Thread by @PaoloShirasi

[THREAD]

A VERY BASIC INTRODUCTION TO THE HEREDITARIAN POSITION ON RACE AND IQ.

PART 4: Size of Race IQ Gaps

Almost no one in intelligence research believes all racial groups have the same average IQ. The (overwhelmingly left-wing) American Psychological Association has explicitly stated that the black-white IQ gap is one standard deviation (a 15-point difference).

The 15-point black-white gap in IQ is accepted in most of the scientific literature, although some scientists, most notably James Flynn, have argued that it's actually closer to a ten-point difference.

A 2001 meta-analysis involving IQ data for over 6 million individuals found a 15-point gap between blacks and whites.

(How many meta-analyses involving millions of individuals are there in areas within psychology not having to do with IQ? Answer: None to hardly any.)

A 2006 study co-authored by the above-mentioned James Flynn argued that the IQ gap has been narrowed to about 10 points. However, most large-sample full-scale IQ studies have found a black-white gap closer to 15-points.

That 2006 study has been attacked for “cherry-picking” — excluding more “g-loaded” tests, and tests which showed less or no narrowing of the gap — and for using “unclear” procedures tailored to produce a black gain, and for “projecting” gains.

A study specifically addressing the claims made in the 2006 study found that there been no narrowing of the 15-point gap with regard to persons born after the 1960s (the majority of current Americans).

Also, a comprehensive analysis conducted five years earlier in 2001 found that if there had been any narrowing of any race IQ gap, it was insignificant, “potentially a function of sampling error... or nonexistent for highly g loaded instruments.”

Most of the more recent estimates of the black-white IQ gap approximate the historical 15-point value, especially where tests have been the most “g-loaded.”

In general, full-scale IQ testing (more g-loaded) tends to produce larger gaps than those that are less g-loaded.

Finally, the American Psychological Association, which would be very motivated to endorse a black-white IQ gap of less than 15 points, has not backed away from its official position that the gap is approximately one standard deviation (i.e., 15 points).

A variety of scientifically-designed tests measuring general intelligence (called “g”) administered to millions of people over decades report consistent IQ results in the following ranges:

NE Asians, 102-108 (105 mean)
US Whites, 97-103 (100 mean)
US Blacks, 81-90 (85 mean)

Most full-scale IQ testing produces results near the middle of these ranges, within a point or two of the means shown in the previous tweet.

“Hundreds of studies on millions of people have confirmed the three-way racial pattern [of IQ].”

No matter where IQ tests are administered in the world, the mean black–white–East Asian IQ differences are found. It's not just a US phenomenon.

Here are IQ curves for each race representing cumulative percentages at each IQ value.

This simple stepped bell graph gives you a very basic idea of the general ability levels for various IQ ranges.

This more detailed representation shows the relative ability/potential levels of each region on the overlapping black and white IQ bell curves.

The bell curves overlap in such a way that you can see that whites are more heavily-represented at the far right tails where the very brightest are and blacks are more over-represented at the far left tails where the least bright are.

By way of an example, if you looked at two high-resolution overlapping bell curves showing the distribution of IQ scores for US whites and blacks you'd see that at an IQ of 130 there would be about a 20-to-1 ratio of whites to blacks per 100,000 people.

To put the Asian-black-white IQ gaps into stark perspective: Approximately 60% of northeast Asians, 50% of whites, but only 16% of African-Americans have a 100 IQ (normalized at 100 IQ) or better.

An IQ of 85 — the average IQ of African-Americans — is at the 16th percentile of all Americans, an extreme cognitive disadvantage.

About 9 out of 10 NE Asian-Americans have higher IQs than the average African-American.

The cognitive disadvantage of blacks becomes most extreme at the far-right tails of the IQ statistical distribution curves, where the very brightest are. For example, 0.47% of NE Asians (about 1 in 200) have an IQ of 145, but only 0.0012% of US blacks (about 1 in 85,000) do.

Meanwhile at the left tail of the curve, about 10% of US blacks are at or below the level deemed intellectually disabled (70 points), while less than 1% of NE Asians are.

I should note there are environmentalists who point to US National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results for 17 year-olds which, when normed on an IQ scale, show a reduction in the black-white gap to about 11 points starting in the late 1980s.

Although the NAEPs are not IQ tests, the NAEP and IQ tests do correlate fairly well — NAEP has enough “g-loading” to be used as a reasonable, but not exact, IQ proxy. (The correlation between the two is around .85.)

The NAEP gap narrowing that occurred, however, stopped in the 1990s, and hasn't really budged since despite billions of dollars spent. Most of the earlier narrowing is attributable to significant progress made by lower-income blacks in the 1970s and 1980s.

The NAEP, of course, is an educational assessment, not an IQ test, even if it does possess a reasonable amount of “g-loading”.

Most intelligence researchers believe you can't make definitive claims about average group IQ based on exams that aren't optimized for “g”.

No gap-narrowing has happened with other standardized education-related tests (e.g., SAT, ACT, and GRE) over the past three decades. (Some hereditarians claim this is due to most environmental gaps being closed by the 1990s, leaving only genetic influences.)

It's worth noting that the failure to narrow these gaps at all in the last thirty years came during a period of time in which the black middle class expanded to historically unprecedented levels. The environment in which most African-Americans lived has never been better.

SOURCES:

books.google.com/books?id=Au2KH…

archive.org/stream/EarlHun…

differentialclub.wdfiles.com/local--files/d…

home.ubalt.edu/tmitch/645/art…

intelligence.martinsewell.com/Gottfredson199…

www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfreds…

peterdanpsychology.ro/ro/pagina/25/f…

semanticscholar.org/paper/The-tota…

psycnet.apa.org/record/2001-01…

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

intelligence.martinsewell.com/Gottfredson199…

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Weiss L.G. et al (2010), Table 4.3, p.118.

iqcomparisonsite.com/iqtable.aspx

iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/Linked…

ets.org/Media/Research…

bleske-rechek.com/April%20Websit…