Recently I’ve found it to be highly taboo to talk about IQ score differences between races. Wikipedia states that race is a social construct so such differences cannot exist. But we all see physical differences and test scores clearly demonstrate a difference in IQs.

I have sources for this graph, does anyone have any contradicting sources?

For example if adopted children have the same IQ score as their parents to show that IQ is more of a social construct?

To what extent do you think IQ is social verses genetic?

  • @mandy@gtio.io
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    42 years ago

    I find it interesting no-one has bothered asking for the source of the image in the original post. “These are the average IQ scores broken up by race” is a pretty useless statement without context; are these from a city in America? Nationally reported averages around the world? This is important information and a massive source of data bias.

    Speaking of bias, the original poster has said not to use Wikipedia links as they are “beyond [bias] on the topic”. Wikipedia certainly has fundamental issues with bias in most political topics, but the idea that “bias” alone invalidates a source and all their sources is very ignorant. Essentially every source and analysis is biased. That’s how biases work. You have to account for the bias and judge how it influences the work, and whether or not that compromises it (which in Wikipedia’s sources cases, I don’t think it does). Should we invalidate the original poster’s statistics for not mentioning Ashkenazi Jews, who consistently score an average above all those groups mentioned in common IQ comparisons? Should we invalidate them for being anglo-centric while comparing a wide variety of races?

    Recently I’ve found it to be highly taboo to talk about IQ score differences between races.

    I find it’s because the people who bring up the topic only do so to argue for racial supremacy, and they tend to falsely assume that it can mean universally ‘that race is dumber’ or a limiting factor, contradicting recorded cases of (for example) Sub-Saharan Africans like Philip Emeagwali with a recorded IQ of around 190. It can’t be a racial hard-coded factor if these cases exist, and the average isn’t a particularly useful measurement.

    Wikipedia states that race is a social construct so such differences cannot exist.

    That’s not a logical conclusion of calling race a social construct. Race is a categorization, and different cultures have different views on what race a given person is (and even the same culture over time: are Irish people ‘white’? Are quarter-African people ‘white’?) Race is usually not directly based on genetics, they often correlate, but they are not the same. That doesn’t mean races can’t generally have differences, but in-group differences tend to diminish out-group differences in things like IQ so grouping that by race is currently seen by experts in the relevant scientific communities as unhelpful.