IQ and Race

(under construction)

IQ and Race

We are confronted with a never ending stream of social media when it comes to race and superiority. Intelligence is one of the many supposed differences between the races.

Who is smarter? Black, White or Asian? Or maybe Latin?

Why does it matter? Can we look at it? Should we look at it?

A bunch of questions that keep both the race haters and the equality warriors up at night. Time for us to take a look so we can make sense of what they are claiming.

Let's start with motivation.

Motivation

Why does it matter?

As you can read in the mechanics of discrimination, people form groups automatically on many levels. These groups partly identify themselves with what they are not: the other groups. An element of this identity is a superiority over another group in some aspect deemed relevant to both groups. Examples are strength, morality, intelligence, and culture. This notion has several functions. It is part of the validation for the existence of a group. Why else would a person want to be in the group?

Just look at yourself as an individual. What makes you better or equal to person X ? Are you kinder, more handsome, smarter, funnier, better dressed? Are you not upset if someone is superior in a quality you identify with? A group has just like you a need to feel good about itself in relation to other groups. Feeling less is simply unacceptable.

Groups form all kinds of relationships with each other. Hostile, friendly, neutral, submissive, and so on. These relationships are influenced by their relative notions of superiority in combination with factors such as whether there are any resources both groups want and the relative power each group has.

If we look at conflicts we can see that the most important publicly stated aspect of a conflict is the why. Why do we fight? This why always contains the notion of superiority. And rarely what is really at stake, which is usually resources. The USA fought Mexico over California and Texas because whites make better use of the land than Mexicans, or so people told each other at the time. And because Mexico attacked first which made them morally inferior. People rarely talked about grabbing land because they could and wanted to.

Let's look at an example. In high school various groups are formed. Nerds, jocks, stoners, etc. They all compete for survival and power in the same small space. Some groups get along fine. The math club and the audio visual people might be friendly. The stoners and the nerds probably ignore each other, even though the nerds might consider themselves intellectually superior. Some groups are at each others throats. Jocks versus nerds, body worship versus mind worship.

Another example is Catholics versus Protestants. Protestants deemed themselves morally superior because they had a clean faith. No saints, no popes, no more selling of indulgences. Catholics saw themselves as the original faith ordained by God. In the European wars of religion millions of people died as seemingly the two faiths fought each other on the basis of moral superiority. However it was actually over power. Both clergical power and secular.

One of the many groups each of us is a member of is our race. These races live on one planet with limited resources. Logically races form the same kind of concepts of and relations with each other as goes for other groups. Which race is deemed more intelligent matters for our group identity. We have the need to feel superior, and intelligence is just another aspect in which we can do so. Thus we want to measure it.

There is another reason why it matters. Science. Humans study all kinds of life in order to gain knowledge and thus be able to better control their environment. Take for example dogs. There are many, many kinds of dogs. Which are good for what? We studied them and found out that intelligence, hunting ability, strength, aggression etc. vary greatly among the different races. This is the result of some natural selection and a lot of selective breeding. We know this about our dog races and are at peace with it. It's purely functional. Which dog is kept for what reason? Sheep herding? You need this type. Hunting? Take that type. Guard dog? Pick this one.

We can now identify two motivations:

1. Scientific

2. Social

Practice

Can we look at it?

What actually is intelligence? We all have a our own concept of what intelligence is. When we think of intelligence all kinds of notions spring to mind. Being better at math, solving sudoku problems, doing well in a test, making effective decisions. Apart from a bunch of vague notions and examples, can we define what it is in an absolute sense? Well .. even wiki has problems with it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence. So let's look at concepts first.

Concepts

A concept is basically an information storage container for a particular 'object'. Things like cars and houses. But also love and hate, politics and charity, and even people like Trump and Obama. Using concepts greatly speeds up the information processing in our brains and communication with others. Concepts are the basis of our consciousness. Without this type of information storage we would not be able to think at all.

One aspect of the nature of concept is where they fall on a continuum of relative to absolute. Another is broad to narrow. Height is an narrow absolute concept. You are this tall. Irregardless of how tall other people are, and whether you use inches or centimeters. Height is also just one thing, and not many. A building does not have many kinds of height, it has one.

Love however is a broad and relative concept. Just try to define it for yourself and ask others what they came up with. The concept in your mind does not contain one absolute notion, but a lot of different examples you picked up during your life. Loving your job is not the same thing as loving your wife.

Absolute concepts are always narrow, however relative concepts fall somewhere in the continuum of narrow to broad. Take for example a black box. A box can have a different color on each side. However color is an absolute value, determined by the wavelengths of reflected light. The box is not black relative to a white box. It is just black. There is no need for the white box to exist. A box can be darker than another box, but not more or less black. Color is also just one thing. The awesomeness of the box is a broad concept. Many things could make it awesome to you. The color, the smoothness, the feel, the weight, who gave it to you, etc.

For the purpose of communication we mostly use concepts as absolutes and in the narrow sense. The advantage of this use is speed. When someone tells you person X is kinder than person Y, we take it as 1 fact. We usually don't ask what they mean with kindness. As long as the other kinda gets what you mean it is good enough. However we know that kindness can mean many different things to different people in all kinds of situations. Trying to give exact definitions would lead to endless conversations.

The concept of intelligence

Intelligence is a concept full of bias. We associate intelligence with things like mathematics, computers, etc. In other words, nerd stuff. Suppose i am good at calculus. Does this make me more intelligent than the lady at the supermarket checkout? Well i would not know what to do if i had to supervise a bunch of kids, and she might.

Intelligence is a funny concept. It is broad and relative. A collection of notions and examples stored in a big container in our minds. We can not define it as one thing, no matter how hard we try. Is it being good at math? Is it understanding things quickly? Or perhaps understanding social situations? However we have come to think of it in the same way we perceive height. Something absolute and narrow.

This is mainly due to two things. We confuse relative and absolute with broad and narrow. When we are in class, we can clearly see that person X is taller than person Y. Height is an narrow absolute, and taller is the narrow relative cousin. Similarly we can see that person X is smarter than person Y. We infer from this that intelligence is an absolute and thus narrow, with smarter being it's relative derivative.

The other cause is measurement. In class we have tests. Smart people do well on these, and dumb people badly. From the marks people get on tests, we inferred that we measured something absolute and narrow. We can measure height with a ruler and think the equivalent for intelligence is the test. What we fail to understand, is that each tests only measures the performance on itself. To understand this we need to take a closer look at tests.

Testing

We all notice that one person can be better at some task than another. In order to allocate the best people to specific jobs, we need to discriminate between them. There are things like physical strenght and speed which can be clearly seen and measured. However there are skills that are very hard to define exactly but still important enough to discriminate for. Social skills, maternal skills, intelligence. What are these exactly? Can you tell us? Well it does not matter. We get along fine with our somewhat vague concepts. The goal is only to discriminate in order to allocate, not to know exactly what is what. For this purpose we developed something we call a test. A test is validated or rejected based on it's ability to discriminate in a population better than random.

In science definitions matter. What exactly are you talking about? What did you measure? How did you do it? Someone in India has to be able to get the same results using concepts and data from rocket science as someone in the USA. Otherwise you have explosions.

Often it goes like this. Suppose you have a piece of paper with two lines that differ in orientation. You say: the measure of difference we will call angle. The unit we will name degrees. A degree is defined by little notches on this instrument X which i have here in my hands. Thus we now have defined the new concepts of angle and its measurement of degrees. These new concepts you invented are ready to go for our day to day conversations. There is no ambiguity. We can all use it and have the exact same results.

In social sciences this is difficult because of our preexisting concepts. For instance we have invented the concept of likability ages ago. We had observed that some individuals are better liked in general than others. We gave this a name for the purpose of conversation. From that time we could say to each other 'this person is more likable than that one'. This was always a broad and relative term. One person might feel judge someone likable, another might not.

What we did not state was: 'hey i see a difference and i call it likability and i measure it in likability degrees'. What would that be, a likability degree? How would we have measured it? As long as we sorta knew what the other meant with the term, there was no need for degrees. However if we want to know the likability of some group in an objective sense, there is.

We can make a test with questions on it like 'how well do you get along with other people: 1 2 3 4 5' or 'do other people ask for your help: never, sometimes, often'. We can give this test to people and calculate their score. What then did we measure? Specifically likability? Or more general Social ability? Or perhaps something different like kindness?

Tests are validated by their ability to discriminate in a population. If our goal is to allocate people to social type jobs and individual type jobs we can make a test like in the example. And we can validate the test by measuring the performance of people we allocated via the test versus people that we just randomly assigned. If it was better, the test has value, it is validated. However it did not measure our preexisting concept of likability. It just measured itself. It is useful because it can discriminate. It does not define a concept, even if it pretends to measure it.

Often a researcher decides to name his test based on his individual notion of what it might kind of be an indication of. It in this example we could name it the likability test, and claim that it measures likability degrees. But it does not. The test measures scores on the test. It could have been named differently. Perhaps cooperability test. It has no direct relationship to our preexisting concept of likability. And here lies the danger.

We humans like to keep things simple. We can not handle such abstract notions as what a test really measures. We are not aware that some of our concepts are very vague and can't be used like absolutes. It's also impractical to use such complex notions in our daily communications. We simplify. We have made the concept of intelligence into something that is similar to height. We adopted the illusion that it is absolute and can be measured in degrees. We have named a particular test the IQ intelligence test and think it measures degrees of intelligence. We forgot that originally people just wanted to discriminate better than random in a population for the purpose of allocating to jobs.

Any IQ test we use could not give us the intelligence of our test subject in an absolute narrow sense like that of height. Simply because intelligence is a broad and relative concept. The concept of intelligence was invented ages ago for the purpose of communication, just like likability. Not for measurement. We can only use an IQ test to discriminate in population X, in this case the races, in order to allocate better than random to a specific job. It would thus be pointless to test for intelligence all by itself.

We are also never going to allocate races to jobs via intelligence tests, because all races have suitable individuals when it comes to intelligence, and thus testing on an individual basis would be far more effective for any company that is looking to hire. We can and do test races for things like heat and cold tolerance, which does have applications as to how a person would need to be equipped with weather gear relative to a specific job.

Application

Should be look at it?

We humans differ from other animals by means of our big brains. These have realized the arbitrary nature of discrimination. Any difference is a potential cause for group formation and social inclusion or exclusion. The salience of a particular difference is only determined by circumstances. It is not absolute. We have realized this. What now happens in our post medieval western society is that this realization product of our higher thinking ability is at war with our basic instinct of discrimination over the control of our head space. Do we tolerate and include? Or do we hate and exclude?

The issue with testing the intelligence of groups is that it will automatically influence the relations between the groups. Intelligence is something we tend to feel superior about just like athleticism or martial abilities. It does not matter that we can not really test for a broad and relative concept such as intelligence. It also does not matter that a test result by itself is useless because the value of a test only lies in discrimination for allocating people better than random to specific jobs. We tend to view intelligence as a narrow absolute regardless of fact.
Suppose a group of white students from the USA tested better at a particular math test X than a group of black Africans. We would incorrectly infer from this that whites are more intelligent than blacks. We would then proceed to reject Africans for jobs like engineer and computer programmer. We would subsequently miss out on a whole lot of human potential and productivity.

What we can not do is measure the intelligence of race. What we can do is discriminate in a population better than random relative to a certain task. However this is pointless when it comes to race and intelligence.

As for science, for our understanding of ourselves and the world around us knowing whether races could be better suited for specific jobs - or not, is important. One could imagine that race X could be better at working in the arctic than race Y. And we should pursue this knowledge. If we find that we are identical, that is valuable information. If we find that we differ, equally valuable. It will help us make better decisions about ourselves. When it comes to intelligence however it would be more or less of academic interest only. Unlike heat tolerance levels, specific levels of intelligence* are not tied to race. Individuals vary greatly in intelligence in each race, and all levels are present in each race. We have black professors and white retards (presidents). All though the spread* of intelligence levels in theory might differ from race to race, there is no application for this knowledge.

(*levels as in defined by the IQ test, a concept which has been shown to be incorrect)
(*for instance Caucasian people might have equal numbers of professors and retards, while Asians might have more professors than retards.)

Conclusion

We found that it matters to us humans which race is more intelligent. Simply because we want to feel superior. We also found out that we can not investigate it for reasons of logic and we should not for social ones. Furthermore our concept of intelligence is biased towards math and logic skills. Of course with all this said, in the past we in the West have already decided that us whites are more intelligent than the other races. Paradoxically, even though it doesn't really work, a fair and unbiased ''IQ intelligence test'' could actually ''show'' us that the races are equal. For now we can safely ignore all the claims of superiority and equality as irrelevant nonsense. IQ is not applicable to race in any useful way.