Overall fun essay but I'm not really sure what the overall point is (I think I know the hidden motive but that's beside the point), that is it seems anyone intelligent or reasonable enough to understand the arguments presented in this post would already both believe that Bostrom is not hateful towards blacks and that Bostrom is right about differences in intelligence. And anyone unintelligent and unreasonable enough to not understand the arguments in this post would already believe Bostrom to be a hateful and deny differences in intelligence, and of course would not be capable of being motivated to change their views based off this post.
I should say perhaps the most interesting takeaway from the entire ordeal is Nick Bostrom's response "Are there any genetic contributors to differences between groups in cognitive abilities? It is
not my area of expertise, and I don’t have any particular interest in the question. I would leave to
others, who have more relevant knowledge, to debate whether or not in addition to environmental
factors, epigenetic or genetic factors play any role." Which is almost as ridiculous as suspending judgement on the question of whether their are differences in height between men and women because you don't have a PhD in Biology, one need only open their eyes to perceive reality, this is especially egregious given the fact that Bostrom is obviously familiar with the literature and assuming he is intelligent enough (and he is) to see how intelligence is important for his other beliefs, he obviously has a strong interest in this question.
Furthermore the response or lack thereof from prominent people who clearly agree with the unfiltered Bostrom tells you what kind of people they are, and how easily they are willing to sacrifice the obvious to the irrationality of the mob. Don't get me wrong this is perfectly understandable given how powerful the mob is, but its hilarious nonetheless. I wonder in 5 or 10 years time what the same people will be saying as the Overton window moves further left.
>For example, the standard deviation of the set {1, 2, 8, 9, 3} is 3.65 and the average of the set {6, 8, 2, 4, 9} is 2.86.
I presume "average" should read "standard deviation" here.
(Also, the values given are the _sample_ standard deviations, with Bessel's correction applied, which isn't appropriate for the accompanying explanation.)
Thanks. In the survey it says "SD" in both locations, so I've corrected it in the post. And good catch, I guess I made a mistake in providing them that formula for the standard deviation and the Bessel corrected SDs in the applet.
What are your thoughts to Turkheimer's claims that environmental variables on IQ would be proportional with test complexity:
"He [Rushton] believes that a genetic hypothesis about the origin of the racial IQ gap would predict this pattern of larger differences for more heritable, heavily g-loaded items, and that environmental ones would not. This belief is mistaken. The construct of g would have no significance if it were not a measure of cognitive complexity. If a group is environmentally disadvantaged, its performance in comparison to non-disadvantaged groups will be greater on more complex tasks than on less complex ones."
And Flynn:
"(1) g would be of no interest were it not correlated with cognitive complexity. (2) Given a hierarchy of tasks, a worse performing group (whatever the cause of its deficit) will tend to hit a “complexity ceiling” — fall further behind a better group the more complex the task. (3) Heritability of relevant traits will increase the more complex the task. (4) Thus, the fact that group performance gaps correlate with heritability gives no clue to the origin of group differences."
Turkheimer and Flynn's views on this topic don't make much sense. They're not deep thinkers, so don't go looking for too much from them.
If g is a common cause of the covariation of intelligence test items as it appears to be, then a common pathway model will fit and thus the genetic and environmental influences on g will necessarily be collinear with its loadings. However, the fact that g is so strongly influenced by genetics and not by environments leaves little room for the environment to make a difference, and it makes the collinearity between environmental effects and g loadings which is attributable to the form of g disappear when you look at test items alone, because the residual variance in test items is more environmental than their common factor, and it is necessarily not collinear with g loadings unless you have a bifactor model or equivalent. but I'm not a big believer in that.
If environmental disadvantage moderates g loadings such that they differ between groups, it means psychometric bias. If if moderates heritability, it also means bias because suddenly the causes of item covariation are not common between groups. The only way around this would be for moderation to only concern influences on g or whatever other latent variables are at play, and not specific items. As far as I know, the opposite is supported. However, taking moderation seriously, if you want to address it, just calculate the gap where the delta between groups is 0 for whatever variance components you're interested in and then calculate the gaps that result. This has been done: https://cremieux.medium.com/fraud-incompetence-or-both-d46c6fbc0551.
Flynn's claim that g would not be interesting were it not about cognitive complexity is strange. g is interesting precisely because it isn't explainable in terms of anything anyone has tried to explain it in, including cognitive complexity. You can measure the same g with reaction time tasks as you do with the Wechsler tests. In both cases, you will get the same sized gap between groups. We have no need to invoke complexity to find that g loadings and group differences are related, and the collinearity of the two quantities is informative if a common pathway group is invariant for different groups.
His paper is just (1) lying about the citations, (2) using numbers from them that are inconsistent with his discussion of them, (3) failing to note that the known variants are not all the variants, and (4) making a negative conclusion with extremely low (~5%) power. See: https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/183/3/1055/6063141.
With more populations, the result is significant and some people have already started that paper. Bird's paper is a nothingburger that took off for the same reason Loehlin, Vandenberg & Osborne (1973) and Scarr et al. (1977) did: they had extremely low power, but they produced nulls that people really wanted to interpret as if the studies had high power. See also, Reed (1997; https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0003-066X.52.1.77).
Overall fun essay but I'm not really sure what the overall point is (I think I know the hidden motive but that's beside the point), that is it seems anyone intelligent or reasonable enough to understand the arguments presented in this post would already both believe that Bostrom is not hateful towards blacks and that Bostrom is right about differences in intelligence. And anyone unintelligent and unreasonable enough to not understand the arguments in this post would already believe Bostrom to be a hateful and deny differences in intelligence, and of course would not be capable of being motivated to change their views based off this post.
I should say perhaps the most interesting takeaway from the entire ordeal is Nick Bostrom's response "Are there any genetic contributors to differences between groups in cognitive abilities? It is
not my area of expertise, and I don’t have any particular interest in the question. I would leave to
others, who have more relevant knowledge, to debate whether or not in addition to environmental
factors, epigenetic or genetic factors play any role." Which is almost as ridiculous as suspending judgement on the question of whether their are differences in height between men and women because you don't have a PhD in Biology, one need only open their eyes to perceive reality, this is especially egregious given the fact that Bostrom is obviously familiar with the literature and assuming he is intelligent enough (and he is) to see how intelligence is important for his other beliefs, he obviously has a strong interest in this question.
Furthermore the response or lack thereof from prominent people who clearly agree with the unfiltered Bostrom tells you what kind of people they are, and how easily they are willing to sacrifice the obvious to the irrationality of the mob. Don't get me wrong this is perfectly understandable given how powerful the mob is, but its hilarious nonetheless. I wonder in 5 or 10 years time what the same people will be saying as the Overton window moves further left.
>For example, the standard deviation of the set {1, 2, 8, 9, 3} is 3.65 and the average of the set {6, 8, 2, 4, 9} is 2.86.
I presume "average" should read "standard deviation" here.
(Also, the values given are the _sample_ standard deviations, with Bessel's correction applied, which isn't appropriate for the accompanying explanation.)
Thanks. In the survey it says "SD" in both locations, so I've corrected it in the post. And good catch, I guess I made a mistake in providing them that formula for the standard deviation and the Bessel corrected SDs in the applet.
What are your thoughts to Turkheimer's claims that environmental variables on IQ would be proportional with test complexity:
"He [Rushton] believes that a genetic hypothesis about the origin of the racial IQ gap would predict this pattern of larger differences for more heritable, heavily g-loaded items, and that environmental ones would not. This belief is mistaken. The construct of g would have no significance if it were not a measure of cognitive complexity. If a group is environmentally disadvantaged, its performance in comparison to non-disadvantaged groups will be greater on more complex tasks than on less complex ones."
And Flynn:
"(1) g would be of no interest were it not correlated with cognitive complexity. (2) Given a hierarchy of tasks, a worse performing group (whatever the cause of its deficit) will tend to hit a “complexity ceiling” — fall further behind a better group the more complex the task. (3) Heritability of relevant traits will increase the more complex the task. (4) Thus, the fact that group performance gaps correlate with heritability gives no clue to the origin of group differences."
Turkheimer and Flynn's views on this topic don't make much sense. They're not deep thinkers, so don't go looking for too much from them.
If g is a common cause of the covariation of intelligence test items as it appears to be, then a common pathway model will fit and thus the genetic and environmental influences on g will necessarily be collinear with its loadings. However, the fact that g is so strongly influenced by genetics and not by environments leaves little room for the environment to make a difference, and it makes the collinearity between environmental effects and g loadings which is attributable to the form of g disappear when you look at test items alone, because the residual variance in test items is more environmental than their common factor, and it is necessarily not collinear with g loadings unless you have a bifactor model or equivalent. but I'm not a big believer in that.
If environmental disadvantage moderates g loadings such that they differ between groups, it means psychometric bias. If if moderates heritability, it also means bias because suddenly the causes of item covariation are not common between groups. The only way around this would be for moderation to only concern influences on g or whatever other latent variables are at play, and not specific items. As far as I know, the opposite is supported. However, taking moderation seriously, if you want to address it, just calculate the gap where the delta between groups is 0 for whatever variance components you're interested in and then calculate the gaps that result. This has been done: https://cremieux.medium.com/fraud-incompetence-or-both-d46c6fbc0551.
Flynn's claim that g would not be interesting were it not about cognitive complexity is strange. g is interesting precisely because it isn't explainable in terms of anything anyone has tried to explain it in, including cognitive complexity. You can measure the same g with reaction time tasks as you do with the Wechsler tests. In both cases, you will get the same sized gap between groups. We have no need to invoke complexity to find that g loadings and group differences are related, and the collinearity of the two quantities is informative if a common pathway group is invariant for different groups.
Is there your review article about kevin bird's paper?
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.24216
His paper is just (1) lying about the citations, (2) using numbers from them that are inconsistent with his discussion of them, (3) failing to note that the known variants are not all the variants, and (4) making a negative conclusion with extremely low (~5%) power. See: https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/183/3/1055/6063141.
With more populations, the result is significant and some people have already started that paper. Bird's paper is a nothingburger that took off for the same reason Loehlin, Vandenberg & Osborne (1973) and Scarr et al. (1977) did: they had extremely low power, but they produced nulls that people really wanted to interpret as if the studies had high power. See also, Reed (1997; https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0003-066X.52.1.77).