get wrong answers if you keep with the normal distribution assumptions.
For example, let's consider the IQ 145 point. In a normal distribution there needs to be 1 person with IQ 55 for every person with IQ 145. Does that hold? From what I have seen of the IQ data, that left end curve is highly truncated, driving the mean and median apart, so we have to be careful because we don't have a normal distribution away from the tails.
Another problem is that the curve can be truncated on one side and then "fat tailed" on the other in a very different manner, then drop off/truncate very suddenly. For example, maybe IQ 100-110 has 25% of the population in there, 100-125 has 50% of the population, 100-135 has 55%, 100-145 has 56%, 100-150 has 56.01%. That isn't a normal distribution, but rather a distribution with "shoulders" around the central high point. (I think... I might have accidentally picked numbers that are normal.) You can maybe roughly approximate that with a normal distribution, but it will be misleading if trying to go from the model to reality, underestimating pretty severely close to the mean but over estimating as you go out.
All that to say that we way over use the normal distribution because all our econometrics and statistical analysis depend on it, but reality need not fit it, and generally does not do so.
Kind of boggled that Arnold spends so much time wailing about how women have ruined the world based on nothing more than his feeeeeeeeeeeeelings about what feminization must mean only to write two absurdly naive posts questioning incredibly consistent data on race and IQ.
So here's two very clear, easily established data points that anyone can look up to establish what Amy Wax means by "hardly any blacks".
The black average LSAT score is 141.7 with SD of 8.97. That means that a 4sd score for a black person is 177.5
The white average LSAT score is 153.18 with an SD of 9.27 A 3rd sd score for a white person is 180.
If you consider that a 175 is generally considered necessary to get into an elite law school--well, for whites and Asians, anyway--a 175 is the 99.1% for whites and at (according to an online calculator) 100% for blacks--that is, the probability that a black will get a score of 175 is functionally 0.
The top 5 law schools are 11% black, with a high at Columbia and Harvard of over 30% and a low at Yale and Cornell of 11%. If they were accepting purely on lsat scores, there would be functionally zero, although I imagine there would occasionally be an outlier.
Another stat:
Generally speaking, a 1400 SAT score is considered necessary for elite college acceptance, say top 50 schools. This is the equivalent to a 31 ACT.
The SAT is very obliging on scores and race. 2711 blacks scored a 1400 or higher in 2019. Nearly 76,000 whites did. The ACT is not revealing at all, and there are students who take both, so I took the number of students getting 31 and over, assumed the same percentages as the SAT in terms of racial distribution and then assumed 15% overlap. These are made up numbers but close enough.
So an estimated combined population of 1400 SAT/31 ACT scorers is about 117K white and a little under 4200 black.
If you just go down the colleges by ranking and see how many blacks and whites they actually accepted, the schools have accepted nearly 4400 blacks by the 28th ranked school. Meaning they are completely out of blacks with the necessary score. Meanwhile, they've used less than 25% of the whites with that score (and only about 18% of the Asians).
I've done the calculations to the 36th school on the list and they've already accepted 150% of the blacks with a 1400, 100% of Hispanics and only 38 and 27% of whites and Asians.
I'm not sure where the data will end up, but assume for now that the top 100 ranked colleges or more could effortlessly fill themselves with whites and Asians getting 1400 or higher, and those schools combined would only have 4200 blacks and 17000 Hispanics.
In reality, by the time you get to the 30th ranked school, they're taking close to 70% of their kids from below the 1400 standard. Such is the bullshit that the fiction of grades allows.
Once again: if colleges used a simple metric with no grades to lie about, the top 100 schools would be overwhelmingly white, somewhat less Asian, and there'd be 4000 blacks total.
The skew is huge.
Jesus, over 30% at Columbia and Harvard Law Schools. Can I get a source for those numbers? Because the closest I can find is this link:
https://jbhe.com/2019/12/black-enrollments-at-ivy-league-law-schools/
But one of the comments on the article says that the number 30% is due to a calculation error. And when I looked at the ABA report that the comment cited (https://www.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/2022-12/Std509InfoReport%20%2814%29.pdf), it confirms what they said. The report says that 46 out of 409 students are Black (about 11%). Still much higher than it would be under a more meritocratic selection process. But it's at least in-line with affirmative action standards at most elite university admissions.
I just tossed that in because I found this link:
https://jbhe.com/2019/12/black-enrollments-at-ivy-league-law-schools/#:~:text=Black%20students%20make%20up%20at,percent%20of%20the%20total%20enrollments.
I could probably do the actual data but I'm working on the SAT stuff right now.
Yeah, those numbers were rather strange -- average of 11% with high of 30% and low of 11%. Huh??
Arnold also said, "When I look around the economics profession, I do not see 250 whites for every ultra-high achieving black." From your numbers, if he looked around at Harvard Law School students, he wouldn't see 25, or heck, 5.
It seems a bit naïve to think one can draw reliable inferences from that observation about the normal distribution of intelligence as opposed to, say, the political distribution of goodies.
That is, the obvious reason one don't see the predicted ratios is that no expense or effort deviating from meritocratic selection has been spared by the people who make the calls precisely in order to prevent one from seeing those ratios.
What can calling Stanley Fischer "Genghis Khan" mean except that getting the opportunity to be an ultra-high achiever in the economics profession is a function of the fact that social favoritism plays some significant role in distorting the outcomes of the selection processes?
Jewish hard science Nobel laureates (Physics, Chemistry, Science) were almost 25% of the world's winners down through history up through 2011, the last time I checked. That's about the single most impressive statistic I know.
I don't believe there has ever been a black winner of a hard science Nobel. (The hard science Nobels appear to have been better than most institutions at resisting the DEI demand for Plaques for Blacks due to the colossal prestige of the Nobel brand.)
In general, the Jewish vs. black dichotomy in hard science Nobel laureates appears at least as vast as a 23 point (or whatever) average IQ gap would suggest.
I almost didn't post this because it can only cause me trouble, but honor dictates that I do: "Plaques for Blacks" is very clever.
With the current Plagiarism Panic, let me point out that "Plaques for Blacks" is from Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel "The Bonfire of the Vanities:" the Ed Koch-like mayor of NYC asks his chief of staff what's on the agenda this morning, and the chief of staff says "plaques for blacks." The mayor considers this in bad taste, but he's dependent upon his razor sharp staffer to stay organized, so whaddaya whaddaya?
Copying the wit of other earlier wits, like telling jokes, seems quite different than plagiarism - but it's quite good taste and interesting.
Some quick points.
1.a. The most important statistic about intelligence-related statistics is that the intelligence threshold for being consistently competent at doing statistics is amazingly high.
1.b. The second most important statistic about intelligence-related statistics is that, ironically, no cognitive capability makes a more powerful case against the statistically-robust 'single factor' thesis of intelligence, than the capability to be consistently competent at doing statistics, because that thesis is hard to square with what we observe, which is that some people just 'grok' it and some people just can't seem to grok it and so keep fouling up, no matter how good at other maths they are. Andrew Gelman's blog will provide you with Exhibits A through ZZZ, heh. "Thinking in terms of exponential growth" is also apparently very unnatural, though not as uncorrelated with high intelligence as advanced statistics, which, as I mentioned in a comment to another post, is a surprisingly young field. The point is, the 'skill stack' of being both above the 1.a threshold and also having the mysterious 1.b gift from Athena is really rare, and if you are not getting numbers from someone like that you are reasonable in putting your shields up.
2. There are two ways people are using the normal distribution to argue these matters.
2.a. The first way is to try and make bold claims or predictions about human reality using math, and they usually are reporting numbers that are too precise, too confidently (i.e., without showing big confidence intervals) because they are not being honest or accurate about wide errors bands when extrapolating to extremes, or propagating those errors through the steps of calculation in the statistically appropriate manner. It's reasonable to be skeptical of the precision of these numbers, though usually not about whether they are in the right order of magnitude ballpark.
2.b. But the second way is to merely make a basic demonstration of the natural fact that for anything that tends to have something like a normal distribution, when comparing the proportional representation above some threshold of two sets with difference means, that proportion changes and tends to grow rapidly the farther away one gets from the means. And you have to make this demonstration over and over and over both because of 1.b and the 'unnatural' feel of it for most people, and also because the left's Narrative and political formula adamantly denies this fact and the impersonal, blameless naturalness of these proportions.
There is simply no better way to start a rigorous defense against those antisocial libels than to demonstrate by means of statistical principles that it is not merely theoretically possible but in fact *the usual case* that disparities in set representation will be much larger at the extremes than in the center. All the caveats about things not actually being normally distributed don't really chip away at this insight because it's robust against all kinds of modifications you could make to the basic bell curve model that aren't completely bizarre and unnatural mathematical constructs.
Here is the point about statistics. With the political and legal logic of 'disparate impact', the left is making a *mathematical* claim that the very existence of these large disparities are red flags which provide *strong statistical evidence* of unjust discrimination, and that the existence of this discrimination can be presumed with the burden of proving innocence and the absence of discrimination properly being shifted to the defendant.
That's bad enough, but could be worse under a standard of "strict liability" for which one can make no defense. But even worse than a strict liability regime that at least tells people there is strict liability, is a strict liability regime that *lies* about that and pretends to be merely a "rebuttable presumption" / "prove your innocence" regime.
But *how* can you prove your innocence when the adjudication system has deemed the statistical truths which must constitute the very heart of any such defense to be inadmissible untruths? To call this a rigged game is an understatement, and lately this kind of dishonest and time-wasting invitation to appeal or apply with the implication that it is actually possible to prevail when in fact the rejection was decided from the start has become alarmingly common throughout USG.
But again, the *statistical* point here is that there is simply no good alternative except for courageous and influential people using whatever protections or positions they enjoy to prove the truth about it over and over and over until just maybe it becomes embarrassing for a purportedly educated person to reflexively reject it in the manner of a proud know-nothing. Murray hoped for this once, especially as better genetic insights were discovered and accumulated, but alas it has not yet come to pass, as politically-indispensable beliefs have become impervious to counterargument in what passes for our 'intellectual' culture.
3. "I would regard method (a) as reliable, as long as the samples were large enough." - We have had had many, huge, reliable samples for a long time. The results of method (a) are easily available for anyone to look at, often for free. We have even have some solid genetics results now (e.g. Stephen Hsu's work), these are the opposite of secrets (e.g., Connor and Pesta: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.14.444173v2.full.pdf)
Look, I totally get why it has to be done sometimes. And I'm certainly not going to do what the progressives do and yell, "The Science Is Settled! SETTLED!!!" But it is simply not accurate to write about these matters as if this kind of research has not yet been done or not in sufficient amount and thus that there is still so much empirical uncertainty about these matters that really nobody can say anything with any confidence yet and it's reasonable to stay agnostic or on the fence about it, etc., etc. That is just not the case.
"... it is not merely theoretically possible but in fact *the usual case* that disparities in set representation will be much larger at the extremes than in the center."
I wondered about this in re AK's statement that only 8% of American billionaires are Jewish. I would have imagined the number was higher, although I don't have a clear sense of billionaires and IQ particularly; but what I was vaguely recalling turned out to be a piece that went through the Forbes top 100 list of wealthy people and concluded that 1/3 were Jewish or half-Jewish.
That's correct. It seems Arnold's numbers are off on that one.
And, point in favor of the intelligence normal distributionists, 1/3 is indeed reasonably close to Arnold's 1/2 with, "But since Jews are only 2.5 percent of the population, there should be about one Jew for every non-Jew in an ultra-high achievement category."
https://www.unz.com/isteve/forbes-100-35-of-top-100-u-s-billionaires-are-jewish/
"So, 35 of the first 100 on the 2019 Forbes list are, more or less, Jewish. If you sum up my weights, the first 100 make up 33.25% of the Forbes 100, or just about exactly 1/3. This appears to be about the same fraction as when I previously looked into the question in 2013. Jewish organizations usually report that Jews make up 2.2% of the U.S. population, so being about 1/3rd of the Forbes 100 is impressive."
As I wrote:
"I looked up on Wikipedia the backgrounds of the top U.S. billionaires on last October’s [2019] Forbes 400 list, and six of the top ten and nineteen of the top 50 appear to be half or more Jewish. Among the top 100, 35 seem to be significantly Jewish:
"Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison (Italian father, but raised by his Jewish mother’s aunt and uncle), Larry Page (half), Sergey Brin, Michael Bloomberg, Steve Ballmer (half), Sheldon Adelson, Michael Dell, Jim Simons, Leonard Lauder, Len Blavatnik, Stephen Schwarzman, Carl Icahn, Donald Bren (half), Steve Cohen, Donald Newhouse, David Tepper, Dustin Moskovitz, Jan Koum, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, George Soros, Micky Arison, David Geffen, Leon Black, Ronald Perelman, Stephen Ross, David Shaw, George Kaiser, Robert Kraft, Steven Rales, Eli Broad, Israel Englander, Marc Benioff, Daniel Gilbert, and Bernard Marcus."
While all these big lists would probably show the same output, it seems a waste of time to be debating whether this or that of 400 people has a Jewish enough name.
The broad elite has millions of people in it. And the UMC tens of millions. That's a huge dataset, and you don't have to worry about small sample sizes or weird tail shapes in it.
It's also what most people think of as "elite" and has political salience. Nobody knows what a Clark medal is. Even regular people will notice if there isn't a single black doctor in a hospital (which could happen if they are only 1% of physicians).
Not every superhigh-Q person wants to just make as much money as possible. Many are drawn to significantly less lucrative professions: mathematicians, theoretical physicists, nuclear engineers, classical musicians.
Indeed, part of the advantage of being a superhigh-Q'er in a low-odds-of-success profession is that you might just be smart enough to figure out how to make it both work, and make it stay working, no matter how much you have working against you, as long as sufficiently few enough of your competitors are at your intellectual level.
One could even claim that being half Jewish is an advantage
I think you may be making an incorrect assumption about the etymology of "race realism." I've always understood the term as being analogous to "moral realism," i.e. that race has a real, biological basis, and is not merely a social construct, as is routinely claimed by blank slatists.
To steelman the social constructionists, I think they do understand that there's a genetic basis for racially characteristic physical traits such as skin color and hair texture, but subscribe to a sort of dualism where they believe that these have negligible correlation with genetic influences on cognitive and personality traits, or believe (contrary to evidence from twin studies) that variation in these traits is overwhelmingly attributable to environmental factors, with genetics explaining very little of the variance.
To be honest, though, I'm skeptical that more than a handful of those who assert that race is a social construct have any kind of coherent model of what "social construct" actually means in concrete terms or how that might be reconciled with evidence from behavior genetics.
It is possible that the IQ distribution for black Americans has a fat right tail due to selective immigration, intermarriage with whites and Asians, and/or assortative mating, so I agree that we shouldn't be too confident in naive Gaussian estimates.
But while we can quibble about the numbers, Wax's overall point stands: Without the thumb (or whole arm) on the scale that is AA, descendants of antebellum slaves are going to be greatly underrepresented, perhaps by an order of magnitude or more, in positions with high cognitive demands. There will be some, but not nearly enough to satisfy social constructionists. This is in fact what we see in highly selective tech companies, despite the fact that they practice a form of soft AA.
I wouldn't put too much stock in the Clark medal. As noted, it's awarded on a subjective basis. There are only two black recipients in your sample, which gives us huge error bars. And while I hate the fact that this is a reasonable suspicion, it is worth noting that one of these was the first Clark Medal awarded after the George Floyd Riots. I'm not saying he's not a great economist (I'm not personally familiar with his work), but how confident are we that race wasn't a factor in the decision?
You can't even separate social construction from the biological reality of race. Evolution isn't something that just stopped happening to humans 60,000 years ago. It happens every generation. That's why online DNA tests are able to tell whether you're Irish, Scottish, Welsh, or English, and at what percentile level, with reasonable reliability, even if you yourself have never so much as visited the British Isles.
The Clark Medal in economics is awarded by a committee (clinical judgment).
Performance rankings in elite chess are determined by matches, tournaments, and ELO ratings based on these mechanisms of objective competition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system
Is the Clark Medal as reliable as ELO ratings, for ranking performance?
Maybe instead of “race realism” they could go with “race assumption-ism”? Or maybe “race presupposition-ism”? Or maybe--for ease of speech--they could just go with “race-ism”?
There is a vast data pool on IQ and equivalent measures out there- is it really doubtful what the distribution at the extremes is? Your entire essay here is based on the assertion that it is unknown what that distribution in the tails is.
I think there are plenty of other problems with "race realism". And, for that matter, any other theories that depend on "race" in making any measurements and predictions.
For one, given the amount of historical intermarriage across races, it's devilishly difficult to define who belongs in which racial category. This challenge will continue to grow as intermarriage becomes more common.
For two, inter-racial comparisons don't seem to be consistent across time and location - the black-white gap in IQ scores has been narrowing over time, for instance.
For three, the methods and conclusions often seem to match those of the "scientific racists" of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which seemed to start with the conclusion ("my race is superior") and then find examples and reasoning to support the conclusion.
For four, even if you could demonstrate some racial difference, excluding environmental and cultural influences, using data and methodology that were fair and replicable, it wouldn't really matter. If you want to choose high-achieving people, all you need do is define "high-achieving", and then select people who meet your criteria, so racial characteristics are irrelevant. If you want to justify racial differences in "high achievement", there are innumerable explanations you could offer without really contributing any knowledge or understanding.
Edit to add:
For five, such racial theories are almost perfectly useless for any good purpose. But they can be (and have been) used by bad people for very bad purposes. We're really better off never using them for any purpose. Although I don't impugn the motives of people who keep trying to find some truth in them, I can wish they'd use their efforts for something more productive.
The problem is that the racial gaps are not going away, and people demand an explanation for why. We end up making public policy decisions on the implicit assumption that all groups are equal in average cognitive ability. When these policies fail, new theories are invented for the failure which end up causing even worse decisions to be made.
A perfect example would be schools getting rid of advanced classes because not enough non-Asian minorities are enrolled, after numerous previous programs to improve enrollment failed. The entire popularity of "racial equity" only came about because of the failure of previous programs to get rid of racial gaps.
A sane solution would be a healthy agnosticism on the issue of cognitive equality.
"The problem is that the racial gaps are not going away, and people demand an explanation for why."
I disagree - the number of people demanding an explanation is very small, and almost entirely limited to Social Justice Warriors. These are the people who end up making the bad policy decisions, and then compounding the bad decisions with worse decisions, because they are obsessed with readily measurable metrics, rather than solving problems that would matter to actual people.
A healthier solution would be to strive for fair treatment of everyone, allowing them to participate and achieve according to their interests and abilities. You can always find inequalities of outcomes between different groups, no matter how you draw the lines between groups. For instance, no one seems to worry that Hindus and Jews have much higher incomes than Jehovah's Witnesses or Baptists. Probably because the woketariat considers religion to be a voluntary choice - any Baptist could choose to become a Hindu and reap the associated benefits.
What would a "healthy agnosticism" entail?
This seems like some very wishy washy words. People are told from birth that everyone is equal and that racism is the worst thing ever.
How are they going to be "agnostic" about things like blacks being 10x more represented in bad things and 10x less represented in good things?
Blacks will vote 90% for whatever side promises to try to "do something" about that. And lots of whites will get jobs and funding "doing something" and otherwise get to feel good about themselves. That seems like a winning electoral coalition to me, especially as you keep adding more client vote banks outside blacks.
Look, after The Bell Curve Charles Murray published a ton of books full of "healthy agnosticism" and totally not mentioning race, and it did nothing to move the needle.
If your explicitly saying that you think "healthy agnosticism" is a political strategy, we can debate its odds of success. I could see pros and cons. But as a statement about reality? It seems pretty insulting to reason and empirics at this point. Can't we agree amongst ourselves on "the truth" and then debate about popularizing strategies?
Expand the universe of things, perhaps; and deprive the universities - not just Ivy, all of them - of their pride of place in the universe of things?
Sometimes people act like there are but three arenas of success in the world: money, entertainment-world celebrity, and sports. Maybe they do this in part to supply the examples of both blacks and whites doing great, which is assuredly true. But mainly I think they do it because those 3 categories represent the degraded state of America, with regards to values, and to materialism.
That state is the trouble, as I see it. Trouble for everybody across the board. And of course, trouble for the things I personally care about (natch!).
My own heroes don't fall into one of those categories.
A shift in values would open up - some would argue, return us to - a state of affairs where there's a recognition of more "good things" open to everybody.
"Blacks will vote 90% for whatever side promises to try to "do something" about that."
I think this is wrong. Polling consistently shows that most people, including most Blacks, do not support the policies (preferences, set-asides, speech restrictions) that are being enacted to "do something about that." The support for race-conscious policies is narrow, while the support for basic fairness is broad.
The best polling you can get on affirmative action is phrasing it as "not considering race". Even with that neutral wording blacks strongly net approve of considering race in things like admissions and hiring, and they express the highest approval of all racial groups. Black college grads support even higher approval for affirmative action then blacks overall.
If you use more strong racial wording, like giving blacks an advantage rather then neutrally "not considering", support rises (support also rises amongst hispanics if you say hispanics benefit).
Another good proxy is support for racial reparations payments. 77% of blacks support such payments.
Bottom line, in every place and every campaign, they support the DEMs pretty consistently around 90% or so. That doesn't seem like the kind of thing that people come to after considering all the issues and determining what is best for the entire citizen body. It's the kind of thing you do if you know papa DEM gets blacks the goodies and you really just give a shit about your fellow blacks.
You can of course find some instances where blacks don't agree with every single plank of the DEM platform or they give contradictory answers to different phrased questions. But time after time, they know what lever to pull.
I'm not sure what you mean by "best" polling. Fairest wording? Most favorable answers?
I think that, prior to the Students For Fair Admissions cases, most Americans thought that "considering race in admissions" meant some small bonus leading to accepting well-qualified Black applicants over equally-qualified white applicants. There are probably still many people who think this. But, this doesn't describe affirmative action as practiced at US colleges.
"meant some small bonus leading to accepting well-qualified Black applicants over equally-qualified white applicants."
I don't know about this. It was obvious to me back in high school that the advantages were vast. Cases made it to the Supreme Court. But I will move on.
Polling on affirmative action varies considerably based on how it's phrased. If it's phrased in a way that implies race neutrality and no quotas then it polls better. If it's phrased in a way that implies racial advantage it polls worse.
With the following exceptions:
1) If you specifically say that "race X" will do better under the system, then support from race X increases.
2) The more a race traditionally benefits from affirmative action, the higher it will poll for any given phrasing.
So a common example is that if you say "should people consider race in admission" that will poll badly across the board, especially amongst non blacks.
But if you say "race should be considered for admission to help black and hispanics" then it will poll much better amongst blacks and hispanics.
You have to remember that a lot of hispanic/black people, especially working class ones that don't really interact with AA that much, think "consider race" means "discriminate against us." They believe the system is racist against them, and want to end that discrimination. Most Blacks sort of understand "the score" with these questions, but it flies over the heads of non-blacks often. Sometimes you have to explicitly say "your race will benefit from this" before they will support it, which is illegal to say so a lot of effort goes into finding a way to phrase it that gets the message across. Hispanic support varies a lot based on whether Hispanics think it will benefit them or not (if its only for the blacks they have no interest).
Even Asians will increase support for AA when it specifically states that Asians will benefit from it (like with minority business loans).
Pretty much only whites recoil at specific set asides for their own race on the basis of race.
Often a lot of racial set asides don't need to take the form of explicit AA. For instance, nearly every urban political machine delivers benefits for specific ethnic groups based on a spoils system. A black ward boss or the mayor of a majority black city won't even pretend they are looking out for the general welfare, they make a specific deal with their clients.
"Given the amount of historical intermarriage across races, it's devilishly difficult to define who belongs in which racial category."
It isn't difficult, it's trivially easy. Stanford Medical School study published in American Journal of Human Genetics:
"The study consist[ed] of 3,636 people who all identified themselves as either white, African-American, East Asian or Hispanic.... For each person in the study, the researchers examined 326 DNA regions... Without knowing how the participants had identified themselves, Risch and his team ran the results through a computer program that grouped individuals according to patterns of the 326 signposts. This analysis could have resulted in any number of different clusters, but only four clear groups turned up... [O]nly five individuals had DNA that matched an ethnic group different than the box they checked at the beginning of the study. That's an error rate of 0.14 percent..."
Niel Risch, Stanford genetics professor who led the study: "This shows that people's self-identified race/ethnicity is a nearly perfect indicator of their genetic background."
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/705824
It's not really "devilishly difficult to define who belongs in which racial category." If there was, people would get their own racial category wrong from time to time, right? But nobody logs on to ancestry.com one day after a lifetime of thinking they're white and then realizes "oh, I'm actually 50% Pakistani." Doesn't happen. There's some unexpected mixing, sure, but that's not the same thing, and even so, this does not mean the categories themselves are not meaningful or useful.
A forensic anthropologist can usually tell you the race (excuse me, "ancestral group") of some unknown individual with good confidence with just a few pieces of the skull, for example, the area immediately posterior to the bregma, which is "under the skin", as they say.
Naturally this easily provable fact was an inconveniently inconsistent irritation to the "There's no such thing as ... " crowd, so after Flyod's death they began to attack it in the literature in articles using political nonsense words with titles like - get this - "decolonizing ancestry estimation." Because it's racist to estimate ancestry.
When the NYT reported the publication of this garbage, they stated matter-of-factly as if 'settled science' that biological race was a myth which had been debunked, and felt it necessary to note that the field of forensic anthropology was 87 percent white which is important for readers to know about a field we are accusing of fraud and racism for, uh, reasons. They do the same awful thing when they don't like the verdict coming from a mostly white jury, and for the same awful reason.
Excellent
I think this goes too far, but it does have a lot of graphs indicating IQ is NOT normal at the high end:
https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39
"Goes too far" goes too little. Taleb is just not reliable on this subject.
He kicked off a mini-obsession with the topic about 5 years on Twitter, and of course people who were much more familiar with the literature and who actually knew better started taking apart his arguments one by one, and Taleb being Taleb, he patiently responded to each of these devastating criticisms in a civil and professional manner with counterarguments well-supported by logic and evidence and by citing a number of the latest research articles on the subject and ...
Lolololol, just kidding.
Taleb just called them insulting names, refused to seriously engage or counter any of their strongest arguments, moved the goalposts repeatedly, and blocked them all by going on the greatest epistemic bubble wall erection spree in human history. It literally would not have been more intellectually embarrassing had he put his fingers in his ears and yelled, "La La La! I can't hear you!"
I've read that Jews are 139 of the Forbes 400, and other statistics showing much higher then 8%.
One thing we could do here is start debating exactly how many Jews (or blacks or whoever) there are amongst some tiny group of people (award winners, the rich, athletes, etc). While this could be useful, I think it's really beside the point. I suspect that HBD would hold up to their exercise, but I don't think its a very good use of this post (its been done to death).
When we are talking about race realism and affirmative action, we are basically talking about the broad elite. How many blacks are going to be able to get into medical school, or other professions that require +1SD or +2SD IQs? How many are going to get lucrative computer programming jobs. Etc. There are a million practicing physicians in the USA for example, and I think most people wrote define "medical doctor" as a pretty elite profession.
I think this is also a good test case because a google search for the relevant statistics on this flooded my search bar with "Eliminating bias from medical school admissions - Less reliance on MCAT and GPA scores, and a more holistic view of the whole student, could drastically increase the number of Black medical students, one dean argues" and some such things.
Black applicants were 6% of the total, despite being 13% of the population. Asians were 19% despite being only 6% of the population. Even though this already should have biased things in favor of blacks, it is still the case that blacks applicants have an MCAT of 497 with an SD of 10. The final average MCAT of matriculants was 512 white whites and 514 for Asians. Let's say 513 with an SD of 6. So what % of black applicants will reach the 15th percentile of their white and Asian colleagues (the absolute bare minimum, these are poor performers)? 15.87%. So 15.87% of applicants which makes up 6% of the population or 0.95%.
So if we stopped shoving incompetent black doctors through medical school we would be at 0.95% black physicians. Which is...around the % of the black population that the bell curve says should have IQs over 130.
https://www.aamc.org/media/6066/download
So let's say we just did it. We cut black medical school admission from 6% of the pop to 1%. People would ask questions. What are you going to tell them:
1) Well, that's about what the bell curve says for IQ, so it can't be that off. Nothing to see here.
2) I knew these two nice black economists once, so maybe the far tail curve of for blacks is wildly flatter and longer then for every other race, so these MCAT scores are caused by some failing in our society that we all need to feel bad about and do something about.
You're saying that, via MCAT scores, approximately the top 15% black testers overlap with the bottom 15% of white and asian?
You've got to be in the top 15% of black test takers to score at least as well as a white/asian at the 15th percentile. And this is after the test taker pool already selects for top blacks relative to population.
The link is pretty descriptive.
Another way of looking at it is the acceptance rate for a given level of MCAT performance:
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-chart-illustrates-graphically-racial-preferences-for-blacks-and-hispanics-being-admitted-to-us-medical-schools/
The same MCAT score that would result in a ~7% acceptance rate for a white/Asian will result in a 56% acceptance rate for a black. The same MCAT score that would result in a ~25% acceptance rate for whites/asians would be 81% for blacks.
And of course if you measure black performance as physicians its markedly lower then whites/asians, indicating that this process literally graduates incompetent doctors that kill people. Hospitals with lots of black doctors are generally considered death traps. ICE Cube made a rap song about how getting sent to MLK hospital was a death sentence.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1679970523013615618.html
I hope I made plain in the comments yesterday that in my view, everybody - like the whole country! - should just stop talking about this stuff so much. *Too much talking* about something you can't do anything about is unwise. Least said, soonest mended - could be amended to - least said, soonest moved on to other things. Because at least we can all agree? - we have somehow gotten well and truly "stuck" on this rather crude topic. I blame the left, of course, but y'all do you.
But I would turn AK's question - "Is 'race realism' realistic?" - around and ask another one: "Is it okay for people/peoples (and yes, races) to be different?"
As my *Southern* grandmother-in-law liked to point out: it would be a dull world if we were all the same.
And I would argue that it is the left that answers "no" to my question. And in the process they try to make fairy tales come true in the real world, like making "show" appointments such as the one we all witnessed the sad collapse of this month - owing to the efforts of a Jewish billionaire who claimed he had no idea - none at all! - an ideology of which he said he explicitly approved, had in it the seeds - indeed, the saplings - of anti-semitism.
I say "sad". Yes, to me the episode is sad. Sure, some of you have jumped up to say - well, she engaged in witch hunts of her own, against Roland Fryer or whomever. Fine - you are not sad. I understand that some of you have to deal with workplaces, as I do not, and may be worn down by DEI as by a daily Two Minutes Hate; and ready to see some people get their comeuppance. Somehow, though, the comeuppance never quite falls precisely where it should ...
It is sad to me for this reason: once again the left has done something self-flattering, and yes, race-flattering, indeed race-baiting - and somehow the end result is the public embarrassment of a prominent black woman in a position which inhabited by any other person would not have attracted America's notice, but now has been national news, day after dreary day for like 3 weeks.
And all of this effort has the one solid result: making race relations worse! - worse than they used to be, worse than they needed to be again.
Congrats, high-IQers!
I first read about Harvard's investigation of economist Roland Fryer out of curiosity precisely because it contradicted everything I thought I knew about AA at elite universities. I would have been surprised if they had launched an investigation against him had he actually engaged in sexual harassment, but my impression from the first article I read was that the case against him was flimsy. I have firsthand experience with sexual harassment in academia, and I have heard secondhand accounts from other women of such harassment (which I define as a professor soliciting a student for sex in exchange for some type of assistance), and it was news to me that the off-color remarks and bar room atmosphere in Fryer's lab (which after all was optional for the grad students who worked with him) constitute sexual harassment in contemporary academia. I have not read Fryer's work, nor do I have an interest in doing so, but I have heard through the 'econ grapevine' that he is the real deal. I haven't looked, but I would be surprised if there are any other members of Harvard's economics faculty with PhD's from an x-tier university like Penn State. I also understand him to be arrogant, but that was normal for hot-shot male economists before the 'feminization' of economics. The video posted on Loury's Substack (linked in Cochrane's piece) suggests that Gay and another black faculty member punished Fryer because his research on black education undermines the claim that the relatively poor black performance is the result of systemic racism, but I can't help but think that they also went after him precisely because he is smart and achieved his position through merit.
Like you, I am exhausted by the topic of race relations. The problem has only gotten worse in my lifetime, it won't be solved in what remains of my life, and there is nothing I can do about it, nor do I want to. I left academia for other reasons, but it is certainly one of the aspects of academia that I don't miss. At the same time, I believe that, if there is any way of improving the situation, it has to come from within by people like Roland Fryer. The problem with DEI is not only that it discriminates against non-diverse people with high IQs, but it is also used as a weapon against people like Roland Fryer.
“I hope I made plain in the comments yesterday that in my view, everybody - like the whole country! - should just stop talking about this stuff so much.” I second that. Let’s move onto things we have more control over.
The curious task of race realism is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about the factors that go into living a successful life. For example, consider
Humility
Generosity
Courage
Good Judgment
Self-Discipline
Ethics
Perseverance
Pride in Work
Respect
Creativity
Responsibility
Curiosity
Vision
Amiability
Love of Learning
Assertiveness
Intuition
Enthusiasm
Empathy
Confidence
Courage of Conviction
Self-Motivation
Commitment
Positive Attitude
Wisdom
Virtue
Integrity
Self-Reliance
Personal Accountability
Truth Seeking
Critical Thinking
Continuous Learning
Competent Technical Skills
Astute Problem Solving
Cooperative and Contributive Team Member
Strong Work Ethic
Traditional American Values
Entrepreneurialism
Well-Developed Communication Skills
Gratitude
A Healthy Mind, Body and Spirit
Literally every single positive character trait is correlated with 'g'. It's even more depressing to consider that people with low IQ are also more likely to be deficient in practically every desirable moral trait.
Citation for every single positive trait being correlated with g? You may actually change my mind
It's literally in "The Bell Curve". There are whole chapters on it. A huge part of the book was about how low IQ people are more prone to various anti-social behavior.
If you want to go further there are people that have done further research to prove that it's not correlated with some other factor but IQ itself. I posted a link to several HBD blogs that discuss this in the last post.
To give the shortest answer, low IQ means that people have a hard time understanding the consequences of their actions or imaging themselves far into the future. This leads to lower time preference and conscientiousness. They steal more. They cheat more. They abuse substances more. Etc. They fail the "marshmallow test".
Here is Murray on his crime chapter:
https://www.aei.org/society-and-culture/the-bell-curve-explained-part-ii-cognitive-classes-and-social-behavior/
----
Chapter 11. Crime
Among the most firmly established facts about criminal offenders is that their distribution of 1Q scores differs from that of the population at large. Taking the scientific literature as a whole, criminal offenders have average IQs of about 92, eight points below the mean. More serious or chronic offenders generally have lower scores than more casual offenders. The relationship of IQ to criminality is especially pronounced in the small fraction of the population, primarily young men, who constitute the chronic criminals that account for a disproportionate amount of crime. Offenders who have been caught do not score much lower, if at all, than those who are getting away with their crimes. Holding socioeconomic status constant does little to explain away the relationship between crime and cognitive ability.
High intelligence also provides some protection against lapsing into criminality for people who otherwise are at risk. Those who have grown up in turbulent homes, have parents who were themselves criminal, or who have exhibited the childhood traits that presage crime are less likely to become criminals as adults if they have high IQ.
These findings from an extensive research literature are supported by the evidence from white males in the NLSY. Low IQ was a risk factor for criminal behavior, whether criminality was measured by incarceration or by self-acknowledged crimes. The socioeconomic background of the NLSYs white males was a negligible risk factor once their cognitive ability was taken into account.
----
In COMING APART in which Murray argues with the low IQ are godless fat lazy hedonists criminals and deadbeat divorced parents that watch TV all day. But he only talks about whites, just so people can't call him racist.
I'm being unfair to Murray there, who means it in a loving way and wants to help, but those are the basic facts of what he's discussing.
To clarify, I don't need reassurance that our kids are intelligent. As a reading specialist I have observed a couple kids with the same pattern. Maybe the answer is that group intelligence predicts individual intelligence better than IQ scores, or maybe IQ tests have changed.
Hi, it took me a while to get through this reading, and I was very interested in the topic.
I think the general positive correlation to intelligence is true. But I know many people of high intelligence who have other disabilities. My own children have not scored well on IQ tests. But the one with the below 100 IQ was writing essays in third grade and reading adult level books and doing advanced math. So I can't figure out why my family doesn't seem to fit any of those heuristics.
Good! There’s correlation between morals and IQ. That’s important to talk about. How about causation?
Spot on, Scott!
The premise that real world performance is tightly correlated to IQ is silly at best, and when generalized by race, with all of the socioeconomic differences between racial groups in the US, its worse.
The question of race based preference is one thing, and I support race-neutral hiring, but to use a race and IQ argument in a discussion of what is essentially an example of Woke excess, is just wrong.
Wisdom and effectiveness cannot be measured by a test score.
I say that as a high IQ individual. I'm a four time college drop out. My greatest accomplishments were to manage the computer network in my wife's business and to design and build our home.
My wife comes to me for help with understanding financials and other complex problems, but she is successful because she has perseverance, patience, and compassion, all of which I lack.
“Four Time College Dropout”—hey, that has a ring to it. Does it have a memoir yet?
Thanks for your comment. You bring up an important point: men are increasingly dropping out, and not just out of college, but of participation in general.
More men are giving up on the path that leads to a culture of conformity, contradiction, untruths, mental illness, censorship, high tax rates, long sedentary commutes, exorbitant college tuition, and frustration. Too often it leads to woke hell; woke academia; woke corporate; woke bureaucracy. It leads to dark blue cities and dark blue states. It leads to social justice fundamentalism. No shame in dropping out of that.
As much as we value grit, the better choice when faced with these outcomes is quit.
Once we quit, we can re-evaluate. Let’s start at the end and work our way backwards to the present. Where do we want to end up?
We want peace of mind. We want respect from people that we respect. We want to build and create the world around us - one that is healthy, virtuous and beautiful.
So let’s de-emphasize the metric that leads to those dark blue places, especially the SAT, ACT and similar IQ tests. At least temporarily, we should—that is, until there are higher education and corporate options that we respect and that demand very high test scores. Until then we need to be building these institutions from the ground up.
I say we focus on fixing red culture, starting with ourselves.
For this we won’t need 12 years of gearing up for standardized tests. We’ll need real world skills. No more signaling to blue America our high status credentials and stellar IQs. We aren’t trying to fit in over there. We’re building a new community for ourselves, which means thinking about which factors will bring about real world performance and real fulfillment.
We should start with ourselves as husbands and fathers. We are the protectors, thought leaders, visionaries, warriors, peacemakers, builders and providers. It is our responsibility to say enough of this progressive-dominated career path. Let’s look at the big picture and talk about what’s really important, especially in red counties.
Let’s start by talking about education tailored for boys and men.
I had the pleasure of being an intern teacher at a high achievement private school recently. One of the more prominent features of these classrooms was the difficulty boys had relative to girls, sitting for 6 hours per day. These boys didn’t come from “struggling” families either. They were paying 15K per year in tuition; most probably from conservative leaning families.
Boys need a more physical world than is currently being offered them. They need more outside time. More rough play. More pick-up games. More real work. More responsibility. More fitness. More hands-on building. More male role models. More character education. More technology. We need to build a new American man, starting with a new American boy.
I think this really goes to the heart of a big problem in our culture - too much emphasis on test scores—particularly high SAT and ACT test scores for college.
The public school monopoly has damaged our country deeply. The neighborhood school paradigm with its great emphasis on test scores has narrowed our focus away from more important things in life.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/08/whats-behind-the-growing-gap-between-men-and-women-in-college-completion/
Scott,
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
I agree that the boys are losing out in schools that cannot or will not accommodate their need for exercise and other physical expression.
I recommend Jonathan Haight’s work on the more general problems. Kids and social media and the coddling of children.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jonathanhaidt?r=d4enp&utm_medium=ios
My criticism of this piece is the use of IQ and race to try to show that Claudine Gay is unfit.
In my opinion, IQ is a poor measure for administration competence. Why not point the finger at the criteria used to choose her, not use the race card?
IQ is indeed a poor measure for admin work. But a key issue on Woke lies is because of the false belief that Black & White IQs are about the same.
They're not. The Woke BS is an attempt to solve the fake problems which are assumed to be the cause of the difference in average group outcomes, believing* IQs are the same.
Plus excluding shame for promiscuity - none can be called sluts, nor slut-jerks.
We need more K-12 classes for boys.
We need more jobs for low IQ folks.
We need to give more status to virtue, and virtuous behavior, and less to test scores; tho we also need meritocracy where the top do get medals, tho all can get participation diplomas.
Is a society managed by elites who are aware of the truth likely to be better managed than a society managed by elites who live in ignorance of the truth?
Likeli-er, but not guaranteed. There are indeed plenty of awful things that could be done by a society that recognizes IQ as both real and valid. ("Look how high the Jews are scoring! This must be some sort of devilry! Let's kill them all before they take over the country!")
But it should still be fought for all the same. Especially because the doomer scenario I outlined isn't really worse than what's happening now. ("Look at all the money the Jews have! This is white supremacy in action! Let's kill them all and free Palestine!") Indeed, there's every reason to think it'd be better. People are less resentful of others when they know their talent is both a real thing and something they were born with.
Besides the intellectual mistake of over-emphasizing IQ in life’s outcomes, it shows poor taste.
“Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you're doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”
"Method (b) is often erroneous. In finance, Nassim Taleb and many others have pointed out the poor performance of calculations based on using the formula for the normal distribution at the extremes. Events that should occur less than once in a thousand years have occurred often in our lifetime. The problem is that approximating probabilities using the normal distribution tends to break down at the extremes. Phenomena that appear to be normally distributed close to the mean are not actually normally distributed across the full range."
Well, using Taleb's methodology, when you're talking about wealth for example (or finance), you're in the realm of extremistan, where one or small number of data points can have big influence on the mean.
IQ scores belong in mediocristan, where the values at the tail of the distribution don't have a big effect on the mean.
And why do we need to assume anything? There's been a lot of testing done in USA through the years (IQ test and other g-loaded tests). Isn't IQ data by race available, since everyone references average IQ scores by race and the gap in scores?
Even still, the question isn't about the extreme values, but about the shape of the curve. The normal distribution is a very specific shape, and small deviations drive you away from that shape and into something else for which you will get wrong answers if you keep with the normal distribution assumptions.
For example, let's consider the IQ 145 point. In a normal distribution there needs to be 1 person with IQ 55 for every person with IQ 145. Does that hold? From what I have seen of the IQ data, that left end curve is highly truncated, driving the mean and median apart, so we have to be careful because we don't have a normal distribution away from the tails.
Another problem is that the curve can be truncated on one side and then "fat tailed" on the other in a very different manner, then drop off/truncate very suddenly. For example, maybe IQ 100-110 has 25% of the population in there, 100-125 has 50% of the population, 100-135 has 55%, 100-145 has 56%, 100-150 has 56.01%. That isn't a normal distribution, but rather a distribution with "shoulders" around the central high point. (I think... I might have accidentally picked numbers that are normal.) You can maybe roughly approximate that with a normal distribution, but it will be misleading if trying to go from the model to reality, underestimating pretty severely close to the mean but over estimating as you go out.
All that to say that we way over use the normal distribution because all our econometrics and statistical analysis depend on it, but reality need not fit it, and generally does not do so.
Well said.
I debated Taleb over race and IQ in a couple of columns in 2018-19:
https://www.takimag.com/article/negotiating-the-curve/
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-fundamental-constant-of-sociology/