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I feel like what is missing from this article is that there are in fact group differences, and just what they imply. The article really tries to be neutral, so let me try to do the same. There are 2 groups, squares and triangles, and contrary to what the article says, understanding of right angles is in fact important for senior polygons. Now further assume standard deviations in understanding of right angles between squares and triangles differs by one sigma between the groups. Let's take the same as in the article, squares understand right angles better. (in reality, in properties that might be important for jobs, speed, IQ, strength, ... standard deviations of 1-2 between groups are very normal between groups. For IQ, when selecting the groups on purpose, you can pick groups with a 3.8 sigma difference) Given that assumption, what would the expected distribution be, given 50-50 squares vs triangles in the population ? (this is assuming that every time a senior polygon position opens up a square and a triangle face off for it, and the one with the best knowledge of right angles gets the promotion) 1 sigma: ~76% - 24% 2 sigma: ~92% - 8% 3 sigma: ~98% - 2% 4 sigma: ~99.7% - 0.3% To give one relevant example, one might take the diagnosis of vitamin D insufficiency. If a patient comes in with these symptoms, and they're black, they're about 3 sigma more likely to have that problem. So if a patient comes in complaining that he's been having bone pain for months/years (in other words, the husband/wife/kids dragged them into the emergency room after they've been complaining about it for 10 years), if the patient is black you should probably prescribe a food supplement and 1 hour of sunlight (yes, really). If the patient is white you get them into an MRI and look for bone cancer. Why ? Look at the above numbers to see how often you'd be right. Now of course if the supplement doesn't work after a month you should still get an MRI, but using it as a first stab at the problem is a waste of time. This is why you can't have meritocracy. Races are different, in ways that society finds important (and literally everything else as well), and "small" differences will result in large imbalances in outcomes. Small is taken here as compared to what one sees in reality for differences society judges as important. This is also why island species only occur on islands (google island species, and don't take islands too literally). If there is a 1 sigma difference in procreative success between differing island races, the "worse" one's population will halve every generation. It is easy to see that this will not result in a mixed race result, one race will die out. It's harder to see intuitively that this happens at 0.1 sigma as well, but run the math and you'll see it's true, just takes longer. |