{"id":93591,"date":"2025-01-17T04:00:02","date_gmt":"2025-01-17T09:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=93591"},"modified":"2025-01-16T16:27:56","modified_gmt":"2025-01-16T21:27:56","slug":"most-of-them-can-do-simple-low-iq-jobs-like-manual-labor-basic-retail-or-writing-for-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/01\/17\/most-of-them-can-do-simple-low-iq-jobs-like-manual-labor-basic-retail-or-writing-for-the-new-york-times\/","title":{"rendered":"“… most of them can do simple low-IQ jobs like manual labor, basic retail, or writing for the New York Times<\/em>“"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Astral Codex Ten<\/em>, Scott Alexander<\/a> discusses the highly controversial national IQ estimates of Richard Lynn … I’m sure I don’t need to spell out exactly why<\/em> they were (and continue to be) controversial:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Lynn\u2019s national IQ estimates (source<\/a>)<\/p><\/div>\n

Richard Lynn was a scientist who infamously tried to estimate the average IQ of every country. Typical of his results is this paper<\/a>, which ranged from 60 (Malawi) to 108 (Singapore).<\/p>\n

People obviously objected to this, and Lynn spent his life embroiled in controversy, with activists constantly trying to get him canceled\/fired and his papers retracted\/condemned. His opponents pointed out both his personal racist opinions\/activities and his somewhat opportunistic methodology. Nobody does high-quality IQ tests on the entire population of Malawi; to get his numbers, Lynn would often find some IQ-ish test given to some unrepresentative sample of some group related to Malawians and try his best to extrapolate from there. How well this worked remains hotly debated; the latest volley is Aporia<\/em>‘s Are Richard Lynn’s National IQ Estimates Flawed?<\/a> (they say no).<\/p>\n

I’ve followed the technical\/methodological debate for a while, but I think the strongest emotions here come from two deeper worries people have about the data:<\/p>\n

First<\/strong>, isn’t it horribly racist to say that people in sub-Saharan African countries have IQs that would qualify as an intellectual disability anywhere else?<\/p>\n

Second<\/strong>, isn’t it preposterous and against common sense to compare sub-Saharan Africans to the intellectually disabled? You can talk to a Malawian person, and talk to a person with Down’s Syndrome, and the former is obviously much brighter and more functional than the latter. Doesn’t that mean that the estimates have to be wrong?<\/p>\n

But both of these have simple answers, which IMHO defuse the worrying nature of Lynn’s results. These answers aren’t original to me, but as far as I know, nobody has put them together in one place before. Going over each in turn:<\/p>\n

1: Isn’t It Super-Racist To Say That People In Sub-Saharan African Countries Have IQs Equivalent To Intellectually Disabled People?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No. In fact, it would be super-racist not to say this! We shouldn’t conflate advocacy with science. But if we did, Lynn’s position would make better anti-racist advocacy than his detractors’.<\/p>\n

The “racist” position is that all IQ differences between groups are genetic. The “anti-racist” position is that they’re a product of environment — things like nutrition, health care, and education.<\/p>\n

We know that in the US, where we do give people good IQ tests, whites average IQ 100 and blacks average IQ 85.<\/p>\n

If IQ was 100% genetic, we should expect Africans to have an IQ of 85, since American and African blacks have similar genes. This isn’t exactly right — US blacks have some intermixing with whites, and only some of Africa’s staggering diversity reached the US — but it’s close enough. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander discusses the highly controversial national IQ estimates of Richard Lynn … I’m sure I don’t need to spell out exactly why they were (and continue to be) controversial: Richard Lynn was a scientist who infamously tried to estimate the average IQ of every country. Typical of his results is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[362,465,21,62,66],"tags":[827,1129,99,290],"class_list":["post-93591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-americas","category-asia","category-europe","category-health-science","tag-genetics","tag-iq","tag-racism","tag-statistics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-olx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93591"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93593,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93591\/revisions\/93593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}