One line stood out to me in particular, and it stood out due to a misunderstanding I had which I suspect many other readers have as well. The line is "...there are significant heritable intelligence disparities between ethnic groups?"
At first read, this post implies that genes in different populations determine at least 50% of the variability in IQ, which is not true. I know your stance on saying the truth without regard to dumbing it down for audiences that shouldn't read it, but I think this is one point where you should explain more. I conjecture that a nontrivial amount of people reading that line also have the same confusion I had.
What is the confusion? That heritability is different from genetic heritability. This post enlightened me: https://bostonreview.net/science-nature-race/ned-block-race-genes-and-iq
An example from that article is that wearing earrings used to be highly heritable because you just had to look at whether they were female or male. As more people have started wearing earrings, the earring wearing trait has become less heritable. Similarly, IQ is not genetically determined and you see kids from low socioeconomic status way surpassing their parents IQ when adopted into higher socioeconomic status families.
On this particular point, while you are trying to succinctly say the truth, you are communicating a falsehood that needlessly alienates readers who have the same misunderstanding as me. I'm not refuting your point. I'm merely arguing that you should explain more here about a common confusion people will have when reading this.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, and the interesting read!
My claim is that IQ has a genetic component. I am not claiming that IQ is 100% genetically determined. Are you claiming IQ doesn't have a genetic component at all?
I'm not claiming that IQ has zero genetic component, but I am saying that it's not straightforward to conclude there are significant ethnic differences in IQ that are determined by genes.
To be specific, I'm arguing that IQ between ethnic groups in the US is likely much less than 50% determined by genes. Finding genes correlated with ... (read more)
My favorite thing about living in the 21ˢᵗ century is that nobody can stop me from publishing whatever I want.
I mean this in the most literal sense. I can log onto a free blogging platform via Tor and no government in the world could deanonymize me. I might even do this already and there would be no way for you (or anybody else) to know.
Different countries have different levels of freedom. I have friends who live under authoritarian regimes who would literally be disappeared by the secret police if they declared their political views outright. They say "it's dangerous to express my views publicly" but they never say "I'm an independent thinker". The only people I know who claim they're scared to express independent thought live in the United States where freedom of the press is protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution.
People tell me they're worried of being cancelled by woke culture. I think this is just a convenient excuse for laziness and cowardice. What are you afraid of saying? That there are personality differences between men and women? Women consistently score higher than men in agreeableness and neroticism.
Are you afraid to say that there are significant heritable intelligence disparities between ethnic groups? It's the obvious conclusion if you think critically about US immigration policy.
"87.2% of Indian-American adults in 2010 were foreign-born[1]." US immigration policy makes it very hard for natives of India to immigrate into the United States. It's so hard to get an H1-B visa that a young hardworking ambitious Indian data scientist who reads this blog[2] told me about how working for a US company was "unrealistic". If most Indian-American families immigrated recently and recent Indian immigrants to the United States are smarter than average Indians then one of the following statements must be true.
Intelligence is more than 50% heritable. US immigration policy does not distinguish between heritable intelligence and non-heritable intelligence. If there is a difference in intelligence between these populations then at least 50% is likely to be heritable. I am willing to bet money that the average IQ of descendants of H1-B visa holders is (or will be) higher than the IQs of both the average American and the average Indian. I'd be happy to be proven wrong. I would prefer to live in a world without ethnic differences in IQ. But I do not believe that is the world I live in.
I would love to be proven wrong about the gender-personality connection too but that won't happen if I keep my conclusions to myself.
If you work for Cyberdyne then you should use an alias when you say bad things about Cyberdyne so you don't get fired. If you live under an authoritarian regime then you should behave appropriately. Neither excuse applies to most readers of this blog. Denying reality hurts social justice. Epistemic rationality is a prerequisite to instrumental rationality.
Source: Pew Research Center. ↩︎
People who read Less Wrong tend to be good engineers. ↩︎