Why Thomas Sowell is wrong about IQ
(www.jollyheretic.com)
Comments (53)
sorted by:
Yesterday I watched a youtube video of Sowell's opinion of antisemitism. He is a basic boomer when it comes to this kind of thing.
When people talk "racism" or "anti-Semitism," they probably infer "baseless, irrational" hatred. The problem is that the issues we're dealing with today are evils committed by people who absolutely deserve the hatred, and have to use these buzzwords to shield themselves because they cannot back their stances.
Is that the "culturally education is the most important factor and even poor Jews have books and regularly read them"? opinion
If racism is bad, in group preference is bad. Aka why would you be part of a group that prioritizes the outsiders of the group?
The whole thing breaks down. Individuals are important and must be honored and respected for positive actions within the group and bad actions reprimanded. You can't value outsiders more than your own kin/folk, or the tribe group breaks down and apart.
Individualism has become worship of the atomized individual because somehow belonging to a group and prioritizing that group is bad, racist, discrimination, etc etc.
People need to realize you can't belong to a group without discriminating against non members to some level.
Groups don't need to be based on race. Sharing a skin tone or a few features won't make me have in group preference towards a leftist, nor would it make for tolerable government.
Go back in your hole 70 iq conpro goon.
Why would you ever consider white leftists a part of your white in-group then they have declared themselves to be active traitors against that group? Your own example is completely retarded.
You faggots do. Any person that makes their judgements starting with race instead of behavior and ideology is a low IQ goon. And if someone's behavior and ideology meets standards, then I'm going to prioritize them over anyone who doesn't, regardless of race.
I'd welcome a black jewish pro-2a constitutionalist over any racial collectivist lefty goon, conpro faggots included - because the only advantage those fags have to me over tykwon from the hood shouting "fuck whitey" is that they don't immediately want to kill me. But they're still useful idiots to the leftist cause, working against any effort to make things better.
Race is a heuristic for behavior you simpleton. The two are inextricably linked.
You won't have anything in common with a black Jewish whatever. Multiculturalism is dooming nations.
Guess what fag - get out of your lefty city or european shithole and into america proper, you can find people of all races that actually assimilated to american culture.
And they're smarter than tribalistic little monkeys like you, while you emulate one of your own jewish stereotypes. They're better people. Better neighbors. And while you cower in your basement and scree that YOUR version of race based leftism isn't in charge, you have more in comnon with the lefties and the city goblins and their racial tribes than any one of the real humans that have fully functioning brains capable of understanding the difference between individuals and your imagined collective.
Any right wing american patriot has more in common with another one of the same, than they ever would a screeching socialist no matter shared ethnic background.
Goes on board created by people being censored by leftists who hate them. Says those being censored actually have solidarity with the leftists attacking them. Proceeds to call them faggots. >9000 IQ move.
This isn't conpro, fucknuts. This is KiA2, which is a place born from a movement AGAINST identity politics, hosted on a site born from the-donald which is primarily RIGHT wing, not lefty authoritarian socialist.
Conpro nazi fags obsessed with blaming jews for everything are not the dominant force on this or any board beyond their containment board, and deserve the rope no less than any other wannabe tyrants.
Comment Removed for: Rule 16 - Identity Attacks
Declaring that individualism is a racial conspiracy by the jews.
IQ disparity is mostly genetic.
Meaning if you put people in a similar context with similar opportunities, the IQ gap never goes away.
This disparity gets an added multiplier because low-IQ people create a context and "opportunities" to drag an already low IQ beneath its potential.
This is why black kids in an overwhelmingly White school perform much better than black kids in "diverse" schools.
but still perform worse than the white kids
Correct, much worse.
Still doesn't disprove Sowell's claim.
Says Appalachian IQ starts off ok and declines faster with age relative to others maybe because they develop faster as an adaptation to hardship of that environment.
More likely it's the smarter you are the more likely you are to move away from West Virginia. Colloquially known as "brain drain".
On the other hand if you're smart and you move to WV you're the big fish. So there's some balance to it.
Can we have a tldw point form summary of the argument?
Or as we used to call it, a WRITTEN rebuttal.
Youtube has it's valuable uses, but this entire 'create a small documentary out of an essay' trend I'm seeing alot of drives me up the fucking wall.
Just... let me read your essay, please. I promise, I can read this stuff faster than you can talk and meander on about your argument. And get to the point faster than you can.
Yes. And it's even more absurd when a lot of creators just straight up mention talking to a script.
They don't just post it somewhere because they want the views, because YouTube and their sponsors pay them to make videos, not essays.
It's an extremely silly waste of time, but I guess that's what happens when money was injected into what used to just be called blogging.
This video is just, well bad… considering that the majority of black orphans are genetically fucked because mom was a drug addict/ alcoholic/ etc during pregnancy them being able to achieve an average iq of 89 from an average far lower than 85 does indeed show that IQ is more environmentally malleable. The Asian IQ myth is another one that is almost entirely environmental, that’s why the Asian iq variance is hilariously dependent on what culture they come from despite having near identical dna (north versus South Korea for example). There are instances where genetics highly determine iq and there are instances where brain trauma from an injury actually spike the persons iq by 30 points.
He’s essentially claiming that genetics are the end all be all of IQ, which is vastly wrong. The variance in environment can raise iq by at least 10 points and in some cases 15-20.
He seems to pretty clearly acknowledge environmental factors exist, his claims only go so far as saying the example of black orphans raised by white families who typically have children with 100+ IQ only bridging less than 33% of the gap to go up to 89 suggests that genetics are a larger factor than evrionment between the two groups.
Or maybe, their IQ was always that high and their environment was keeping them from acting like it. The same way people here clearly aren't stupid, but they make arguments only a retard would.
The test isn't fucking magic. It can't read your mind. If you are barely sleeping or eating because of an extremely bad home, you aren't gonna accurately answer the test in a way to demonstrate your brain's ability proper.
He makes no such claim in this video. Around 1:30 he says "IQ...is partly genetic in nature." I've never seen or read him make such claims elsewhere either. As I said in my other post, genetics is a very strong predictor of IQ, no more no less.
I'm not familiar with any evidence of general population IQ jumps that large between the same genetic groups in different environments. The difference in American blacks IQ and sub-Saharan blacks is accounted for by the rather large European genetic admixture that blacks Americans have (that sub-Saharan blacks lack) combined with moderate increases that the Flynn Effect can cause in more industrialized nations, in other words blacks living in the US.
Caribbean and African black US immigrants regularly outpace the native US black population in IQ and that gap GROWS by every generation.
Unfortunately we live in a society where any discussion of IQ is forbidden. I too believe genetics and environment can both play a part. Like if STEM actually took in those who were qualified you’d definitely end up with a lot of whites and Asians.
I’ve never heard of the Jolly Heretic so I saved it to look at later.
Think about all the censorship and lack of academic inquiry we saw on COVID19 and the safety of various therapies. That was an accelerated, concentrated version of how academia has treated the "IQ and Race" question for the past 100 years. Nobody sane or who cares about their career would release any "insensitive" findings if they want to get funding.
That’s true. Just cracks me up that they always say we need to have a discussion on race and I’m like you don’t really want that.
"We need to have a discussion about race"
Translation: we need to lecture you on how Whites R Bad (TM) and
communismreparations"justice" requires changesYea, and the slightest push back is violence. Like asking to name a specific instance
It's more like DNA codes for potentialities (when it's not coding simple morphology, that is), while environment either encourages or inhibits that potential.
Let's say the DNA of a creature codes for it to be no taller than 6 feet, but no less than 5 feet. If it gets a decent diet and isn't exposed to nasty chemicals (alcohol or anything else), it's likely to hit its potential .. but if it doesn't, it might be stunted and only be five feet tall. The same goes for intelligence and other "soft" coded elements of a living thing.
Think on this: A sufficiently advanced and truly sentient/sapient robot would never refer to its programming limiting it from doing this, or forcing it to do things. It would say it "feels" right or wrong, and would probably deny its programming had anything to do with its decision-making ... in the same way humans don't think they have natural predilictions for or against things that influence their OWN behaviour sets ...
Very well said.
Do you have some evidence to support this?
What average that is "far lower than 85" are you referring to?
IQ is environmentally malleable to the extant that it can be pushed to its phenotypic limit by access to more resources and education, but only to a very certain degree. Your example actually support this phenomenon, known as the "Flynn Effect."
At around 98, the North Korean IQ is very good by international standards, and is only 4 points below its much wealthier neighbor to the south, 102. This is also, not coincidentally, the same difference in average IQ of US blacks (85) to blacks raised by white parents (89).
There are not just instances, this is the general trend. Intelligence is so strongly correlated with genetics as to be highly predictable.
Race, Social Class, and IQ:
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Race-Social-Class-and-IQ-Population-differences-in-heritability-of-IQ-scores-were-found-for-racial-and-social-class-groups.pdf
Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability:
https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/34/htm
The new genetics of intelligence:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104
Genetic Ancestry and General Cognitive Ability in a Sample of American Youths:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354766492_Genetic_Ancestry_and_General_Cognitive_Ability_in_a_Sample_of_American_Youths
The Persistence of Cognitive Inequality:
https://humanvarieties.org/2019/12/22/the-persistence-of-cognitive-inequality-reflections-on-arthur-jensens-not-unreasonable-hypothesis-after-fifty-years/
Not familiar with this phenomenon, but rare, unpredictable freak accidents are not relevant to understanding different population groups intelligence levels. Important decisions around education, economics, government policy, etc can be based on the latter, not the former.
When the average of ALL black people is 85, the average for adopted children are lower because once again the average adopted child comes from higher risk environments than the average.
North Korea does not have an average IQ of 98, that is an estimated number not an actual accounting because much like China, NK only self reports and in most cases iq estimates are made by regions so NK is given a higher average because they are bordered by China and South Korea. The autism rates in NK compared to SK alone squash that metric as it is one that NK can’t lie about.
Variance is higher than predictability in all of these cases. The average of 5 points difference is a huge factor when looking at genetically identical twins or genetically similar siblings.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3771015/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption_Study
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6526420/
Just say "the average of black people (in the US) is 85." The "average of all black people" means something quite different.
I'm asking what that number is, not relying on assumptions. You're claiming they are making big jumps in IQ merely through changes in environment. Show me what those jumps are, as we observing rather modest increases otherwise.
It is the estimate we have based on the evidence available. It's possible it is off, but that is conjecture, and the number presented is highly consistent with the Flynn effect. Not sure what you're arguing about in the rest of that paragraph so I'll skip responding to it.
The autism rates in NK compared to SK alone squash that metric as it is one that NK can’t lie about.
So you dispute IQ averages of North Korea, but readily accept the numbers associated with autism? Which I don't see the relevance of anyway.
Variance and predictability are not at all incongruous with each other. The predictability of genetics as it relates to intelligence is so strong on average that, if you had similarity consistent predictability in sports betting, you would quickly amass a fortune.
I can already see where this conversation is headed. The evidence has been presented for those looking to come to an understanding on this topic.
No the numbers are admittedly conjecture are the people that do the studies admit countries like North Korea are done by region averages because there is no data given by the NK government.
You mean there’s a difference between falsifiable data and non-falsifiable data?
As long as environmental factors are maintained, the second malnutrition hits, iqs drop dramatically like in the pubmed study I posted…
You can falsify an iq exam to a far easier extent than something like autism, especially when NK relies on foreign medical for the latter.
IQ is yet another thing I class under "stuff Leftists ignore because it hurts their belief systems, but only sometimes." For example: Dumb White hillbillies = haha, stupid inbreeding retards. Dumb black hoodlums = omg raciss, shut up. They want to believe that IQ is a valuable measure for intelligence, but refuse to use it because it so terribly damages everything else they preach, and even the consequences of using it hypocritically anyway are still too dangerous for them.
Read The Bell Curve. Come for the last solid IQ information published in history, stay for the dawning horror of the leftists authors as they naively straight up admit what the data say.
Sowell is wrong.
He can't even debunk his opening claim. As no range has been established for either of their outcomes.
Lets take an extreme example shall we? An orphaned white baby raised by rhesus monkeys will have an I.Q of zero. As it will not survive.
In addition, Edward Dutton is sighting statistical averages, where as Sowell is discussing the individual.
This is silly. This is dumb. Edward Dutton is a dumb sweaty nervous little man. Why is he even like that in this video? Barely in control of himself? He Doesn't even seem to understand the term 'environmental' in this instance.
Downvoted for being a video with this guys dumb face front and center. Stop trying to be the center of attention and write/post your essay