Originally posted by AKDejaVu:
Because it was written down does not make it substantiated. Learn that please. Learn it soon.
You surely sound like everything you write down is absolute truth.
The books I read are scientific - they do not make any dogmatic statements. They present the current state of knowlege as working hypotesis and they never state that their hypotesis are final.
Ways to measure abilities across cultural divide have been being developed for decades. It may not be perfect yet but it is quite developed branch of psychometrics. The data it yield may not be 99.99% perfect yet but I would not call it bogus.
Intelligence is not averaged anywhere. In fact there is yet no such term as "intelligence" in science. The analytical constructs like g and IQ can be introduced and mathematically manipulated - mostly using statistics.
There are plenty of artificial constructs in other sciences - like force in physics for example. Force is not a natural phenomenon but force concept is used successfully for practical purposes.
It is hard to argue with you when you are extremely non-specific as to what you consider fallacious in the research I reffer to.
IQ or any other test score reflects cognitive abilities to some extent. If the tests are well designed, the scores are normally distributed and can be manipulated mathematically.
There are plenty of tests that are not culturally loaded.
Forward and backward digit span; perception time of which line is longer; reaction time on elemantary task that does not involve consious action; neural propagation velocity; frequency of certain brain waives; responce time, shape and amplitude of brain waves in responce to simple stimulus (click); brain glucose metabolic rate; consistency of all those measurements (standard devation) - all of them are easily measured, absolutely not culture-related and show statistically significant differences for individuals and groups.
MJ: The same statistics can be used to see if a sample is sufficient and the results are meaningfull. Most studies do well with hundreds of subjects, not millions or billions.
Hangtime: I don't subscribe to the concept that jews are a 'race' Some people state that jews are religion, not etnic group. That statement is easy to disprove by finding just one person who is a jew but not reliogous.
About 2 million people in Soviet Union had "jew" in their passport while neither they nor their parents ever considered themselves religious. More then half the people in Israel are not religious and they think they are jews. Lot of people in US think of themselves as jews and are not religious. 3000 years ago the nation of jews lived next to arabs. Since then they moved around. Arabs are still a nation, why not jews. Besides, gene analysis will easily tell a jew from a non-jew.
There are specific medical and genetic pecularities that any doctor knows about jews.
Pongo: Even if it is true that the avarage Jew is 15 iq points smarter then the average gentile(is that the opisite of jew?) it doesnt follow automatically that the percentage of Gentiles with an IQ of 130 is the same as the % of Jews with 145..which is what you are saying That is exactly what normal distribution means. And the IQ scores of jews and non-jews are normally distributed. In fact, the IQ test is designed specifically to be normally distributed. The mean is 100 and standard deviation is 15. You can automatically convert percentile to the IQ score and vice-versa.
Pongo: There is no direct corilation between high IQ and achievement Of couse there is no direct corellation. There is no such thing all. You confuse corellation with causation. Corellation means that things are statistically related to a certain degree. So if corellation is high, then presence of certain thing indicates some probability of another thing - probability, not necessity. Example: with height 6'7" you are twenty times as likely to a basketball player. It does not meant that you are or even that most people 6'7" are. But 20 times difference is very significant.
MRBill: They took a group of post grad students and gave them all standard IQ tests. Then they gave them all identical written and practical tests on driving, following instructions, and common sense.
...those tested that did the best on the written tests did the worst on the practical tests... First, if one thing is known about the brain function is that there is no limited capacity there that will cause someone to perform purely on one test if he performed well on another test. In fact quite the opposite. The whole concept of g is based on the fact that all mental abilities are positively corellated - if you are good at something, you are likely to be good in everything else.
Second, there is such concept as limiting the range. That is why the study does not sound plausible to me - unless it involved many thousands of subjects. Once you select people according to some ability, that ability plays smaller and smaller role in their comparisons the higher or more narrow you go on the scale. Post grad students most likely have IQ within a range of 5 points - about 130. How it is possible to relate anything to IQ if it is so preselected already?
Example - people who are 6'7" are generally - on average - much better at basketball then average people. In fact the taller - the better till some value after which it gets worse.
But if you take 100 professional basketball players with height 6'5" to 6'8" and analyze their performance based on height, you will not find any corellation.
IMrbill: I have personally seen this theory in effect, in real life, in a person I know well. This person can write hundreds of lines of code in machine language and it works the first time! (I swear the guy dreams in machine code) But the same guy can lose his boarding pass twice on the same flight First, statistics cannot predict anything regarding an individual. Second, standard distribution or correlation not only does not prevent from certain percentage of people with high IQ from being at the bottom, it actually predicts how many such people you should encounter from reasonably large sample.
Second, you confuse cognitive abilities with personality aspects. Study of personality is very interesting and developed aspect of psychology. Of couse personality affect person's chances of success in real life - things like energy level, concentration, motivation, extro/introversion, etc.
IQ studies are only valid for large groups where personality traits average out.
fd ski: Yes, european jews did assimilate. That means mostly that some jews married non-jews and their children became non-jews. It can be conjectured that less-successfull jews did it more often then more successfull jews and can actually be one of the mechanisms for genetic selection.
Obviously quite a lot of non-jewish blood joined jewish blood - european jews look mostly like european. But the looks can be very deceptive. Obviously alleles that positively affect physical appearance and those that affect inteligence are mostly the dominant ones. So a child of a jew and non-jew may well have appearance more determined by genes from non-jewish side while his intelligence will be closer determined by genes from his jewish side. The non-jewish appearance genes may well be propagated as dominant in his/her progeny along with jewish-derived intelligence genes.
Another selection mechanism is following: while large numbers of unusially smart and capable europeans (outside of in-breeding nobility) chose priesthood - and removed themselves from the gene pool, or joined the army - and reduced their chances to procreate. Job choices were limited then...
At the same time pointless expertise in studying books was valued very highly among jews. A poor fellow famous for his wit had no problem marrying a daughter of a wealthy man - and had a lot of children.
A thousand years of that and you can get far from where you started.
fd ski: There is no Jewish race, there are people who choice to have jeduism as their faith. That is plain noncence and ignorance - contrary to observable facts. In case I am wrong, where does your expertise in the matter come from?
StSanta: I've read Robert Sternberg's articles. It seems that what he calls "practical intelligence" is more likely a personality trait. He was affected by test anxiety in the childhood and made it a basis of his research. While test anxiety is real and very-well researched subject, exitability is a personality/physiology ytait quite separate from cognitive abilites. It is of course greatly affect how effectively those abilities are used in many situations.
He does not have anything against the concept of g or heritability and is very carefull in his wording.
Considering how much heat this topic generates and all the accusations of racism, I cannot imagine many scientists risking their careers with doing (or at least speaking) about such research if they do support Jencen & Co.
Herrnstein and Murray do not list many studies concerning race but Jencen does - beautifull culture and motivation-free tests) and they explicitely base their research on his work.
As for agreement among scientists, if there is one thing more irrelevant to the truth, it should be hard to find. All schientists admit that. H&M and Jencen do list quite a lot of disagreeing points of view.
I would also not compare the rate of development of psychometrics in the last 100 years (not 30) - based on teh state of the art mathematical tools and equipment - with the rate of development of medicine in teh arbitrary 30 years of Ancient Greece.
2000 years usually ain't enough to do it, unless you selectively breed a species. One of "The Bell Curve" more important subjects is development of cogntive elite in USA over the last three generations. If true, ther rate is significant - even though the US cognitive elite probably has much fewer children per family then jews in middle ages.
Guys, I understand you righteous wrath about the topic, but usually when you argue a hypothesis, you infer predictions from it and then test them.
Like: if A was true, then in situation B we would see C present which we don't. Or something like that.
Here is an example:
Jews are more mutually supportive then other nations. They have lot of influence in US. They keep helping Israel.
Those statements are mutually contradictive.
Jews in US can easily move to Israel - there are certain advantages there for them. The fact that they do not care to do so means that they like living in America much more.
So if they cared about jews in Israel, they would have arranged for immigration from there to US to be open. That is clearly not the case - many jews in Israel are trying to come here or to Canada.
After all any jew from Soviet Union could get in here if he managed to get out.
Israeli jews are highly edicated people speaking english accustomed to living in wester democracy and tehre is no more then 3 mil of them. We have millions of people coming here every year with completely foreign background and no education/language/social skills that require generations to get accustomed and it is not a problem for us.
I guess american jews do not care enough or do not have enough influence to do that for israeli jews.
So how can you care enough and have inflience enough to help a country in war and make US spend billions of $$ and risk itself politically, but not have care/influence enough to arrange simple immigration?
miko
[ 11-14-2001: Message edited by: miko2d ]
