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points by paganel 1 day ago | 0 comments

> intelligence isn't racial..

The same way as South-Koreans are by now taller than North-Koreans (because of material reasons) we could posit that "intelligence", i.e. the "workings" of our brain, can be distributed in a non-uniform manner across humankind, depending on the "local" material conditions.

And this is not about "race", because according to those that do believe in the "race" stuff both North-Koreans and South-Koreans are part of the same "race", it is about those material conditions that I've mentioned and which, in the end, by necessity end up modifying things in our (very material) brains, and hence in our "intelligence". Believing otherwise, meaning believing that are our brains are not affected by the material conditions under which we live our day-to-day lives, would be preposterous.

[–] pingou 23 hours ago

I don't think many people dispute the fact that the environment plays a role in intelligence. Not even many people dispute that there is some heritability to intelligence. What is in dispute is whether that heritability means that some races are on average genetically more intelligent than others (and another problem is how to define intelligence).

[–] graemep 21 hours ago

How do you define races? As I said in another comment definitions shift and they are different in different countries. I have an encyclopedia from the 1950s that defines South Asians as "Caucasoid". Some East Africans were also defined as "Caucasoid" historically.If we define races on the basis of genetic similarity then almost everyone whose ancestry is from Eurasia is the same "race", but people whose ancestry is African belong to multiple races.

[–] pigpop 17 hours ago

Race was only ever a stand in before we had an accurate understanding of genetics.

[–] graemep 15 hours ago

Yes, but people seem very reluctant to accept that. They keep trying to pretend that genetics backs their culture's definitions.

[–] thin_carapace 23 hours ago

I don't understand how the precedents could lead to any question regarding the disputed conclusion

[–] logicchains 22 hours ago

If we define intelligence as IQ then the evidence is overwhelming that the average differs among races. Even in Singapore, which has a very high standard of living, nutrition etc., we still see Chinese Singaporeans perform significantly better than Malay Singaporeans on various measures of intelligence, with Indian Singaporeans somewhere in the middle. The same pattern is seen among Chinese, Indians and native Malaysians in Malaysia, and globally when we compare the mean IQ scores of China, India and Malaysia.

[–] graemep 21 hours ago

There are significant cultural and economic differences between those communities. These will be similar between Singapore and Malaysia. The Chinese and Indians are sufficiently recent immigrants for their culture to still have a lot in common (they speak the same language, follow the same religions, have inherited attitudes) with the places their ancestors came from.

[–] pingou 22 hours ago

That could also be explained by cultural differences, I don't think the evidence is overwhelming.

Or it could be discrimination. There are studies that show that black and white mixed races children did not score any higher than children with two black parents, while white people score higher than black people on average, which may point to some discrimination impacting IQ.

[–] JuniperMesos 21 hours ago

Discrimination against whites in favor of blacks doesn't lower white IQ.

[–] tptacek 12 hours ago

No, you mean to say "if we define intelligence as the output of IQ testing", which clarifies that you're projecting from statistical surveys (with all sorts of potential confounders) rather than some directly queryable and innate attribute of people.

[–] card_zero 1 day ago

Right, but the equation of workings of the brain to intelligence is the tricky bit. That's like equating the workings of my bicycle to my decision to ride to a particular place.

[–] paganel 1 day ago

> workings of the brain to intelligence is the tricky bit

I don't find it that tricky, intelligence does come from the brain.

> That's like equating the workings of my bicycle to my decision to ride to a particular place

Both one's brain and one's "intelligence" belong to the same person, like, physically and materially, which is not true when it comes to your bicycle example. More to the point, I find the comparison itself kind of self-describing, it's like deciding to "outsource" intelligence to some other external, non-ethereal entity (like a bicicle that is physically separate from a human being) in order to avoid those hard questions the OP was alluding to (hard questions that oftentimes also involve the political side of things).

[–] card_zero 23 hours ago

Now I want to say that your ideas don't come from your brain. But of course they do, as a result of interaction with other people's ideas, some of which were written down. (Don't worry, I'm not a dualist.)

The thing is that no matter how fancy your bicycle, I can still ride my shitty bicycle to a university, and you can ride your lubricated carbon fiber bicycle into a ditch, and then you're not so smart. If what you call intelligence is how fast your bicycle typically goes into the ditch, then sure, it can be measured on a scale and you have more of it.

[–] defrost 23 hours ago

You, as a dualist, is the least of the fears we hold.

There are other notions about the transfer of ideas: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/06/memory-transfer

[–] card_zero 23 hours ago

I'm not a dualist! Fumes

Wait, cannibal worms that eat memories? My my.

[–] defrost 23 hours ago

I for one thank our AI overlords that weight training avoided that path not taken :/

[–] jstanley 23 hours ago

If you think any brain can be just as intelligent no matter how it works then why not extend that to things that aren't brains? If everyone's brain is equally good then isn't a rock just as good as well?

[–] card_zero 21 hours ago

Sure, if the rock has good ideas.

(Rocks don't have ideas.)

[–] vintermann 22 hours ago

A lot of HN is currently about rocks that we've made very smart, in case you haven't noticed. I don't want archeology polluted by generic academic culture war stuff, so can we please leave "intelligence" out of it?

[–] jstanley 14 hours ago

Well this just proves the point I'm making.

It takes an enormous amount of engineering work to make an intelligent rock, and not all intelligent rocks are equally intelligent. This is very obvious.