Why race-and-IQ claims rest on shaky premises

@Aella_Girl 1. averagerianism is naive The book "The End of Average" illustrates the history of taking averages of human beings and points out that it is very confused and comes from the same thinking that generated other outdated things like Taylorism

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Nov 10, 2019

@onnlucky @thehandbehindt1 @sentientist [Source of latter claim: book called The End of Average, whose main point is "just because you can calculate an average for a population, doesn't mean there's even a single member of the population that meaningfully resembles that average"] (applies to bodies, brains, &+)

@Aella_Girl 2. intelligence tests aren't about intelligence They may be, for instance, about The Desire To Pass Tests: Implies that such quotients are less relevant in contexts that aren't about passing someone else's test, which might include business & innovation. hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/113360634…

@Aella_Girl 3. IQ from not just genes but nutrition + personality compatibility w/ educational industrial complex Haven't dug into this much but eg study on two genetic strains of mice with very diff maze perf in normal upbringing, showed way less variance in either extreme environment.

@Aella_Girl Long story short, as long as we know that our culture & education systems are fucking over the students (which seems very obvious to me) we can't conclude much of anything about what kind of intelligence is possible for anybody, and any correlations back to genes are irrelevant.

@Aella_Girl That's back to "genes"—already assuming you can figure out which genes to look at. "race" is very far from being an adequate set of categories for talking about genetic correlations for complex traits.

tess @xsphi · Jun 21, 2020

@Aella_Girl And race isn't really a real thing either. There's more genetic diversity in Africa than anywhere else in the world, yet most Americans/Europeans would simply label most Africans "black".