re: #3 freetoken

Such a nice clean thread, and here I am going to dirty it up with a post on racism:

Intelligence is just another privilege you inherited from mummy and daddy

This is just downright misleading.

What Ed West leaves out is that what he labels “significant influence” is not “significant” in the meaning of that word which would be synonymous with “large”, “majority”, or even “sizable minority”.

Rather, what has been shown is that IQ is affected in a very small amount ( a few IQ points on traditional scales) by genes, as far as describing variance of intelligence in a population. These finding may be statistically “significant” as used by statisticians describing empirical studies, but that simply implies a high likelihood of repeatability and that the studies are not just noise.

And of course Ed West side-steps the very considerable issue of exactly what is “intelligence” and what exactly are we measuring with IQ tests.

There is a persistent misuse of science by racists and this will, I expect, grow in the future.

As a society we don’t deal well with genetics, evolution, and of course statistics and empiricism.

And there are plenty of people out there with agendas who exploit this weakness of ours.

However, malnutrition has a significant effect on intelligence.