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Dear ikb, cultural success is indeed largely determined by group cognitive ability, and individual SES is indeed determined by individual cognitive ability. These are simply long-established facts. How could the situation be otherwise? Are highly accomplished individuals generally stupid, and society's worst failures generally very bright? If so, why would this be? Why have Jews been so successful, despite incredible discrimination and persecution right through mass extermination? Why has sub-Saharan Africa been such a miserable failure? The answer is as plain as day if you compare the cognitive ability of Jews with the cognitive ability of sub-Saharan Africans.
BS easily disproven be the difference in IQ scores of Israeli Jews compare to American Jews. The prior is significantly lower than the later. If it was a genetic difference these groups would be much more similar.
As for Africa, the Afrikaner have lower median IQs than the European countries they originally come from. Clearly ENVIRONMENT plays a larger part than genetics.
And just wondering, how does infant nutrition compare in most of Sub-saharan Africa? Oh yeah, not so hot. It is clear that prenatal and early childhood nutrition provide a huge difference in measures of intelligence.
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Statistical reasoning is helpful, but overwhelming evidence and common sense take precedence at some point. This is generally called "the requirement for plausibility" that should be the first step in interpreting any conclusion based on either kind of statistical analysis, in order to guard against spurious results and wishful thinking.
Uh, no. Statistics help to eliminate bias. Which clearly you are unwilling to let go of.
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Have you seen the recent, infamous paper on the consumption of cereal by pregnant women, published in a respectable journal? It purported to prove conclusively that the consumption of cereal by the mother determined the sex of the child. Do you believe this? The statistical methods were solid, except for the omitted plausibility test. This kind of error is rampant in the social sciences and in epidemiology. Ask enough questions, run enough tests, make enough spurious comparisons and opportunistic arrangements of variables, ignore anything that you don't like, and you will get the answer that you want.
Source?
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So you disagree with Professor Herrnstein about this particular subject. Believe it or not, he actually knew more about the issue of cognitive ability than you ever will, although he was certainly less abrasive about it. His thoughts are explained in full detail in "The Bell Curve." He was tenured at Harvard for years, and held a distinguished Chair. Your qualifications to disagree with his work are exactly what? I should believe you rather than him? Why?
You can't dispute my points so now you use appeal to authority. Enough of this already. You cannot support the notion at all that it is RACE so you resort to logical fallacy. Whatever floats your boat.
Well . . . this began with a discussion of differences in GRE scores. Then the idea of statistical significance was brought in almost immediately -- I think that we all agree now that the sample sizes are quite large enough to ensure statistical significance to a very high degree. And then supposedly the data needed to be adjusted for SES, with your explanation, ikb, being differences in nutrition (never mind that the GRE is taken by college graduates and near graduates, who are likely to be quite well nourished from birth). Along the way we talked about one absurd but statistically significant theory of nutrition, and also about SAT scores, where it was mentioned that only 244 Blacks of either sex scored above 750 on the SAT-Q over the entire United States in 2005. Further, there was the discussion of the GRE-Q gap between Asian men and Black women, which gap is several standard deviations. Supposedly this "disappears" when corrected for parental income, which you seem to suppose to be unrelated to parental IQ and of course unrelated to the IQ of the parents' offspring.
But the crown jewel was your introduction of IQ by country, showing a separation of mean IQ of three to four standard deviations between the top 5 on the list, which are all Asian, and the bottom 5 on the list, which are all African. You probably understand the meaning, ikb, of the phrase "hoist by your own petard."
By this point it seems clear that you really don't know very much about this topic, despite all of your sputtering about statistical theory. That's why I introduced the notion of credentials and accomplishments, and pointed you to the work of Prof. Herrnstein in the hope that you might read some more and learn a little bit. He examines the subject thoroughly and dispassionately.
Edit -- whoops, I forgot to give you a link discussing the cereal study as you requested, which link points to the source paper
I honestly think both of you are overplaying each side.
Yes there is a genetic component, the research most definitely provides evidence to support this (This is what Hernstein and Murray focused on).
Yes there is a a cultural/environmental component, there is much evidence to suggest this as well.
The point that Hernstein and Murray never mention although I wouldn't think they would disagree with it was what Hamish Forbes mentioned and the point I was trying to make. Yes, there may be "group" differences, but the variation within groups is larger than the variation between groups and to me that says there is a large amount of movement that can be made from an environmental standpoint.
I like to think of genetics as the set-point for cogntiive ability. My genetics will set a range for my cognitive ability and my environment and culture will determine where I land within that range.
So let's say that for the average AA male that range is 70-130 and the average Asian male it is 85-145. If everything goes perfectly for each of them the Asian genetics will be superior; however there is a ton of potential overlap between those two ranges. An Asian male placed into a very poor environment may end up with the same CA as an AA male placed into a lower income family(keep in mind this is just an example of what it could look like).
I have never denied there exists a disparity between groups of people.
But if it is based on the genetic notion of race (which is meaningless anyway) than all the groups of Chinese (or at least Han) would be the same. They are not.
Therefore it is another factor, likely a combination of cultural and socioeconomic factors. And those factors can be discerned and the positive aspect applied to education in this country. And the regression supports this idea because the better predictor for score than race is parental income.
I lived in Asia, including the Philippines, Hong Kong, and a stint in Macau for many years. In all of the Asian nations I have spent time in the entire culture values intelligence, and gains in areas of intellectual pursuits to a much larger degree than most in this country do.
IQ and the Wealth of Nations is an old book using old data.
The IQ scores have been modified by later studies. Just google.
Yes, any map which uses that god awful projection, horrible choropleth differentiation without normalization, and selection bias scaling (with, on top of that, bi-scale value based rendering) is going to be controversial. And that is before failing to put in all seven critical map elements.
Well . . . this began with a discussion of differences in GRE scores. Then the idea of statistical significance was brought in almost immediately -- I think that we all agree now that the sample sizes are quite large enough to ensure statistical significance to a very high degree. And then supposedly the data needed to be adjusted for SES, with your explanation, ikb, being differences in nutrition (never mind that the GRE is taken by college graduates and near graduates, who are likely to be quite well nourished from birth). Along the way we talked about one absurd but statistically significant theory of nutrition, and also about SAT scores, where it was mentioned that only 244 Blacks of either sex scored above 750 on the SAT-Q over the entire United States in 2005. Further, there was the discussion of the GRE-Q gap between Asian men and Black women, which gap is several standard deviations. Supposedly this "disappears" when corrected for parental income, which you seem to suppose to be unrelated to parental IQ and of course unrelated to the IQ of the parents' offspring.
But the crown jewel was your introduction of IQ by country, showing a separation of mean IQ of three to four standard deviations between the top 5 on the list, which are all Asian, and the bottom 5 on the list, which are all African. You probably understand the meaning, ikb, of the phrase "hoist by your own petard."
By this point it seems clear that you really don't know very much about this topic, despite all of your sputtering about statistical theory. That's why I introduced the notion of credentials and accomplishments, and pointed you to the work of Prof. Herrnstein in the hope that you might read some more and learn a little bit. He examines the subject thoroughly and dispassionately.
Edit -- whoops, I forgot to give you a link discussing the cereal study as you requested, which link points to the source paper
It took all of one second to recover this using Google (cereal, birth, sex)
1. If you do not know the difference between primary lit and a news article you should not participate in these sorts of discussions. That is not a study, and it is clearly not the source I asked for. And anyway, so what? Peer review means that these things get picked up, replicated, and errors fixed. Has no relevance on statistics. Significance is not perfection, who claimed otherwise, it just means that there is only some small percentage of being "wrong". Again, fixed by replication.
2. First, appeals to authority, now ad hominems. Is there any logical fallacy you will not attempt to use when dealing with the fact you keep ignoring, that parental income is a better predictor of score than race.
3. You do realize some 13 million children in this country suffer from some form of malnutrition. And that there is a correlation between SES and income right? Anyway, nutritional issues are much more likely to be a factor in low IQ in nations in Africa
4. You continue to ignore the FACT that there is as a larger difference within racial groups (such as those demonstrated by IQ) than between groups.
Finally tracked down ETS' standard error of measurement for the new test: http://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/gre_guide.pdf
(See page 33)
Combined with the concordance tables http://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/concord...nformation.pdf
It is pretty clear that a 75 pt difference in verbal and 70 pt difference in quantitative on the old scales in the ranges of thse averages places the score differences within the confidence intervals for each other.
I think more important, though, is the various studies that have demonstrated that the new GRE consistently underpredicts graduate school success for women and lower scoring minorities and over predicts for men, whites, and higher scoring minorities. (Especially with older students, which are overrepresented among women and underrepresented minorities.) GRE Research: Validity Evidence: Predicting Success
1. If you do not know the difference between primary lit and a news article you should not participate in these sorts of discussions. That is not a study, and it is clearly not the source I asked for. And anyway, so what? Peer review means that these things get picked up, replicated, and errors fixed. Has no relevance on statistics. Significance is not perfection, who claimed otherwise, it just means that there is only some small percentage of being "wrong". Again, fixed by replication.
My goodness you are trying hard to come off as an abrasive person! -- the Scientific American article states clearly that the paper appears in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, and gives you a link to the website (you probably need a subscription to get inside, but I don't know that for a fact).
What was lacking in the paper, and what should have been picked up, was a complete absence of plausibility.
Regarding my knowledge of the ways of primary literature -- I have both contributed extensively to primary, peer-reviewed literature, and served extensively as a referee. I doubt that you can honestly say the same thing, but of course I don't know for sure.
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