Or so says much of the new research, including a new paper noted by Paul Caron. The theory makes intuitive sense, of course, and dovetails with my empirical experience.
I only have one small question: why do all these papers seem to be written by people at least one standard deviation above the mean in height?
Copyright © 2010 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
I just picture you holding a copy of the paper over Yglesias' head so he can't reach it.
Historically, I can understand why taller people were smarter--they were probably taller (really, bigger) because they had better quality of food to eat than their fellow-citizens, and mplicitly, taller people may not have been malnourished (or as malnourished as their shorter comrades) when they were children. I think that there have been a number of studies showing strong correlations between childhood malnutrition and cognitive development. However, I'm not sure why taller people who now live in a developed nation (like Holland or the U.S.) should be smarter.
But it seems like the real question is whether people are richer because they're smarter. I'm not sure if that's accurate--it's probably more accurate to say that rich people tend to be above a certain level of intelligence.
On a more superficial level, it seems that we place a certain premium on height the same way that we place a premium on attractiveness in general. Attractive people tend to get more opportunities in life than unattractive people.
I've always heard that the best indicator of wealth is looking at one's family tree.
If people who are taller are smarter, and if smarter people are more likely to write research papers, then taller people are more likely to write research papers.
Brown,
Question - where are the students hotter - Harvard or Arizona State? Stanford or USC?
Tall people are richer because they are smarter and more beautiful.
Tall people are richer because they beat up small people and take their money.
Speaking as someone who is 6 foot 4 inches tall, I think this line of research is extremely fascinating, and that the scientists who wrote the paper deserve increased funding to examine this question in depth.
Because they find it easier to gather the low-hanging fruit.
thehova(that wouldn't be a take-off on ANOVA?): Actually, as far as correlations go, it turns out that wealth is more heritable than IQ, that is, when doing a regression analysis, wealth is more highly correlated with family than is IQ - r^2(wealth)>r^2(IQ). By all means encourage the factoid that height is correlated with IQ; I have often thought that a reasonable alternative to teaching algebra to satisfy the math requirement would be probability and statistics.
TALLNESS = SMARTNESS becomes increasingly intuitive as one considers the National Basketball Association and its players. Ooops!
Well...the authors actually don't find that the height wage premium is does to greater cognitive ability, just that taller people are more likely to have greater educational attainment and select into higher status jobs. While interesting, this does not mean that taller people are actually smarter. I'm being a skeptic here - because I think that if the authors had done what they should have and included test scores in their models - they would find that the wage premium is attenuated by IQ. But, they don't. The argument that sociologists have been making has to do with labeling theory (a similar finding is found for more "attractive" i.e., symmetric people), such that taller men (I've never heard of the relationship existing for women) are socialized in a way that promotes leadership skills. The outcome, it is argued, is greater motivation and higher aspirations - second only to IQ in predicting educational attainment.
He didn't show that it correlated intelligence, he showed correlation with educational attainment. and we know that teachers are always fair to all children, and never favor taller, more athletic, better looking students.
I'm 6'5", and I hate this stuff. Of course, I'm the shortest male in my family, so I may be ambivalent about how tall I conceive myself to be.
I have often thought that a reasonable alternative to teaching algebra to satisfy the math requirement would be probability and statistics.
Wow, something SOV and I agree on 100%. Probability and statistics should be taught before every high school math subject that is currently required. It is the one area of math that would be most useful to educated laypersons, and it's the one subject that few ever take.
This strikes me as being eminently true.
Hehe.
I could see tall people being smarter as a result of social selection, as suggested above. Smart people see the height advantage and choose taller mates.
I would think it is most likely a coincidence, people are probably taller and smarter due to better nutrition.
Speaking as a fairly intelligent 5'0" woman, I'm a little skeptical. I don't think the correlation is quite as direct as it seems. I'm smarter than the average bear (or human), but I've rarely been treated that way by taller people, no matter how dumb they are. In fact, the dumber they are, the less likely they are to realize I'm not dumb. This often works to my advantage, so I don't mind...much. It's not easy to get taller people to take me seriously at first. It is incredibly annoying.
I think shorter people may end up missing the economic boat because others are perhaps unintentionally looking down on them figuratively, just as they do literally. But what do I know? I'm just a very short, underacheiving housewife. ;-)
Anecdotal, true, but something I'm quite sure would be born out by statistics: people who are able to run for long distances have in the aggregate higher IQ's than those don't.
I suspect it might have something to do with better oxygenation, and of course, things like lung capacity, circulatory robustness and the like have a heavily genetic component.
Did I mention I run seven miles three to four days a week?
I thought Asian people were smarter.
Anecdotal, true, but something I'm quite sure would be born out by statistics: people who are able to run for long distances have in the aggregate higher IQ's than those don't.
I suspect it might have something to do with better oxygenation, and of course, things like lung capacity, circulatory robustness and the like have a heavily genetic component.
Did I mention I run seven miles three to four days a week?
jmo, I've noticed that elite uni kids these days look rather more attractive than they did during my own undergraduate years (in the previous decade, hélas!). I couldn't say whether they look more attractive than the students at your counterexamples, but you cite mostly Sunbelt unis which have certain advantages over H that could affect student body comeliness.
I can tell you that the H and Princeton co-eds I've seen recently look a fair sight better than the girls at, say, Rutgers, but my observation may have more to do with issues of class (style and demeanour) than genes. With a few exceptions (eg scions of Hollywood), there tend to be few genuinely beautiful undergrads at elite unis, but there seems to be in increasing proportion of pretty, well-dressed people. And of course very few elite undergrads are overweight.
Tall people are more attractive and have an easier time sleeping their way to the top.
Neo,
* My being gay might also influence my thinking.
The guys at BC, BU, Northeastern are much hotter than the Harvard/MIT boys. The same goes for the girls - near as I can tell...
Ha, that's the first time anyone has addressed me as 'Neo', which is a neat way of avoiding 'con'!
I think jmo may be right about BC and BU v H. This may support my suspicion that it's an issue of class and not any correlation of looks with 99th percentile IQ. BU and BC undergrads these days hail mostly from the bourgeoisie. However, they've also both become increasingly competitive unis: I'd be willing to bet the typical student would score at least one SD above mean IQ. If you take away recent immigrants, I'm fairly certain BU, BC, and H students are taller than average.
On a gratuitous note: it's height (even more than celebrity or class) that definitively puts paid to my daydreams of dating Miss McArdle. I'd like to think my intelligence is comparable to hers, but at 1.8 metres, I suspect I'm far too short for a girl her height (1.88 m?) to bear standing alongside in public.
We can easily poke some holes in the "smart" aspect of this report. We are presented almost daily with real life examples of 'rich' tall people who are not too bright: NBA, MLB, NFL
to name a few...
Counter-argument: taller people bang their heads more often, destroy more brain-cells and are thus more likely to be brain-damaged. Thus, shorter is smarter. Discuss.
I never bought the 66% of taller presidential candidates win thing because of FDR. Yeah, he was taller, but he was stuck in a friggin' wheelchair! Who cares if his legs are longer, he couldn't use them!
Stuff like this seems important until you realize that groups of people are made up of individuals. There are plenty of short millionaires; there have been plenty of short geniuses. This stuff is mostly fodder for magazines. Very little actual value.
Cabbage,
"Yeah, he was taller, but he was stuck in a friggin' wheelchair! Who cares if his legs are longer, he couldn't use them!"
And what % of the US was aware that he was in a wheelchair? I seem to recall numerous pictures of FDR standing up with the help of leg braces. In fact I seem to recall their being only 2 public photos of him in a wheelchair vs. thousands of him standing.
To the extent that this exists at all, I wonder if it will change as today's young kids grow up. We know that the richest men always get the prettiest women. In the past, the "prettiest" standard included a lot of tall, athletic women.
Now, though, it seems that every man who earns six figures is married to a woman under 5'2" who weighs about 89 pounds. This sort of thing should drive down the average height in the highest socioeconomic classes.
Of course, tall women can then just go and earn six figures themselves, although this may cut into childbearing time.
I hesitate to offer anecdotal evidence against the superior methods of science, but recently a nice enough fellow got an important job due to his height. He is 6'11. He liberally screwed up and only saved from infamy by a short asian.
He will get the credit though. He is tall.
Derek
Fun fact: As a result of the increasing divide between Communism deprivation and capitalist prosperity, South Koreans are now on average 2.5 inches taller than North Koreans.
Avoiding malnutrition in childhood makes one taller; this is why rich people are taller, and always have been historically. The effect is probably less noticeable in the U.S. past the 1970s or so, given that food is so cheap and abundant that not even the poorest suffer malnutrition anymore except as a result of neglect.
Also, iirc, the U.S. has only the eighth or ninth tallest average height. So it seems that, all other things being equal, the U.S. has only the eighth or ninth highest average intelligence. Curiously enough, this fade from the pinnacle started about sixty years ago.
I think the lack of oxygyn to tall people's brains have made then believe this. I have not found it to be true.
I'm 6'5" and I eat punks like you for breakfast!
Free snacks in my treehouse for everyone over 6'2"
Don't know about the money part but my son is 6'9" while I am 5'10". Except for the height we look alot alike. In college I got dates but had to work at it. He on the other hand has women queued up. I don't get it but it is true.
Hey Megan, you plan on earning your bread around here anytime soon?
Three posts before 10am and nothing since?
It's called pacing. And regular work. Try it sometime, you might get more page hits.
Love,
A Fan
To those of offering the "look at pro athletes" as your counter argument I have two things:
1. What percent of tall males are pro atlhetes? Whatever percent is it large enough to be considered representative?
2. What percent of those pro athletes are really knuckleheads and which are stand up citizens?
3. Is 'knuckleheadedness' (doing something stupid to get arrested) synonymous with not being smart or intellectual?
Of course I'm 6'4" so I'm biased but it seems that offering athletes as your counter argument is more hyperbolic than logic.
k1
ryanculver.blogspot.com
I only have one small question: why do all these papers seem to be written by people at least one standard deviation above the mean in height?
Because we are the only ones who are smart enough to figure it out.
Yawn. Any study that considers height without considering race (and, to a lesser extent, nutrition) is whistling past the graveyard. Kenya is full of tall people. It's also dirt poor. Singapore is full of Asians who are shorter on average than other races. It is also rich. Might there be a stronger correlation here between race/ethnicity and income instead of height and income? Try using some common sense here.
Fred,
We know you are White, broke and stupid, can you tell us your height so we have the complete dataset?
All great economists are tall. The only exceptions to this rule are Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith.
Did Freddie just out-libertarian you?
Surely you're not suggesting we should treat people as individuals, instead of focusing on their group statistics?
Okay, so you're saying it wasn't the Jewish conspiracy that got us into the current financial Armageddon, but the chronically over-achieving tall people? Who knew?
No need to look at the NBA for examples of the "super-geniuses" running the land into the ground...
James,
Since your "dataset" is incorrect already, feel free to make up another datum for it.
Or you could engage with the point I made -- which you probably know is true but will claim ignorance of for status reasons. After all, if you acknowledge that there are differences between different racial/ethnic groups when it comes to average intelligence, earning power, etc., some SWPL may accuse you of being white, broke and stupid.
What part of the dataset is incorrect Fred?
I wonder about the mathematics of this study. Was the data skewed by a few extraordinary earners? Or was the dispersion moderated by the masses? Maybe it's not the intelligence but the physical advantage that height could bring to an average occupation.
For example, a moderate tall individual can paint the interior of a standard home with 8' ceilings without a ladder. With equal technique, this gives a 6'2" or greater indivdual a productivity advantage. In the grocery store, stocking shelves, a 6'2" clerk has the same vertical advantage as well as a horizontal advantage across their wingspan. In a foam plate factory, this same 6'2" person can process far more product over an average shift assuming equal technique.
I wonder if this study also included mortality statistics? Do tall people live longer? I suspect thin people live longer. It seems like tall people tend to be thinner, but I have no evidence. If that reasoning panned out, your retirement/excel spreadsheet looks remarkably better when you add an additional year of earning or living.
I'm three foot four so I don't believe it. "g" (I might be among the shortest men in America judging by the Discovery Channel)
Actually there could be some relationship. As mentioned malnutrition can cause shortened stature. Also some forms of mental retardation can cause somewhat shortened stature. I believe people with Turner's Syndrome tend to be mentally delayed/retarded and also shorter than average due to hormonal issues. I don't think forms of gigantism effect the mind, but even if they did gigantism is rarer than MR. (I live near a facility, MR is an okay term)
Still my guess is that this relationship probably drops off after a point. I'm skeptical that people over seven-foot average smarter than those from six-foot-two to six-foot-eight. On the other end I'm not so sure because there are forms of dwarfism that produce mental retardation so maybe people under four-foot-ten are, on average, dumber than others. Although if you take out people with conditions that cause retardation, or relate to malnutrition, I'm guessing the difference is weakened substantially.
Or I'm just the smartest little man in the world!
I dislike used the phrase, "Tall people are smarter.." to mean "The average tall person is smarter..." The former makes it sound as if all tall people are substantially smarter, which is not necessarily the case.
BTW the cited study actually says, "They find that half of the height premium can be explained by the association between height and educational attainment." No doubt educational attainment correlates with smartness, but they're not the same.
Thomas R,
I think we need a worlds shotest male blogger vs. worlds tallest female blogger blogging heads smackdown!
And as to you sir - they say one of the few benifits to being black is you look good bald. In your case one of the few benifits of being 3'4" is to you all airplane seats are first class!
All other things being equal, it is probably true that the taller you are, the smarter you are. As some have noted, this is likely due to some root cause like better nutrition that is beneficial to both traits.
And Aaron's first comment was priceless!
It may be true _on average_, but predicts nothing as to the relative intelligence of a _particular_ short or tall person.
Me think tall be yes. I am 6 9 and I think that yu be rite abut it. Me like candy.
Well, gee, I guess that explains Tom Cruise and Michael Bloomberg.
It also explains all those basketball players winning the Nobel Prize.
Correlation is not causation.
I just picture you holding a copy of the paper over Yglesias' head so he can't reach it.
Oh, I'd pay cash money to see that.
Crikey.
I know most of these comments are just tossed out there, but read them. Most of them are written as if the poster believes there's a 100% correlation between height and intelligence (or close enough). And the posters here are probably smarter than average.
Is it any wonder why a lot of people find studies that try to correlate intelligence with various physical attributes dangerous?
"Is it any wonder why a lot of people find studies that try to correlate intelligence with various physical attributes dangerous?"
That's not why they find them dangerous. They find them dangerous because they fear that they are true, and they find the implications of them troubling.
Ashkenazi Jews, who appear to have the highest IQ scores on average (and aren't known for being a particularly tall race) have a persecution complex stemming from the Holocaust and are eager to suppress any scientific data that might single them out as genetically different from anyone else. Because the Nazis practiced a (ideologically motivated, non-objective) form of racial science, Jews view any study of race and IQ as a step on the slippery slope to the gas chambers.
Blacks, who appear to be close to the opposite end of the IQ spectrum (Australian Aborigines pull up the rear) have their own reasons to suppress facts about race and IQ. If the truth about their lower average IQs becomes widely acknowledged, it will blow up the entire premise of affirmative action and non-discrimination policies, i.e., that if blacks aren't represented in various fields roughly inline with their share of the general population that this is prima facie evidence of discrimination against them.
Curiously enough, this fade from the pinnacle started about sixty years ago.
That's because 60 years ago, the vast majority of people in most countries suffered from chronic malnutrition.
We're still the richest major country, but the rest of the world isn't quite as desperately poor anymore.
So who was responsible for squeezing Einstein then, have they found that out yet..
There's a Fred in every woodpile around here, isn't there?
That aside, Megan, we get it already. You're 6' 2" or whatever. If it's that important to you to share it w/ the world, go to the nearest 7-Eleven & have your mugshot taken next to the height indicator on the door. Or borrow the line-up room at the nearest police precinct. Or get The Atlantic to spring for a professional shoot in a fake police station. Then put the picture at the very tippy top of your blog. For extra emphasis, you could put a shot of yourself stretching to hold up the picture of just how tall you are at the top of the sidebar.
Sheesh!!
Fred,
You didn't answer what part of the dataset is incorrect. You weren't clever enough to get into a decent school (which you desperately blame on Aff Action), which made you a bitter loser, which then should account for you being broke.
Are you not white? The rest fits you perfect.
and don't bother with the Stuff White People Like; Sailer has the same credibility as you do.
What if taller people are snobbier about having other tall people around because they literally and figuratively look down on shorter people?
You could start from a bell curve like position, but as a taller person moves up the ladder, he/she represses shorter people, causing an upward bias over time.
On another point: Fred, one of the dangers in these comparisons is that many people, no matter how many times they are told, will assume that all people in one group are smarter than all in another, rather than some kind of shift in a curve (assuming that is true).
On another point: Fred, one of the dangers in these comparisons is that many people, no matter how many times they are told, will assume that all people in one group are smarter than all in another, rather than some kind of shift in a curve (assuming that is true).
Many? Try almost everyone. That was the 'danger' I spoke of in my comment.
The surprising thing is that even those who 'know better' will generally act as if they didn't.
I suspect human beings are just not wired to understand probability and distributions. "The Drunkard's Walk" by Leonard Mlodinow has bunches of examples of how people intuitively fail to understand probability distributions.
Tom West, they have been other authors who had played with similar ideas for generations upon generation. Finding physical signs for intelligence in humans. Measuring head sizes were the rage at one time.
The IQ test itself is questionable thing for measuring intelligence.
The short and tall people who wouldn't have contributed to this nonsense would be the smart ones in my opinion. You should gather the data about those who refuse to participate and measure their height and find the correlation.
James,
Except for the white part, the rest of your "dataset" is inaccurate.
Still unable to engage with the argument I made, I see. No surprise there.
"On another point: Fred, one of the dangers in these comparisons is that many people, no matter how many times they are told, will assume that all people in one group are smarter than all in another, rather than some kind of shift in a curve (assuming that is true)."
Should all fields of inquiry that require people to make elementary distinctions between group average characteristics and variations of those characteristics among individuals within groups be abandoned because of the "danger" that stupid people won't understand the difference? That's asinine.
"The IQ test itself is questionable thing for measuring intelligence."
Right. That's why the U.S. military has been using de facto IQ tests for decades, as have most institutions of higher education. That's also why the U.S. government has kept track of millions of test scores with its National Longitudinal Study of Youth for decades. Keep whistling past the graveyard.
Fred,
Are you now denying that you didn't get into the university of your choice because (according to you) of affirmative action?
So are you genius and wealthy? I highly doubt that.
I'm able to understand with your statements. You aren't making any argument to engage with, because you are making it from bias and hatred and deep dishonesty.
Just like your SS friend.
PS Fred - what's your IQ score?
Fred, I suggest that ad hominem attacks such as yours could be sign of lack of intelligence because they are about logical fallacy. A logical fallacy can not be intelligent, can it.
"Argumentum ad hominem is the logical fallacy of attempting to undermine a speaker's argument by attacking the speaker instead of addressing the argument."
http://www.twine.com/item/11nyxkdtc-3/ad-hominem
Also note that researchers have found a correlation between mental illness and racism. You should check it out and find the data and plot some graphs.
"Is Extreme Racism a Mental Illness? Yes
It can be a delusional symptom of psychotic disorders"
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1071634
Sorry the post should have been directed at James.
James, I suggest that ad hominem attacks such as yours could be sign of lack of intelligence because they are about logical fallacy. A logical fallacy can not be intelligent, can it.
"Argumentum ad hominem is the logical fallacy of attempting to undermine a speaker's argument by attacking the speaker instead of addressing the argument."
http://www.twine.com/item/11nyxkdtc-3/ad-hominem
Also note that researchers have found a correlation between mental illness and racism. You should check it out and find the data and plot some graphs.
"Is Extreme Racism a Mental Illness? Yes
It can be a delusional symptom of psychotic disorders"
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1071634
Tev,
Wheel out ad hominem as much as you like. Fred has earned personal attack, and has no argument beyond "black people are stupid, and are the reason I didn't end up at an Ivy League school"
Search his comments here and on Ta-Nehisi's blog (before he was banned there)
He has no interest in actual engagement with debates on IQ and race; his icon is Steve Sailer for god's sake.
I don't know Fred from Adam but failure to engage in debate hasn't been his problem on this thread.
He responded to a statement as to why studies on IQ and attributes are dangerous - that people are mathematical idiots and can't understand statistics - with his own opinion - that there might be something to it - and backed it up with two groups that tend to perform above and below average.
Since then he has been attacked ad hominem but nobody has argued that there aren't identifiable groups that perform differently. Tev made a half-hearted attempt to deny the validity of IQ tests but offered nothing to back it up. All the other comments are just ripping the messenger, so saying Fred is the one who won't debate is a bit rich.
CAL,
If you have ever read this blog before, then you know damn well what Fred's opinion is. If you don't, and you can't be bothered to check as I mentioned, then your opinion isn't worth much really.
CAL, IQ tests have been changing year and year and the mean has been changing as the tests have been getting harder. To claim that humans are getting more and more intelligent since advent of IQ tests is suspect.
Dynamically changing tests can not prove static intelligence given that their mean is mobile. And if intelligence is mobile and fluid then such a tests don't prove a thing. So these tests are flawed conceptually because they cheat and they change their mean year after year.
But also IQ tests can not test all types of intelligence and all forms of competence because they have a narrow view of intelligence.
The younger population would likely to score higher in IQ tests because of more exposure to newly tested knowledge. The next thing would be finding correlation between size of the teeth and intelligence. Toothless people I am sure would score low.
James,
LOL. Now you are attacking me ad hominem. If you disagree with someones point, how about debating the point rather than going after the person?
Tev,
I am not clear what the heck, "Dynamically changing tests can not prove static intelligence given that their mean is mobile." means.
The test at a given time would measure a persons intelligence at that time. Over time that intelligence could rise or fall but presumably a snapshot is not a discontinuous point but something close to that persons intelligence for the few months or years around that point.
Also, I never heard anyone claim IQ tests measure all types of intelligence. I thought their purpose was to measure general g type intelligence and that they had gotten fairly good at it in that there is a high correlation between how well people score and how well they do in jobs requiring high g intelligence.
As the tests have changed, have groups shifted in how well they have done on them relative to each other or do they always tend to finish in the same order?
A few points:
From Fred:
If the truth about their lower average IQs becomes widely acknowledged, it will blow up the entire premise of affirmative action and non-discrimination policies, i.e., that if blacks aren't represented in various fields roughly inline with their share of the general population that this is prima facie evidence of discrimination against them.
Wrong. While you can find some people claim that, they're generally part of the far fringe and they definitely aren't the one's making policy. Generally AA is meant to make up for past injustices, fulfill social goals, and help remedy existing racial discrimination.
You're fighting against straw men that almost no-one is listening to anyway.
Should all fields of inquiry that require people to make elementary distinctions between group average characteristics and variations of those characteristics among individuals within groups be abandoned because of the "danger" that stupid people won't understand the difference? That's asinine.
First, not 'stupid' people, simply 'people' (unless you classify 95% of people as stupid). Note, even those who 'know the truth' consistently act as if they don't. It really isn't wired into us. There's examples of the judges banning undisputed evidence because they *will* be misused by the jury.
Second, I don't think study into areas that have the potential to cause enormous social harm should be encouraged. We discourage (or ban) many things that should (in theory) be harmless or even helpful because we have found that in human beings, they are (in the net) harmful.
As to CAL's point, human neurological research is sketchy. We're probably in the phlogiston level of the science, with actual reliable results probably available in another 50 years or so. Until that point, scientists (especially scientists researching intelligence differences) will be vastly overstating their discoveries or will have the Steve Sailers of the world to do it for them. It's simply a subject that is vastly prone to overstatement and misinterpretation for political ends.
CAL, frankly I don't care if you don't understand it. You asked for an explanation and I provided you with one and gave you a clue to follow if you were interested to investigate it further. If you were informed you would know what I am talking about already.
IQ has been claimed to be a measure of people's intellectual ability and for years the IQ has been boasted to be frozen characteristic of a human being by those who promote IQ status and profit by pushing it. Those that have promoted IQ believe that it is measuring a static factor called the g factor and claim that a person with a higher g factor is smarter than those with lower g factor as an inborn trait.
IQ tests have never been static themselves and every year the mean for IQ tests has been higher. So they have been cheating for decades.
The number of ad hominem and straw man arguments that people bring up when the topic turns to race and IQ is amazing. The odd thing is that this sort of hysterical response wasn't triggered by the title of Megan's post. After all, had she instead written,
That would have also been true.
Some of you ought to revisit this open letter, originally published 14 years ago in the WSJ, signed by dozens of the leading scholars on intelligence: Mainstream Science on Intelligence.
Tom West,
"Second, I don't think study into areas that have the potential to cause enormous social harm should be encouraged."
You're not worried about the social harm caused by willful ignorance? Think about this a little harder. If it is true that the average African American IQ is ~85, how are they served by current education policy that attempts to shoe-horn most students into a college-prep track? How are they served by liberal policies that see education as the solution for economic advancement? How are they served by liberal policies that block the creation of high-paying manual labor jobs in the mining or energy sectors? How are they served by bi-partisan immigration policies that have flooded this country with unskilled workers who drive down the wages for native unskilled workers?
Not just average African Americans, but other Americans -- white, Latino, whatever -- who happen, through no fault of their own, to be on the left half of the bell curve of IQ are ill-served by these policies. Ironically, the only person I can think of who has actually thought about how to realistically help those on the left half of the bell curve is the much-reviled Steve Sailer. See: "How to Help the Left Half of the Bell Curve".
Oh please, not this again. Is there a *single* thing on your list of concerns for the "left half of the bell curve" that requires race (or height) to be considered? No.
In fact, linking physical characteristics and intelligence in the minds of the populace only *prevents* people from being able to best reach their potential by having their intelligence pre-judged rather than simply being judged as individuals.
First my apologies to the rest of the people still reading this thread for turning the topic this way. Mea culpa.
However, I'll try to end this thread the same way I've ended it on just about every other thread covering this topic I've participated in - with a question.
Outside of the futile hope of silencing people who aren't being listened to anyway, is there a single *positive* outcome that this this sort of intelligence research could possibly have?
Fred,
You're a racist shitbag. Stop hiding behind pseudo-science and be honest for 2009.
Perhaps you can still get into that Ivy League school! New Year resolution?
Tom West,
"is there a single *positive* outcome that this this sort of intelligence research could possibly have?"
If you weren't committed to a policy of deliberate ignorance about the subject, you'd know the answer to this question. There have already been positive outcomes to research about race and IQ, for example, about the potential for micronutrients to increase IQs in sub-Saharan Africa. Another potentially fruitful area of research that Sailer mentions is the effect of breastfeeding on IQ.
Medicine is already targeting different treatments to patients of different races; why should a veil of ignorance be pulled over studies of human biodiversity in other fields? Clearly, the current policy of willful ignorance hasn't been a boon for most blacks.
James,
Happy New Year to you too.
There's more to life than getting into an Ivy League grad school (one that, based on my undergrad GPA, I had no business applying to anyway). I've moved on -- perhaps one day you will too.
There have already been positive outcomes to research about race and IQ, for example, about the potential for micronutrients to increase IQs in sub-Saharan Africa. Another potentially fruitful area of research that Sailer mentions is the effect of breastfeeding on IQ.
Fred, even Sailer has enough sense to keep silent when I ask this.
Seriously, have you thought about this for *two* seconds?
None of these ideas (or your previous ideas above) have anything to do with race - these ideas are equally valid if your black, white, green or blue.
Sorry for shouting, but you blew it twice.
Tom West,
Sailer already spelled this out in the link I provided above. The policies he advocates at least have the potential of helping average African Americans. Your preference for promoting willful ignorance and maintaining the fiction of egalitarianism leads to the sort of destructive policies we have now, which hurt African Americans (and other low-IQ groups) at the expense of high-IQ liberals.
Ask yourself honestly: Would most blacks be better off under the policies Sailer advocates in his series on how to help the left half of the bell curve or under the status quo?
Fred, let's let this one rest. It's getting a bit embarrassing. I don't think I can make it any clearer why your answer doesn't qualify. If necessary, ask Steve Sailer.
the fiction of egalitarianism leads to the sort of destructive policies we have now
Dear God. Would you be so good as to list one society that you admire that didn't have this 'fiction'?
Your preference for promoting willful ignorance
No, my preference for not advertising results of half-understood science that will be willfully misinterpreted to cause great social harm.
@@ at Thomas R.
People with Turner Syndrome are not mentally retarded, please get your facts straight.