Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hayst4ck 1157 days ago
Directly from the Wikipedia article you linked:

  Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to 
  have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that 
  disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis.[11][12]
  [13][14] The scientific consensus is that genetics does not 
  explain average differences in IQ test performance between 
  racial groups.[15][16][17][18][19][20]
1 comments
Bran_son 1156 days ago
Of course of course. Now let's look at what happens to researchers who claim otherwise, to see if there might be publication bias...
link
hayst4ck 1156 days ago
I think if you stepped outside of your shoes and said "would someone who disagrees with me find the way I have conducted myself convincing?" you wouldn't like the answer.

No, you are asking for social reinforcement of your idea to make you feel good about what appears on the outside to be quite unpleasant beliefs that wouldn't fly around educated people.

You are invoking a conspiracy to justify your belief.

link
Bran_son 1156 days ago
Systemic racial discrimination in academia (despite Democrats outnumbering Republicans 10 to 1 in faculty [1] - curiously few studies look at whether that might be due to discrimination) is a perfectly analogous conspiracy, yet it is accepted by default.

However, you are correct - cherry-picking which parts of an article to believe is not very convincing. So let me substantiate my claim:

The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. [2]

That was in 1985. Nowadays, it is done openly: Nature publicly stated they will not publish studies that may "harm" (broadly defined) various groups [3], regardless of validity, and commitments to diversity are officially required by one fifth of academic jobs [4].

Of course, if we're talking about discrimination in academia, we skipped a step: as your own quotation implies ("it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis"), there are group IQ disparities. Since IQ is a useful (if imperfect) measure of academic ability, from that alone we would expect disparate outcomes, even in a perfect meritocracy. It does not matter if the IQ disparities are genetic, cultural, or socio-economic in origin (or some combination thereof).

Though it is strange. Bizarre even. Nearly every other heritable human trait - height, skin pigmentation, lactose tolerance, eye and hair color, bone density, sickle cell trait, muscle composition, high altitude adaptation [5], alcohol metabolism [6], etc., is unevenly distributed among human groups. Yet even though IQ and personality are both heritable [7] and variable, they're the rare exception, perfectly equally distributed among all human groups? Nature truly works in mysterious ways.

[1] https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_p...

[2] https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2

[4] https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2021/11/11/study-diversity-...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_adaptation_in_hu...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_flush_reaction

[7] https://www.nature.com/articles/tp201596

link