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Race Sex and IQ Breakthough! Congratulations!


Mrdthree

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I wanted to thank and congratulate Stefan Molyneaux for his dogged investigation of the career killing topic: Race, Sex and IQ.

I think he has finally proposed a hypothesis that is worth researching and is provable and scientific.

 

The hypothesis I see as valid is:

(1) There are differences in mean IQ by race and gender.

(2) owing to the shape of the normal distribution, the proportion of people occupying a given interval of IQ scores will vary with distance from mean. (example: the interval of IQ 100-115 contains 34% of people but the interval of 130-145 contains 2% of people)

(3) TO BE PROVEN: When dealing with the middle 68% of individuals (+/- 1 std, the people you most often interact with) there is less confidence that racial/sex differences in IQ will be observed owing to variations in and between groups. (This can be shown with a power calculation)

(4) MOLYNEAUX'S INSIGHT: For an equal size IQ interval on the tails of a normal distribution, the confidence about IQ increases nonlinearly. SO given some prior knowledge, (e.g. that a person has an IQ>115, i.e. a so called 'elite') once can be more confident of observing bias in race/sex proportions.

 

At the very least statistical tests can be done to prove that one needs a larger sample of people from IQ[85,115] interval to be confident of a race/sex difference than one would need from an IQ[130,160]

interval.

 

It needs some clean up but it seems like a good paper if it hasnt already been published.

If the work has been done I would be interested in a citation.

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sorry can you restate 4) in more plain terms for people who don't know statistics that well?

Also I don't know if it's relevant to your thesis, but if I was giving someone a crash course an this subject, I would also need to cover:

 

  a) IQ is significant because it correlates heavily to life outcomes such as income, life expectancy, drug and alcohol abuse, criminality, likelihood of divorce, etc., as well as political/economic stability when applied to nations as a whole.

 

  b) IQ seems to be, according the best data available, 70-80% heritable and 20-30% environmental

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The idea was to measure how certain we should be when making generalizations from individuals to groups or classes of people.

I think the model experiment is to sample people in a given IQ range and then ask how many people I need to sample to be be sure the proportion of people in that IQ class is reflective of a demographic hypothesis.

 

If we assume all groups in a population have the same IQ distribution ( N(mu,sigma) ) then we would expect that the overall population IQ distribution is a simple linear sum of these component distributions (weighted by proportion).

Because the overall population is a linear sum of weighted isoparametric distributions, we can expect as a null hypothesis that any IQ range we look into will have the same linear proportion of minority groups.

 

Alternatively we would assume that the groups in a population might have different IQ distributions with different parameters (mu, sigma) and the overall population IQ distribution was a sum of these distributions.

Because the normal distribution is nonlinear, it does not preserve proportions and one will find there are different proportions of minorities groups in different IQ ranges, relative to the overall mean population proportions.

 

This was the point Stefan made that I liked. Just because the US is 70% caucausoid doesnt mean that every IQ range under examination will be 70% caucausoid. That only holds true if one assumes that all census defined ethnic groups have the same IQ distribution. If you assume the distributions have the same variance but different means, it will make huge and increasing differences at the tails (owing to nonlinearity of the bell curve).

 

Still problems here to debug in terms of applications

Does this make it easier to prove group differences? Not sure-- it may be hard to do demographically fair random samples of IQ. If you could randomly sample a class of high IQ populations it would be easier to demonstrate a difference in the proportions of group composition relative to the overall population demographics-- this proves a IQ distributions have different parameters for the two groups.

Can you employ that observation in a reasonable way as an individual actor?-- Not sure. A smaller sample is needed to prove a larger effect but encountering smart people is rare so whether group differences are useful at the high IQ end depends on whether they out weigh the risk of infrequent encounters. But one could use the size of the sample needed to be say 95% confident as a proxy for how certain you should feel that you observation is due to group differences.

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sorry can you restate 4) in more plain terms for people who don't know statistics that well?

 

Also I don't know if it's relevant to your thesis, but if I was giving someone a crash course an this subject, I would also need to cover:

 

  a) IQ is significant because it correlates heavily to life outcomes such as income, life expectancy, drug and alcohol abuse, criminality, likelihood of divorce, etc., as well as political/economic stability when applied to nations as a whole.

 

  b) IQ seems to be, according the best data available, 70-80% heritable and 20-30% environmental

 

 

Alot of what Stefan mentioned and I was thinking about is already captured here http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/g.htm.

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The website is interesting. Its written as a Gallilean dialogue I think in 2007. The blogger writes under the name "La Griffe du Lion".

 

He took down his contact information from the website in 2011, last internet archive with email can be seen here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110308071227/http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/

 

Accusations are that the blogger is a retired John Hopkins sociologist, "Robert A Gordon". Robert Gordon is now 82.

https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2008/08/20/la-griffe-du-lion-robert-gordon/

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Gordon

 

Robert Gordon has a controversial past in so far as the left wing hates him. More so when Murray's book came out.

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1995-04-03/features/1995093125_1_intelligence-tests-race-and-intelligence-bell-curve

 

He was funded by the Pioneer Fund which is on the SPLC list.

 

Robert Gordon's bio is interesting: His parents separated when he was 11, and he was brought up in two homes for orphans in the Bronx, N.Y., first at Leake & Watts Home School and then at the American Female Guardian Society and Home for the Friendless.

 

 

He has no posted pictures in the internet archive. His status was changed from professor to research professor sometime between  Jan-Aug 2006. https://web.archive.org/web/20060816083251/http://www.soc.jhu.edu/faculty.html

 

Local correlate: 2 new assistant professor hires

 

He was delisted from the JHU faculty page in jan 2007 last available:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070129010209/http://www.soc.jhu.edu/faculty.html

 

 

His faculty page remained on servers at JHU until sometime between 2012-2016 (his jhu email is likely active)

https://web.archive.org/web/20120204123415/http://www.soc.jhu.edu/people/gordon/index.html

 

A 2013 article claims he was emeritus (but this is not acknowledged at JHU webpage)

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2013/07/a-tale-of-two-trials-what-the-zimmerman-and-o-j-simpson-verdicts-reveal-about-racial-denial/

 

 

While it is impossible to know the state of the man or his present thoughts, Robert Gordon might make an interesting guest and be willing to talk openly now that he is older.

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