Comments on: Eternal Recurrence

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 06:14:21 +0000

Fun thread. Especially to see Brett Bellmore demonstrate his superior intelligence over the ragtag posse pestering him with bbs. He writes much better than they do, too. Maybe it’s all that g.

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 16:40:42 +0000

“(Oh, and Brett, if you can’t accept my “’yes’ in this context” answer, I hereby proclaim that Brett Bellmore is fat.)”

LOL! You’d have been right, too, 75lbs ago. ;)

By: PJ

PJ — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 16:19:46 +0000

sg – is it? It looks to me like Brett has understood Shalizi’s point:

“You can’t prove from all these measurements the existence of a single trait we’ll call “intelligence”

which doesn’t have all that much to do with heritability, since, as Shalizi says:

“Someone will object that g is highly heritable, and say that this couldn’t be true if it wasn’t just an artifact. But this also has no force…

The g found by factor analysis, being a linear combination of the test scores, is itself a linear combination of the abilities and noise, and so, in turn, heritable.

How heritable g would look would depend on whether the environmental contributions to the different abilities were correlated.”

By: bi

bi — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 16:19:29 +0000

(Oh, and Brett, if you can’t accept my “’yes’ in this context” answer, I hereby proclaim that Brett Bellmore is fat.)

By: bi

bi — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 16:18:43 +0000

Brett Bellmore:

Fine, I’ll bite. I’ll borrow your tactics for a little while—you brushed off Rickm’s question (#50) by calling it “loaded”, and you tried to brush off my question (#67) by calling it “argumentative”.

So I’m now also perfectly entitled to brush your question off as irrelevant—because whatever malnutrition’s going on in Africa has nothing to do with Watson’s remarks about dealing with “black employees” in America. Which were what started this whole thread.

Or if you want a yes/no answer: then “yes” in this context, because it’s being used as an irrelevant argument to justify Watson’s unjustifiable position, to justify saying bad things about black people not living in Africa.

… Well, on second thought, I won’t force you to answer my question. Because I already know what your answer is.

By: SG

SG — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 15:17:10 +0000

Brett, the issue here is not of their meaning in predicting job outcomes, which is not being disputed, but their meaning in describing heritability. Perhaps meaningless was too rhetorical a word…

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 13:32:08 +0000

So was mine, and it came first. Answer it any time you want.

By: bi

bi — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 13:29:01 +0000

“Argumentative”? Well, since you kept complaining about “suppression”, I think it’s only reasonable that we find out exactly what kind of “suppression” you’re up against.

To reiterate:

“Brett Bellmore, I’m not against suppression of moronic and willful misreadings of newspaper articles (‘suppression’ in the sense of, you know, not treating it as science). Are you?”

I’m still waiting, Brett. It’s just a simple yes-no question.

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 12:46:19 +0000

I read the linked article, and understood it quite well, having, yes, taken statistics in college. If you think it meant that “the measurements have no meaning”, rather than, “You can’t prove from all these measurements the existence of a single trait we’ll call “intelligence”, then I wonder how well you understood it. Here’s a clue: IQ tests DO work for predicting success in a number of areas, which precludes their being, strictly speaking, meaningless.

I’ll point you back to comment 59: The quantity we call “intelligence” is just a sort of summation of a lot of different traits.

However, there are strong biological reasons to believe that they’re not entirely independent, as I also pointed out in comment 59: Whatever the mechanisms underlying the myriad capacities we sum together and call “intelligence”, they’re all implemented in the same physical brain, and dependent on a lot of the same lower level functions. They can be degraded en mass by a long list of biological insults, and there’s evidence that they can, to some extent, be enhanced en mass, too.

I mean, my CAD program and word processor’s functionality are independent, but overclocking still makes ‘em both run faster.

Finally, the question was an effort to draw out the functional definition of ‘racism’ as it’s being used here. I’m not allowed to find out how words are being used before answering loaded questions?

By: SG

SG — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 12:25:23 +0000

But Brett, you answered a question with a question. That’s impolite. As a sterling model of internet politeness, surely you should repent and answer the question before you ask your own?

Also, reading the linked article might really help you to answer the main point, which is that the measurements have no meaning. It’s really hard to have faith in people who keep bringing up the same “measured quantity” when the “measured quantity” has no meaning. You do get that, right?

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 11:53:28 +0000

I think this time, I’ll wait on my question 55 being answered. I will say, though, I found your question somewhat argumentative.

By: bi

bi — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 07:12:57 +0000

I said:

“Brett Bellmore, I’m not against suppression of moronic and willful misreadings of newspaper articles (suppression” in the sense of, you know, not treating it as science). Are you?”

You’ve still not answered my question, Brett.

By: lemuel pitkin

lemuel pitkin — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 05:13:47 +0000

So I just read the linked article. Awesome! much more illuminating than the discussion here, I’m afraid to say. I especially liked the bit about “economists who regress countries’ growth rates on government policies, etc., etc. As the late sociologist Aage Sorensen said (e.g. here), the sort of social science which tries to identify causal effects by calculating regression coefficients or factor loadings stops where the scientist’s work ought, properly, to begin.” Snap!

A question, tho:

Luca Cavalli-Sforza, in one of his books, does a factor analysis of various gene frequencies from populations across Europe. Then plots the first three or four factors on a map of Europe. And tells a convincing story about how the facotrs correspond to different invasions/migrations into Europe. So the question is, is this invalid for the reasons Cosma talks about? And if it’s OK, what distinguishes it from the spurious factors analysis he’s critiquing?

By: Roy Belmont

Roy Belmont — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 04:31:54 +0000

Suppression of the moronic act and its result leads directly and inevitably to suppression of the moron, and then where are you? Once all the morons are bred out and culled out. Abortioned out.
The real taboo here isn’t racism it’s eugenics.

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 04:24:32 +0000

I repeat: Comment 55 was a hypothetical designed to get at the functional definition of “racism” being used here. And the newspaper article was cited purely to establish that the hypothetical wasn’t a totally whacked out fantasy, that African average intelligence being lowered relative to Western intelligence by way of a lot of disease and malnutrition caused marginal mental retardation is a realistic scenario.

That poor prenatal nutrition can cause marginal mental retardation is established fact, beyond any sane dispute. If poor prenatal nutrition is more common in Africa than in the West, then it’s essentially a given that more frequent mental retardation would follow, inevitably lowering average mental capacity.

So, what it comes down to, is you’re accusing me of being moronic for thinking that poor prenatal nutrition is more common in famine plagued Africa than in the US and Europe? Is that what you’re saying?