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  • E. Kirkegaard and his shitrag appear to be the sum total of his sources and he's still trying to do the enlightened centrist thing of couching everything in 'this is what people (who I implicitly consider qualified) have come up with to explain Lynn's {absurd bullshit}', which I guess at this point might possibly fool some of his Nepal-based readers (average IQ of 42 according to Lynn).

    Uncharacteristically short post by slatescott, best he could come up with to explain how Lynn's results are worth considering once we choose to ignore his vibe based research methodology and how he's downstream of nazi money appears to be that:

    • Lynn's research is in fact anti-racist because US blacks not being uniformly mentally disabled supports nurture over genetics wrt IQ and
    • really low IQ scores achktually fail to capture mental disability because it is comorbid with all sorts of impairments besides low IQ, and it's really surely entirely possible to have a chat with a person who scored 60 on an IQ test and only realize something's off when you try to discuss the finer points of HPATMOR with them, so having a functional country where the median IQ is several standard deviations below normal shouldn't be out of the question.

    Siskind doesn't give a shit. If we take the above at face value the obvious conclusion is that IQ is garbage at what it's supposed to be useful for, but the comment sections is currently full of HBD enthusiasts excited to finally be feeling seen and probably eager to send subscription money his way.

    • It isn't just Kirkegaards shitrag btw, a while back some other race and IQ like paper who tried to prove that people didn't all come from Africa or something had calculations which assumed the earth was flat. (prob not because they are flat earthers, but because they didn't get the math).

      Btw, on the really low IQ scores thing, this is an average. So if the bellcurve holds, this means there is a large amount of people in Africa with a sub 60 IQ. All of whom seemingly can function normally without needing assistance. Which means that either the measure is useless (and all these people with an IQ of 30 are doing fine (and in Nigeria are using the internet to scam IQ 130 westerners), and variants in IQ are meaningless (sorry to the 130+ average SSC reader), or the measurements are wrong (and also useless). Also, due to the bellcurve, university level IQ people from Africa should be so rare there is also just a handful of them. Which, considering we had a group of students from Africa (forgot which countries sorry) means I met all of them. (E: of course the supposed bell curve distribution of intelligence also doesn't hold if you look at this graph and notice that there simply are no 140 IQ countries while there are 60 ones).

      To me it doesn't pass the sniff test, which makes me feel sorry for Scott, after all the extreme precautions he took to not get covid, it still blasted away his sense of smell.

      • They basically invent a special new type of mental impairment to apply to brown people to sidestep the need to explain why entire swaths of the global south aren't desolate wastelands of barely functional people trying to converse in grunts, as predicted by Lynn's research.

        That the statistics of a mean IQ of nothing imply that you should be able to fit every current African university graduate in a room together seems pretty valid as a reductio ad absurdum of the whole affair, surprised I didn't see it mentioned before.

  • The follow up article where normally he retreats to the motte and cherry picks comments from the previous one is somehow worse, we're now treating Lynn as obviously correct as "has been confirmed by later research which is harder to bias."

    Yeah, many people tried to gotcha me with claims that Lynn did this or that or the other thing wrong. Lynn tries to defend his methodology here, but I think (and tried to argue in the post) that at this point, that debate is of historical interest only - there’s too much confirmation now. One commenter brings up World Bank Harmonized Learning Outcomes as an example. Another points me to this preprint, which tries to update Lynn’s numbers using all modern standardized testing data and correlations with social development index and GDP. They find mostly similar numbers to Lynn: Malawi goes from 60 → 66, and new last place goes to Sao Tome & Principe at 62. This is by people affiliated with Lynn and scientific racism, and you can choose not to trust their judgment either, but I think at least the SDI correlations are an extremely simple regression that it would be hard to fake.

  • In the followup

    One possible answer is that the causal pathway is high GDP → lots of education → lots of practice with abstract reasoning → high abstract/symbolic IQ. I don’t think this can be the whole story, because some countries that “cheated” to get high GDP (eg oil sheikhdoms) can’t translate it into IQ points at the same rate as everyone else. I’m stuck with the boring basic explanation that maybe you need to do a lot of abstract reasoning tasks to get high GDP.

    You can't possibly be this dumb. Tfw you're so blinded by racism you transfer yourself to the platonic realm where numbers are things in themselves.

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