A new meta-analysis of group differences in measured IQs in Britain has been published.
Here are the results:
Here's a condensed version that just uses major groups and has 95% CIs.
Whites were the baseline (mean = 100, SD = 15) and equal variances were assumed. Splitting Whites into British (-0.01 d), Irish (0.02 d) and "White Other" (0.04) wouldn't change much.
The study is open access and largely based on FOIA'd data. That means it's largely based on data that the government had to be asked to release and that they probably wouldn't have made available otherwise.
The Economist has a new special issue on boosting the world's IQs.
In it, they suggest that nutritional intervention, vaccination, and so on are low-hanging fruit.
They didn't cite any evidence that supported their conclusions, and what they did cite seemed like a bad joke🧵
If beating hunger, getting people vaccinated, and improving public health generally is such low-hanging fruit for raising global IQs, what of Sub-Saharan Africa?
One study estimated that being exposed to Ramadan in utero reduced the test scores of six-year-old Muslims by up to about 1 IQ point.
Ramadan involves intermittent dry fasting during the daylight hours for 29-30 days.
Opinions vary, but most will accept that pregnant women are not required to fast, and even more will agree that they are allowed to drink water.
Nevertheless, many Muslim women strictly adhere.
Whether this sort of fasting is harmful to pregnant women is contentious, precisely because there are some who believe women ought to do it for religious reasons.
The Economist has a new article out today on boosting global IQ.
It starts off in error: stating that the Flynn effect means people today are smarter than people in previous generations.
So, I'm making an article that's been in my drafts for months available to subscribers🧵
The full post will come out pared down later, in a different publication. This long version is just for paid subscribers
It explains
1. Why the Flynn effect has not indicated rising intelligence 2. Why it is irrelevant for group differences 3. Why it's not easy to adjust for it
What, ultimately, explains the Flynn effect?
The most consistent thing is test bias. The next thing is nothing, because the Flynn effect is not one thing, it is many factors that principally cause the interpretations of rather than the constructs underlying tests to change.
Do women who get offers for engineering roles get offered lower salaries due to their sex?
Thanks to the hiring platform Hired, we might know the answer!
Hired was an online recruitment platform for full-time engineering jobs in the U.S. It had high average wages (low six figure) and its recruitment process looked like this:
The salaries candidates asked for were public. The salaries companies offered (bid salaries) were given based on said asks. About a third of those bids were the asks, and most of them were close.
Their high correlation means job candidates generally got ~what they asked for.
To start, note that multiple outlets have reported that this study provided evidence that the higher the ceiling of the test-taking environment, the lower the exam scores.
Thus, 'Your poor performance might not be your fault. It's the fault of the ceilings!'
Spoiler: if you download the data, you find that the correlation is -0.0423.
You could say "Oh, the effect is small, but it could matter."