First of all if negative thinking is associated with cognitive decline and if what you say is also generally true then humans will also be pretty much, in general, be in cognitive decline.
Humans all being generally in a state of cognitive decline doesn’t make sense from an evolutionary perspective because natural selection will weed out degraded cognitive performance. So most people won’t be in this state. Anecdotally, you likely don’t see all your friends in cognitive decline so likely most of them don’t have a negative bias.
So your conclusion is likely to not be true. In fact I’m being generous here. Your conclusion is startling and obviously wrong both from a scientific perspective and an anecdotal one.
In fact the logic from this experiment and additionally many many other psychological studies points to the opposite. Humans naturally have a positive bias for things. People lie to themselves to stay sane.
Anecdotally what I observed is people don’t like to be told they are wrong. They don’t like to be told they are fat and overweight slobs. Additionally stupid people by all objective standards exist but practically every culture on earth has rules about directly calling someone a dumbass even if it’s the truth.
Like this is not a minor thing if I violate these positive cognitive biases with hard truths it will indeed cause a visceral and possibly violent reaction from most people who want to maintain that positive cognitive bias.
For example racial equality. Black people in America are in general taller and stronger than say Asians. It’s a general truth. You can’t deny this. Strength and height has an obvious genetic basis putting equality from a physical standpoint to be untrue. It is objective reality that genetics makes Asians weaker and smaller than black people in America.
So genetics effects things like size between races, it even effects things like size between species… black people are bigger than mouses. But you know what else? it affects intelligence between species. So mice genetically are less intelligent than black people and also black people are genetically more intelligent than fish. So what am I getting at here?
Genetics affects hair color, physicality, height, skin color between races. Genetics also effects intelligence between species (you are more intelligent than a squirrel) but by some black magic this narrow area of intelligence between races say Asians and black people… it doesn’t exist. Does this make sense to you? Is this logical? Genetics changes literally everything between species and races but it just tip toes around intelligence leaving it completely equal? Is all intelligence really just from the environment when everything else isn’t?
I mean at the very least the logic points to something that can be debated and discussed but this is not an open topic because it violates our cognitive biases.
Some of you are thinking you’re above it. Like you see what I’m getting at and you think you can escape the positive bias. I assure you that you can’t escape it, likely you’re only able to escape it because you’re not black. If you were black there’s no way what I said is acceptable.
But I’m Asian. How come I can accept the fact that I’m shorter and weaker than black people? Maybe it’s because height is too obvious of a metric that we can’t escape it and intelligence isn’t as obvious in the sense that I can’t just look at someone and know how smart he is.
But let’s avoid the off topic tangent here about racial intelligence and get back to my point. I know this post will be attacked but this was not my intention. I need to trigger a visceral reaction in order for people to realize how powerful positive cognitive bias is. That’s my point. It is frighteningly powerful and it’s also frighteningly evident but mass delusion causes us to be blind to it. Seriously don’t start a debate on racial intelligence. Stick to the point: positive cognitive bias.
Humans as a species that viscerally and violently bias in the cognitively positive direction.
Parent poster could not be more wrong. We are delusional and we lie to ourselves to shield ourselves from the horrors of the real world. It is so powerful that we will resort to attacks and even violence to maintain our cognitively positive delusions.
There are studies on separated Black twins that ended up in different socioeconomic situations. They limit the genetic difference in variation of IQ between races to just a few points.
And to be clear, IQ itself is very much inheritable. But the _variation_ in IQ in a population is not explained by genetics.
So yes you can very much find black people who are smarter than Asians and vice versa but the generality (aka the mean, aka the center of the bell curve) will be different for races.
>But the _variation_ in IQ in a population is not explained by genetics.
This is not proven to be true. The most likely explanation is that variation in a population can be explained by both environment and genetics.
There’s not much evidence of rigorous differences in intelligence across racial groups that could not be explained by environmental and cultural differences. Statistical analysis generally suggests that if there is one, the effect size is small.
The current observed gap is much smaller than gains than have been observed within racial communities over time as a result of environmental changes.
So… no. You don’t have a lot of credible evidence for what you claim is a delusion to doubt. And even the observed effect size disregarding confounding effects is less than individual variation.
I know this is such a controversial livewire of a topic and borderline taboo, but the evidence is pretty substantial. That being said, the intra-group variation is also extremely substantial (IE the variation between genius/median in any particular group is simultaneously a) far more than median in one group and median in another group and b) far less than genius in one group vs genius in another group). All that being said, I think this contributes to rather than detracts from GP's comment. These "studies" (as with much of modern psychological "research") are so poorly designed so as to be meaningless, hence the replication crisis. I think they're actually worse than meaningless because they're misleading and create infohazards.
I disagree. It strongly detracts from the GP’s claim.
If we see huge variation in intelligence scores intra group, that strongly suggests that there are social/cultural/environmental factors in play driving a large part of this.
It may be true that some racial backgrounds offer an advantage; but there is no evidence to suggest that this advantage is materially large relative to many of the social structural drivers that are obvious.
The subtext of the claim is not that a statistically significant effect exists. It’s that there is a big important difference in intelligence across races intrinsically derived from genetics. And there’s no compelling evidence to support that.
>If we see huge variation in intelligence scores intra group, that strongly suggests that there are social/cultural/environmental factors in play driving a large part of this.
Correlation does not equal causation. Variation in genetics in a group can realistically be a factor as well. Three probable possibilities here: Only environment, Only genetics, both genetics and environment. Common sense says it's both genetics and environment.
>It may be true that some racial backgrounds offer an advantage; but there is no evidence to suggest that this advantage is materially large relative to many of the social structural drivers that are obvious.
I never commented how large this advantage was relative to the social driver. I agree with you... the social structure likely the greater driver. But the genetic driver is not insignificant.
>The subtext of the claim is not that a statistically significant effect exists. It’s that there is a big important difference in intelligence across races intrinsically derived from genetics. And there’s no compelling evidence to support that.
There is evidence. But there is huge political debate and attacks around the evidence. There are many studies that study IQ among races independent of environment and many of those studies show there is a statistically significant difference. Those studies suffer from the replication crisis, but so do all conflicting studies within psychology as well.
Cite them. Let's see which ones you're talking about. We know there are studies that say what you say! But it's hard to engage when the studies themselves are abstractions.
Please don't dump ChatGPT stuff onto threads. It's specifically against the rules here. If your uncertainty was whether we could set up dueling ChatGPT sessions: we very definitely can.
I disagree. This is not a hard rule. I'm willing to bet if the moderators saw this they would be ok with this instance of it.
This would be the fault of the moderators for not directly putting it in the rules if that was the case.
Though I doubt they'd be ok with this entire thread as it's heated and the topic is flamewar-like even though I tried to direct it in a different direction initially. It already went off the rails with the other guy once he told me I was dumb and trying to establish race superiority among asians. Too late. I think I'll get warned or banned.
Anyway, I'm not disguising the content human generated. Additionally All I'm doing is asking the LLM to cite and summarize citations which you asked for. Manually finding those citations are tedious.
My opinions and thoughts are still human written and not AI generated.
What I find incredulous is that you have some problem with content that's AI generated even if it's actually true and even it's just flat summaries of citations. Like I told the LLM to find specific resources and summarize studies I have already seen so you don't have to go through the entire paper and you have a huge problem with that? Fine. You can just refuse to engage. Commenting on it is also "against the rules" per your link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44808351
I mean if you want you can flag my post and vote it down. I think it's extreme and an ass hole move so I don't do that to people I have different opinions with. It's up to you.
"Please don't post AI-generated comments, or any generated comments" seems pretty clear to me. My point stands: I'm not interested in watching dueling ChatGPT contexts and I don't think anyone else is either. I can just write what I know about this issue into a GPT5 session and say "change my mind" and get all those 1970s cites myself.
I literally said to you that chatGPT is JUST citations. My comments are my own, you can respond to my comments can you not? What if I used AI to spell check and repair grammar? End of the world and you can't respond? Are people so against AI that they lose all common sense?
>"Please don't post AI-generated comments, or any generated comments" seems pretty clear to me.
Did he say please don't post AI-generated citations? Is he referring to the entire post or all comments? Why not make it an official rule on the rules page. What does Dang say about this? Seems unclear. I think you're just being deliberate.
Bro. You don't need to respond if you don't want to. My citations are still there. You asked for it, you got it. You don't like it? I'm not going to manually do what chatgpt ALREADY did so conversation is over if you don't want to continue.
On second thought, I'm noticing that we're the only people reading this, and that this thread is mostly pretty uncivil and gnarly, and I feel bad for contributing to it staying alive, so maybe we pick this up some other time.
The thread is already buried. Like I said, it's your call whether you want to engage. Either way, no loss. If I actually manually wrote down those citations so SERVE your request it would've been a massive waste of my time and it would be rude for you not to respond.
Good thing I used AI to assist me. I knew you'd leave. Mainly because there's really no solid evidence so a lot of this will go in circles. Good day sir.
> Correlation does not equal causation. Variation in genetics in a group can realistically be a factor as well. Three probable possibilities here: Only environment, Only genetics, both genetics and environment. Common sense says it's both genetics and environment.
Common sense says nothing about the weight of these factors nor does it say anything about “genetics” being archetypally delineated by race. Genetics for sure plays a role in intelligence.
You are appealing to non cognizance as a premise to support your biases. But that’s… dumb.
You are welcome to point to specific studies if you wish but the general consensus is that there is no statistical evidence of what you’re claiming to be obvious.
Most studies that attempt to normalize against socio cultural features recognize that it’s basically impossible to do. That’s why the best available premise is that since we broadly observe huge gains in population intelligence based on economic development within racial groups; it is most likely that economic and cultural differences occupy the lions share of any observable difference between racial groups currently as they’re all in different places.
Don’t call me dumb just because I disagree with your point. Keep the conversation civil and stop acting like an immature child or find another place to voice your opinion without insulting other people.
Common sense says many things about genetics. In fact it’s the basis behind my entire premise which you didn’t even address. Genetics plays a role in the physicality and even temperament of a race (testosterone is measurably different across races). What black magic makes intelligence the only factor that is independent of race? Common sense says it’s a factor.
Common sense also says environment is the greater factor. If a person lacks practice or education vs. a person who practices math puzzles everyday. Obviously that is the bigger causal factor by common sense.
Both are factors by common sense. Environment is the bigger factor also by common sense but by that same reasoning genetics is not insignificant. The best way to put it is that environment influences IQ but genetics influences potential.
Why appeal to common sense? Because there’s lack of solid causal evidence. Evidence exists, but the replication crisis and the lack of causal experimentation makes all the tests not as solid as the correlative tests.
The stupidest thing here is that we are not in disagreement on what the evidence points too. It’s just I’m able to rely on induction and logic to predict conclusions where scientific evidence is lacking while you’re entire model of the world is essentially “if the science doesn’t exist then it must not be true“
If the science doesn’t exist, it means it’s unknown. I hope this was educational for you.
I’ll point to some resources when I have time. Im currently not able to cite them atm.
Does genetics influence intelligence? Yes. Does genetics influence race? Yes.
Does that mean that race is a _material_ driver of differences in intelligence? No. That just doesn’t follow at all. Every difference between groups is statistically significant at some obscene sample size but the claim in question here is about whether it is _material_ and important. That is not at all clear. Nor is intelligence the only thing that this applies to. There’s a basically infinite list of human traits, competencies, and capabilities for which race-affiliated genetic advantages alone is pointlessly small in terms of effect.
The claim was originally made by me. Qualifiers like “important”, “material” were added by you so you’re the one who’s moving the goal posts with vague words like “important”.
The word I used is “significant”which I will specify here as a different mean value.
It applies because among top countries of different races with extremely high wealth, gdp and education standards there are clear differences in IQ. You can still attribute this to environment but it starts to lean towards genetics once you match wealthy countries.
None of this is solid but neither is your conclusion that genetics doesn’t influence racial intelligence in any significant way. If your conclusion is “we don’t know” then my counter is common sense and evidence suggests otherwise.
> The claim was originally made by me. Qualifiers like “important”, “material” were added by you so you’re the one who’s moving the goal posts with vague words like “important”.
> The word I used is “significant”which I will specify here as a different mean value.
There are statistically significant differences between any two populations where randomness is included provided your sample size is big enough. Your thinking here is novice and misinformed. If an effect size is immaterial and unimportant then it definitionally does not matter. You win no points for saying HA! Technically there is an immaterial advantage for Asians! If it’s immaterial, it doesn’t matter.
> It applies because among top countries of different races with extremely high wealth, gdp and education standards there are clear differences in IQ. You can still attribute this to environment but it starts to lean towards genetics once you match wealthy countries.
Wealth is one of many things that matters. It’s not the only thing. As I have said before, culture is a huge one.
> None of this is solid but neither is your conclusion that genetics doesn’t influence racial intelligence in any significant way. If your conclusion is “we don’t know” then my counter is common sense and evidence suggests otherwise.
You need to learn how to interpret statistical effect sizes. The basic 101 conclusion of failure to reject null hypotheses is that you cannot conclude that population A is different from population B. But “different” doesn’t mean much. The important takeaway is much rather that there’s no evidence of a strong effect size showing that one race is materially intrinsically smarter than another. If there were a big gap, it would be visible in available statistics. It’s not, so we can largely conclude that there’s no material difference.
You’re talking a big talk about people being biased by trying to be equitable but ultimately you’re just saying “well I can’t provide it but my common sense biases say my race must be superior, even if it’s by a meaninglessly small margin”. Yeah, ok buddy. Take a lap.
not true. Evidence of rigorous differences exist. The "explanations" are not supported by rigorous evidence. They are just "explanations" for a correlation. One explanation is environment, another is genetics.
Realistically Both are factors.
>The current observed gap is much smaller than gains than have been observed within racial communities over time as a result of environmental changes.
Yes environment is a factor but given a prime environment to foster intelligence, you can see that among races there are still differences in intelligence.
Additionally the logic is inescapable. If genetics is what causes something like down syndrome then of course it can cause the opposite of down syndrome.
>So… no. You don’t have a lot of credible evidence for what you claim is a delusion to doubt. And even the observed effect size disregarding confounding effects is less than individual variation.
Either way can you stick to the main topic. Tired of this off tangent bs. The intelligence thing was just an example.
> Yes environment is a factor but given a prime environment to foster intelligence, you can see that among races there are still differences in intelligence.
You cannot. And the smoking gun is, again, that we have seen massive rises in intelligence scores within racial subgroups over time correlating with environmental changes that are much larger than current spreads and still unevenly distributed.
Right and again, when you maximize environmental factors there ARE STILL differences in intelligence. While Environment plays a massive role, genetics does as well. It's not as if environment is a smoking gun that makes the other factor disappear even when environment accounts for a much greater rise.
Obviously a starving, stressed out person is going to have a much lower IQ score then someone who is happy and well fed. You think because that obvious fact is true it completely eliminates genetics? No.
This is what I'm talking about. The mass delusion. The positive cognitive bias. You grasp for evidence that supports the conclusion you want.
> You think because that obvious fact is true it completely eliminates genetics? No.
The claim is not that genetics has nothing to do with intelligence. The claim is that race is a material, important driver of intelligence. There is no rigorous evidence of this.
The phrase you are responding to is 100 percent saying environmental factors does not eliminate genetic factors as a driver of intelligence. The English in context does not imply anything else.
Please read what I wrote and respond to what I wrote and don’t make random assumptions.
You inserted yourself into my context. I brought the topic up and you responded. Don’t apologize to me if it’s fake. Additionally Please try to follow what’s actually going on instead of making stuff up.
My dude you’re pivoting to try and argue that there are differences, even if the differences are immaterial and even if there’s no statistical evidence to support your claim.
I don’t give a shit if you believe yourself to be part of the (immaterially) superior race.
There's no statistical evidence to support your claim either.
It's not about race, it's about facts. Like I said in another comment, Jewish people have the highest measurable average IQ, and they are "White".
I think you should walk away. You brought racism into the conversation while I'm just arguing facts. I never made a claim asians were "superior" and I'm NOT from an asian country with the highest IQ either.
Humans all being generally in a state of cognitive decline doesn’t make sense from an evolutionary perspective because natural selection will weed out degraded cognitive performance. So most people won’t be in this state. Anecdotally, you likely don’t see all your friends in cognitive decline so likely most of them don’t have a negative bias.
So your conclusion is likely to not be true. In fact I’m being generous here. Your conclusion is startling and obviously wrong both from a scientific perspective and an anecdotal one.
In fact the logic from this experiment and additionally many many other psychological studies points to the opposite. Humans naturally have a positive bias for things. People lie to themselves to stay sane.
Anecdotally what I observed is people don’t like to be told they are wrong. They don’t like to be told they are fat and overweight slobs. Additionally stupid people by all objective standards exist but practically every culture on earth has rules about directly calling someone a dumbass even if it’s the truth.
Like this is not a minor thing if I violate these positive cognitive biases with hard truths it will indeed cause a visceral and possibly violent reaction from most people who want to maintain that positive cognitive bias.
For example racial equality. Black people in America are in general taller and stronger than say Asians. It’s a general truth. You can’t deny this. Strength and height has an obvious genetic basis putting equality from a physical standpoint to be untrue. It is objective reality that genetics makes Asians weaker and smaller than black people in America.
So genetics effects things like size between races, it even effects things like size between species… black people are bigger than mouses. But you know what else? it affects intelligence between species. So mice genetically are less intelligent than black people and also black people are genetically more intelligent than fish. So what am I getting at here?
Genetics affects hair color, physicality, height, skin color between races. Genetics also effects intelligence between species (you are more intelligent than a squirrel) but by some black magic this narrow area of intelligence between races say Asians and black people… it doesn’t exist. Does this make sense to you? Is this logical? Genetics changes literally everything between species and races but it just tip toes around intelligence leaving it completely equal? Is all intelligence really just from the environment when everything else isn’t?
I mean at the very least the logic points to something that can be debated and discussed but this is not an open topic because it violates our cognitive biases.
Some of you are thinking you’re above it. Like you see what I’m getting at and you think you can escape the positive bias. I assure you that you can’t escape it, likely you’re only able to escape it because you’re not black. If you were black there’s no way what I said is acceptable.
But I’m Asian. How come I can accept the fact that I’m shorter and weaker than black people? Maybe it’s because height is too obvious of a metric that we can’t escape it and intelligence isn’t as obvious in the sense that I can’t just look at someone and know how smart he is.
But let’s avoid the off topic tangent here about racial intelligence and get back to my point. I know this post will be attacked but this was not my intention. I need to trigger a visceral reaction in order for people to realize how powerful positive cognitive bias is. That’s my point. It is frighteningly powerful and it’s also frighteningly evident but mass delusion causes us to be blind to it. Seriously don’t start a debate on racial intelligence. Stick to the point: positive cognitive bias.
Humans as a species that viscerally and violently bias in the cognitively positive direction.
Parent poster could not be more wrong. We are delusional and we lie to ourselves to shield ourselves from the horrors of the real world. It is so powerful that we will resort to attacks and even violence to maintain our cognitively positive delusions.