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@georgepotter @viraptor @aimaz @bontchev Holy shit. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence Thanks for bringing that to my attention! @georgepotter @OddDev @viraptor @bontchev https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo&feature=youtu.be this is a few years old now but covers a lot of this stuff and the description has links to lots of reading material.  @georgepotter @viraptor @aimaz @bontchev this is way too strong a claim that it just ends up being wrong. "clinical psychologists generally regard IQ scores as having sufficient statistical validity for many clinical purposes." @makeworld @viraptor @aimaz @bontchev ah yes, quoting wikipedia, the most robust of sources. Stop and think for a moment about what an IQ test involves. I still remember the one that I took as a child that labelled me a 'genius'. If you can't see how much of those tests are far more about culture and assumptions about what constitutes "general" knowledge than they are about actual cognitive ability then of course you don't see how they're racist. But you're wrong. @makeworld @viraptor @aimaz @bontchev and if that's not sufficient to convince you, then how about the Flynn effect? When modern children take the old versions of the test the average scores are significantly above 100 (which is meant to be the baseline average). An actual robust measurement of intelligence doesn't produce wildly different results by generation. IQ is just astrology for well educated white people. See also Myers-Briggs. @makeworld @viraptor @aimaz @bontchev or, to put it another way, if you were to attempt to devise a genuinely objective assessment for cognitive ability today then what you would end up with would look absolutely nothing like an IQ test. The usage of IQ is just a textbook case of academic regurgitation of past assumptions, without critical analysis, based purely on appeals to historic authority. See also the theories of Sigmund Freud, which were regurgitated long after they'd been debunked. @georgepotter "genuinely objective" -- you're moving goalposts. My only point was that "entirely racist pseudoscience" is incorrect, not that that IQ is "genuinely objective", whatever that means. Furthermore, there are of course modern cognitive assessments, such as the WAIS-IV from 2008. How do you know that one is "entirely racist pseudoscience"? @makeworld you mean a particular version of an IQ test, based on a version from the 1950s, and produced by a corporation which makes millions every year by selling psychometrics (a definite pseudoscience) to businesses as a solution for making better recruitment and talent decisions? And that was weighted and configured based on a sample of Americans and Canadians only? Yeah sure, that's totally reliable and not at all biased or flawed π @makeworld you've ignored the vast majority of what I've said, refused to engage with the core concepts, failed to cite any sources, and keep on relying on fallacious appeals to (unearned) authority in place of any reasoned argument. I'm not going to engage further with someone who refuses to reciprocate. I'm sure you're a clever person so it's a shame you're choosing wilful ignorance over an opportunity to re-evaluate your social programming. @georgepotter ok, I'll stop replying then. I would have appreciated if you cited sources as well. Thanks for chatting a bit rather than just blocking me, although I could have done without the insults. As a final link, I enjoyed this piece that discusses why/when it can be useful to just accept mainstream opinion: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/ @makeworld if anything I had claimed could not be sourced via the most cursory of searches then I'd have provided citations. What you seem to miss is that I spent most of my life accepting mainstream opinion about IQ, not least because that was rather complimentary to myself. The trouble is that the arguments against the validity of IQ have no good rebuttals, and you have failed to provide any yourself. Look up what an appeal to authority is, it seems to be your primary argument. @makeworld If you want to convince me that the arguments against IQ are wrong, then you need to provide actual rebuttals, not simply rely on logical fallacies to avoid questioning, or defending, your own assumptions. Have a good evening. @georgepotter there's a bunch of errors I could reply to here, but I'll just say the basic thing: you rolling your eyes and saying it's biased is meaningless. It's just your opinion. That doesn't mean it's "entirely racist pseudoscience", it just means you don't like it. Facts haven't entered the conversation yet. @makeworld there were a number of facts in what I just said, it's a shame you can't recognise them. @georgepotter I feel like you're not responding to my point, which is that experts in the field (such as psychologists) would disagree with your strong claim of "entirely racist pseudoscience". Do you consider psychology itself to be pseudoscience? My quote is of course sourced, I link to Wikipedia because it's easy to read. I don't really care about whether you or I feel like we were tested on "culture", I care about scientific studies and consensus. @makeworld if you've got a better citation than a quote from Wikipedia then please provide it. I don't think psychology is a pseudoscience, but I have enough of a grounding in scientific literacy and history to know better than to think that any consensus is robust unless it's supported by evidence. If medical racism is a thing (which it definitely is) then you'd have to be an idiot to blindly trust that received academic wisdom is correct. @makeworld For 18 months the WHO insisted COVID wasn't airborne based on erroneous received wisdom that had been copied into medical textbooks for so long that nobody had bothered to verify it. They ignored experts and modern research in favour of a citation-free assertion they'd all learned so long ago they couldn't even remember where, confident that it must be scientific fact. Then it turned out that the source of that assertion had simply misunderstood a rival's research. @makeworld actual science, raw science, the scientific method, all of that, are robust and verifiable and the most trustworthy thing we've got. Science, as in the community of a flawed bunch of humans, operating within cultures and institutions, is absolutely not robust and trustworthy until and unless evidence can be provided. Groupthink, bias and logical fallacies happen just as much to educated people as to uneducated ones.  @georgepotter @makeworld now kiss. Tbh I think you agree with each other, youβre just both talking past each other @makeworld @georgepotter @aimaz @bontchev for that case, clinical purposes means "does this person have working reasoning skills", rather than "how intelligent this person is". Clinical purposes are for the low end. @viraptor @georgepotter @aimaz @bontchev possibly. In that case it would not be "racist pseudoscience" then. @makeworld @viraptor @aimaz @bontchev if you get two identically educated and raised people to take the same test, then that might tell you that the one who did better on the test is smarter. That doesn't mean that the test itself is a good one, nor does it preclude it from being racist and pseudoscientific. @makeworld @viraptor @aimaz @bontchev BMI is another completely inaccurate, flawed and pseudoscientific metric. Yet it's still used near universally by the medical profession. Why is that? Because it's good and robust? Or just because it's easy and convenient and everyone's used to it and the people harmed by it aren't usually the same people as the ones using it? @makeworld @viraptor @aimaz @bontchev medical science has known for decades that BMI is an absolutely terrible metric for health in the general population. Yet most clinical professionals still insist it's invaluable in a clinical context. They're not doing that because they're raving bigots or incompetent, nor are they doing it because they know something we don't, they're just doing it because they're people who are lazy and resistant to change and challenges to their assumptions. Same for IQ. @makeworld @viraptor @aimaz @bontchev I'm not trying to have a go at you here, or change the subject, but I am begging you to start applying some critical thinking to this. We're all raised with assumptions about which groups of people have authority and should be trusted and listened to. And someone railing against an established authority isn't automatically right, *but an established authority isn't automatically right either*. Question those assumptions, apply critical thinking. @georgepotter ah perhaps the issue is semantics. BMI is flawed of course, but not pseudoscientific by any definition. It's not unfalsifiable or un-replicatable and so on. It's just a measure that isn't perfect. @makeworld if you want to argue semantics, then let me be precise: IQ is pseudoscientific in that it does not do what it claims, it relies on false assumptions and confirmation bias, is routinely advocated for situations it fails miserably at, and lacks any kind of proper scientific basis. Some guy in the 1910s thinking that something is scientific does not make it so, no matter how popular it becomes. @georgepotter I mean okay, I think I just disagree. I like this video if you're interested in why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkKPsLxgpuY Thankfully we've moved far beyond the 1910s, over 100 years ago. I have no doubt cognitive testing sucked back then. @makeworld "I watched a video by some guy on YouTube and I found it convincing" plus "I read a wikipedia article and found a quote I agreed with" π It's nothing but appeals to authority, and zero critical reasoning, all the way down with you isn't it? I'm sorry we've both wasted our time on this, but you really need to learn what a proper source is and isn't. Congratulations for being a textbook example of how structural racism upholds itself though. |
@viraptor @aimaz @bontchev also IQ is an entirely racist pseudoscience, and those who rely on it to try to assert that white people are more intelligent than other ethnic groups tend to hate having that fact pointed out to them.