This means someone who wants to practice Law or Marketing needs to go $120,000 in debt and waste four years of their life getting a degree in Art History to present at their interview.
Wait, what?
And it leaves everyone hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, forcing them to optimize for high-paying jobs like finance rather than socially productive ones.
Are you blaming the exorbitant cost of prestigious private education in the US, the crippling student debt system, and the unequal access to social advancement opportunity, on employers being unable to test prospective employees’ IQ?
I have to ask, are you pulling my leg here?
The end result is that a lot of the smartest and most intellectually honest people hate the rest of society and are hated by them in turn. The dumber and less intellectually honest you are, the more likely you are to remain unostracized and end up being a “thought leader”.
Smarties and stupids hate each other because smarties blurt out inconvenient truths? “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”, huh, Ignatius?
Arthur Jensen, whom everyone including his enemies agrees was smart and nice and intellectually honest, who helped pioneer the intelligence research field—got literally burned in effigy, had people threaten to kill his children, and eventually had to hire bodyguards just to go around campus.
Please source this. Give me the whole story.
If scientific racism is true, then believing it is true will make us less likely to do things like threaten to kill the children of intelligence researchers because they are engaged in disproving it.
So Jensen was disproving scientific racism?
But I think intelligence research and associated areas are some of the most important fields that exist!
Wow! Much enthusiasm! So keen!
These are the people who discovered we could increase IQ five to ten points by iodizing salt!
These are the people who noticed that lead decreases IQ and very likely also executive function and so probably was responsible for like the entire giant crime wave of the latter half of this century which we successfully reversed by banning lead.
Now you completely lost me. What crime wave? Also, are you telling me intelligence prevents rather than enables crime? What kinds of crime?
So high-IQ groups will once again end up either loathed by the general population, in defensive hedgehog postures, or in a state of low-grade civil war (cf: the modern atheist movement)
How is atheism a matter of IQ?
Other people’s chosen strategies to deny scientific racism are to make bringing up problems involving certain races taboo. For example, my experience (is it yours?) is that if someone talks about “inner city crime” or “urban decay”, someone else will interject “You’re just using ‘inner city’ and ‘urban’ as euphemisms for black people, you racist!”
But inner city crime and urban decay are real problems, and ones that disproportionately victimize poor people and minorities.
The most convincing explanation I have heard for these problems is that inner cities massively overconcentrate lead, which is neurotoxic and causes crime/impulsivity. This is a highly solvable problem. But solving it would require us to say things like “the population of inner cities is neurologically disturbed”, which would require discussing the problem, which is something that we have to prevent people from doing in order to discourage scientific racism.
This seems to make sense.
“If we admitted scientific racism, we would have to commit genocide against these supposedly inferior populations”
I would have said
“If we admitted scientific racism, some idiots out there would sugget we would have to commit genocide against these supposedly inferior populations. Also black kids would get mocked and bullied at school, or would further interiorize the dumb thug role, and Asians and Jews would be even more pressured to succeed.”
If we go with lies, we might accidentally back ourselves into a corner where our stated position commits us to thinking people with Down Syndrome are inferior human beings without any basic human rights.
I can’t say I follow this reasoning.
For example, a lot of people’s chosen strategy is to just deny that race exists or that genes can differ systematically across human populations. But the drug carbamazepine is a safe and effective anticonvulsant in white and black people, but has a significant risk of causing a fatal skin reaction in Asian people.
Well, in my experience race seems to be a vague and unreliable concept, mostly a tool of privileged groups to keep themselves apart from the rest (the asymmetrical One Drop Laws left me frankly aghast). Of course, if it is actually a useful heuristic in helping people, then by all means it should be used for that in the relevant context.
These are the people who discovered we could increase IQ five to ten points by iodizing salt!
Iodine deficicency makes you stupid, among other horrible things, but I’d like a surce for excess iodine making you smarter.
Wow. I was thinking of providing some sources for you since I assumed you were commenting in good faith, but then you pulled this little gem. So nope, I’m just going to downvote and snark.
Are you blaming the exorbitant cost of prestigious private education in the US, the crippling student debt system, and the unequal access to social advancement opportunity, on employers being unable to test prospective employees’ IQ?
For a more complete explanation of the theory, see Half Sigma here (warning: post is more racist and sarcastic than I would personally endorse) and Bryan Caplan’s response here.
Smarties and stupids hate each other because smarties blurt out inconvenient truths? “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”, huh, Ignatius?
Not sure what you’re saying here, but it seems sufficiently sarcastic that I should reply.
Suppose scientific racism is true. Presumably, smart people will figure this out. Some will have the social skills to stay quiet about it. What do you expect to happen to the rest of them?
Please source this. Give me the whole story.
I will signal the overabundance of sources I could use for this fact by limiting myself to only ones with “Times” in the title. Here’s New York Times, here’s The Times of Higher Education, and here’s the Los Angeles Times which adds the fact, previously unknown to me, that bomb squads had to open his mail.
So Jensen was disproving scientific racism?
Sorry, typo. He found support for some aspects of it, nonsupport for other aspects of it, but was generally classified as a supporter.
Iodine deficicency makes you stupid, among other horrible things, but I’d like a surce for excess iodine making you smarter.
I wasn’t claiming that excess iodine makes you smarter, just that deficiency makes you stupider (and so relieving that deficiency can raise IQ several points)
Now you completely lost me. What crime wave? Also, are you telling me intelligence prevents rather than enables crime? What kinds of crime?
It isn’t directly, but I expect that just as Less Wrong has an average IQ of 138, so most atheist groups will select from people with IQs at least a standard deviation above average.
Well, in my experience race seems to be a vague and unreliable concept, mostly a tool of privileged groups to keep themselves apart from the rest (the asymmetrical One Drop Laws left me frankly aghast). Of course, if it is actually a useful heuristic in helping people, then by all means it should be used for that in the relevant context.
Race is, like all categories, a set of artificial discontinuous labels being forced upon natural continuous variation. On the other hand, the same sort of lossy-but-nonuseless generalizing ability that allows me to say “Black people are more likely to have so-called ‘nappy’ hair than white people” allows scientific racists to say “black people are more likely to have certain mental characteristics than white people”. We could certainly improve accuracy further from there by better subdividing groups (“black people” becomes “Bantu”, “San”, et cetera; “white people” becomes “Scandinavian”, “Mediterranean”, etc) but we will lose accuracy by refusing to even make that first subdivision at all.
It isn’t directly, but I expect that just as Less Wrong has an average IQ of 138, so most atheist groups will select from people with IQs at least a standard deviation above average.
ITYM “most atheist groups in the US”; I wouldn’t assume the same to be true in northern Eurasia, for example.
I wasn’t claiming that excess iodine makes you smarter, just that deficiency makes you stupider (and so relieving that deficiency can raise IQ several points)
Let’s be perfectly honest here; If that was the meaning you were trying to convey, you could have phrased that better than “we could increase IQ five to ten points by iodizing salt!”
I’ll be some time before I can properly examine your sources. Until then, I bid you farewell for now.
Are you blaming the exorbitant cost of prestigious private education in the US, the crippling student debt system, and the unequal access to social advancement opportunity, on employers being unable to test prospective employees’ IQ?
I’m not sure that the whole story (but then again I’ve never been within a couple thousand miles of the US, so what do I know), but tuitions in the US are one order of magnitude more expensive than in continental Europe and this one is the only thing I’ve heard that even begins to explain that.
Wait, what?
Are you blaming the exorbitant cost of prestigious private education in the US, the crippling student debt system, and the unequal access to social advancement opportunity, on employers being unable to test prospective employees’ IQ?
I have to ask, are you pulling my leg here?
Smarties and stupids hate each other because smarties blurt out inconvenient truths? “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”, huh, Ignatius?
Please source this. Give me the whole story.
So Jensen was disproving scientific racism?
Wow! Much enthusiasm! So keen!
Iodine deficicency makes you stupid, among other horrible things, but I’d like a surce for excess iodine making you smarter.
Now you completely lost me. What crime wave? Also, are you telling me intelligence prevents rather than enables crime? What kinds of crime?
How is atheism a matter of IQ?
This seems to make sense.
I would have said
I can’t say I follow this reasoning.
Well, in my experience race seems to be a vague and unreliable concept, mostly a tool of privileged groups to keep themselves apart from the rest (the asymmetrical One Drop Laws left me frankly aghast). Of course, if it is actually a useful heuristic in helping people, then by all means it should be used for that in the relevant context.
Wow. I was thinking of providing some sources for you since I assumed you were commenting in good faith, but then you pulled this little gem. So nope, I’m just going to downvote and snark.
Which one of us are you talking to, and how is either of us speaking in bad faith? It’s okay to snark, but please be meaningful while you’re at it.
For a more complete explanation of the theory, see Half Sigma here (warning: post is more racist and sarcastic than I would personally endorse) and Bryan Caplan’s response here.
Not sure what you’re saying here, but it seems sufficiently sarcastic that I should reply.
Suppose scientific racism is true. Presumably, smart people will figure this out. Some will have the social skills to stay quiet about it. What do you expect to happen to the rest of them?
I will signal the overabundance of sources I could use for this fact by limiting myself to only ones with “Times” in the title. Here’s New York Times, here’s The Times of Higher Education, and here’s the Los Angeles Times which adds the fact, previously unknown to me, that bomb squads had to open his mail.
Sorry, typo. He found support for some aspects of it, nonsupport for other aspects of it, but was generally classified as a supporter.
I wasn’t claiming that excess iodine makes you smarter, just that deficiency makes you stupider (and so relieving that deficiency can raise IQ several points)
The crime wave where probably all kinds of crime increased five to ten times from 1880 to 1980. Both More Right and Slate Star Codex have blogged about this recently. Low IQ is indeed a strong risk factor for crime.
It isn’t directly, but I expect that just as Less Wrong has an average IQ of 138, so most atheist groups will select from people with IQs at least a standard deviation above average.
Race is, like all categories, a set of artificial discontinuous labels being forced upon natural continuous variation. On the other hand, the same sort of lossy-but-nonuseless generalizing ability that allows me to say “Black people are more likely to have so-called ‘nappy’ hair than white people” allows scientific racists to say “black people are more likely to have certain mental characteristics than white people”. We could certainly improve accuracy further from there by better subdividing groups (“black people” becomes “Bantu”, “San”, et cetera; “white people” becomes “Scandinavian”, “Mediterranean”, etc) but we will lose accuracy by refusing to even make that first subdivision at all.
ITYM “most atheist groups in the US”; I wouldn’t assume the same to be true in northern Eurasia, for example.
Let’s be perfectly honest here; If that was the meaning you were trying to convey, you could have phrased that better than “we could increase IQ five to ten points by iodizing salt!”
I’ll be some time before I can properly examine your sources. Until then, I bid you farewell for now.
I’m not sure that the whole story (but then again I’ve never been within a couple thousand miles of the US, so what do I know), but tuitions in the US are one order of magnitude more expensive than in continental Europe and this one is the only thing I’ve heard that even begins to explain that.