Rindermann, Heiner, David Becker, and Thomas R. Coyle. 2020. “Survey of Expert Opinion on Intelligence: Intelligence Research, Experts’ Background, Controversial Issues, and the Media.” Intelligence 78 (January): 101406.
Experts (N max = 102 answering) on intelligence completed a survey about IQ research, controversies, and the media. The survey was conducted in 2013 and 2014 using the Internet-based Expert Questionnaire on Cognitive Ability (EQCA). In the current study, we examined the background of the experts (e.g., nationality, gender, religion, and political orientation) and their positions on intelligence research, controversial issues, and the media. Most experts were male (83%) and from Western countries (90%). Political affiliations ranged from the left (liberal, 54%) to the right (conservative, 24%), with more extreme responses within the left-liberal spectrum. Experts rated the media and public debates as far below adequate. Experts with a left (liberal, progressive) political orientation were more likely to have positive views of the media (around r= |.30|). In contrast, compared to female and left (liberal) experts, male and right (conservative) experts were more likely to endorse the validity of IQ testing (correlations with gender, politics: r= .55, .41), the g factor theory of intelligence (r= .18, .34), and the impact of genes on US Black-White differences (r= .50, .48). The paper compares the results to those of prior expert surveys and discusses the role of experts’ backgrounds, with a focus on political orientation and gender. An underrepresentation of viewpoints associated with experts’ background characteristics (i.e., political views, gender) may distort research findings and should be addressed in higher education policy.
The two primary HBD bloggers on this website have already commented on this paper:
- James Thompson: Experts, Intelligence, Race
- Steve Sailer: My Blog Is Voted Most Accurate Media Outlet on Intelligence Research by Experts on Cognitive Ability; “ISteve” Crushes “New York Times” for Trustworthiness
… so I am not going to do a comprehensive writeup on it.
Incidentally, the results were presented as a lecture at the 2017 London Conference on Intelligence – including a much more pleasing visualization of experts’ opinions on the best media sources on intelligence.
With the addition of James Thompson, it’s safe to say that The Unz Review is the world’s leading media source on this subject.
Only two media outlets received positive ratings, the blogs of Steve Sailer (M=7.38, N=26 ratings) and Anatoly Karlin (6.10, N=10 ratings). Unfortunately, the survey did not consider James Thompson’s blog Psychological Comments, which was just beginning when the survey was administered. All three blogs are currently hosted by The Unz Review. Among traditional publications (newspapers, radio, television), only the German newspaper Die Zeit received a positive rating (M=5.10, N=20 ratings).
The survey was carried out in 2013-14, and since then, quite a number of other HBD/IQ bloggers have gained prominence.
- James Thompson (obviously)
- The paper also mentions Lee Jussim (Rabble Rouser), Peter Frost (Evo and Proud), Jonathan Wai (Finding the Next Einstein), sa well as Roberto Colom in Spanish and Ronald Hens in German.
- Inexplicably, they left out Emil Kirkegaard’s blog, which is probably the joint-first intelligence blog in existence right now along with James Thompson’s.
That said, most of the really interesting conversations – as in many other spheres – are now unfortunately occuring on Twitter.
In the rest of this post, I’ll just highlight and briefly comment on some findings that I found interesting and important.
- 83% of respondents were men and 17% were women (n=72).
(For comparison, 30% of ISIR members are female, the organization specifically dedicated to intelligence research; and they make up a solid majority of psychologists).
- Most of them are from Western countries. National breakdown:
Notably, there is a near complete lack of an East Asian presence; Korea doesn’t even have a single respondent. Coffee Salon Demographics strikes again!
* In childhood, 63% of experts were Christians, evenly split between Catholics and Protestants; however, 2/3 of them reported they were non-religious in adulthood.
There were slightly more leftists:
Slightly more liberal/left positions were observed for open immigration policies(yes, M=4.78), social democratic policies (yes, M=4.54), and marriage rights for homosexuals (yes, M=2.20). The position on marriage rights was the most striking (86% endorsed same rights for homosexual couples) and showed the lowest variability of all items.The experts showed a fairly centrist position on economic liberties (yes, M=4.90). A more conservative/right perspective rejected the views that western economies contributed to third world poverty (no, M=5.16) and that affirmative action was needed in hiring to ensure representation of immigrants (no, M=6.69) and minorities (no, M=6.99).
So, basically, liberal racists. 😉
On the B/W gap question, the split was basically 50/50 (49% genetic, 51% environmental), though there were 2.5x as many “extreme leftists” (100% environment) as “extreme rightists” (100% genetics).*
(FWIW, my own assessment is that it is ~90%+ genetic. As a modern state, the US gives its population largely equal educational and nutritional opportunities. Moreover, the urbanization rate of Blacks is significantly higher than for whites, and cities are more cognitively stimulating. It is consequently entirely plausible that truly equal environmental conditions in that respect would lead to a widening, not a narrowing, of the B/W gap in the US. Conversely, where the B/W gap truly is ~50% genetic/environmental is with respect to Sub-Saharan Africans (IQ=~70) vs. whites in First World countries (IQ=~100). The 85 IQ demonstrated by African-Americans reflects the direct environmental/Flynn benefits of living in a First World country, whose internal socioeconomic divisions pale into insignificance relative to the differential between Black Africa and the First World.)
Women were significantly more “progressive” than men:
- Genetics role in B/W Gap: Men – 61%; women – 23%
- Endorsed the g factor: 81% of men, 64% of women
- IQ testing for immigration: 60% of men support, while 92% of women oppose
Patterns were less clear between nationalities, though small sample sizes play a role now (though it is remarked that the German experts tended to have a “conservative-burgher” or “right” perspective).
Experts with PhDs differed only slightly from experts without PhDs.
- On the g factor (which was widely endorsed): “It should be noted that a specific abilities view is “progressive” and “left” only in the current political climate. It has also been endorsed by National Socialist scientists (e.g. Friedrich Becker 1938…).“
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Both leftists (58%) and rightists (93%) endorsed the g factor. In contrast, leftists (67%) opposed IQ testing in immigration, whereas rightists (80%) recommended it.
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There is remarkable viewpoint diversity in intelligence research relative to psychology at large:
According to Duarte et al. (2015, their Fig. 1), the leftward tilt in psychology emerged over the last three decades, leading to a 14:1 ratio of left (progressive, democratic) to right (conservative, republican) psychology faculty. More recent data show an even larger disparity (16.8:1, Langbert, 2018). The leftward drift is reinforced by a liberal bias among journalists (e.g., Groseclose & Milyo, 2005; Kuypers, 2002; Lichter, Rothman, & Lichter, 1986) and in Wikipedia (e.g., Greenstein & Zhu, 2012, 2018). In addition, there have been increasing disruptions and attacks against scientists with a perceived right orientation at university talks (e.g., Duarte et al., 2015; HXA Executive Team et al., 2018; Inbar & Lammers, 2012; Jussim, 2018). Student groups have interrupted lectures, courses, and invited talks, and in some cases violently attacked scientists and scholars with a perceived right orientation (e.g., Charles Murray; Arm, 2016; Beinart, 2017). Finally, these events parallel a growing political divide between progressive and conservative factions in the US and other countries (Pew Research Center, 2017, p. 7f.). In the Pew survey, the gap between Democrats and Republicans in the US grew (in 10 political domains) from an average of 14.9% in 1994 to 35.8% in 2017, an increase of 20.9%. 20.8% of this increase (or 99.5% of the growth) was due to a shift to the left by Democrats, whereas 0.1% was due to a shift to the right by Republicans.
The authors suggest that the more balanced political profile of intelligence research may have helped the field largely avoid the replication crisis wracking the rest of psychology.
- On the politics of intelligence research:
Experts thought that speaking about intelligence (M=5.24), genes (M=5.67), and the relationship between them (M=5.17; always N=75 ratings) became easier in the past few years (1 difficult, 9 easier).
This is rather ironic, since 2013-14 marked a local trough in persecutions of intelligence researchers, which would soar to unprecedented heights in the following five years (see my writeup of Carl Noah’s and Michael Woodley’s paper).
- Censorship: 5% endorsed restrictions on science (“Yes, the results could be misused”); 41% rejected restrictions, with caveats (“No, but there must be an intensive education of society, how to deal with it”); and 54% favored full academic freedom (“No, freedom of research should not be restricted”).
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85% of respondents had a background in psychology; all identified as scientists, not journalists; 87% held PhDs. They had higher than average academic accomplishments.
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While there were different opinions on the highest quality, most innovative, and most significant intelligence researchers, there was one guy who made the bottom of all the lists: Stephen J. Gould.
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Was the survey good quality? “Although the EQCA sample was relatively small, our recruitment criteria (e.g., publications on intelligence) most likely excluded people with only tangential knowledge of the subject matter, which can distort answers.“
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Does anyone here know if Ian Deary and Stuart Ritchie both participated in this study?
Also, in regards to Emil Kirkegaard’s blog, have you considered e-mailing the authors of this study and asking them why they didn’t include this blog in their research?
As for this part:
If one embraces the idea of demographic change (for instance, Canada with their cognitively elitist diversity), then one doesn’t automatically have to embrace things such as IQ testing. After all, once we can increase IQ through things such as (IVF + embryo selection) and gene editing, even low-IQ immigrants are going to be able to have smart descendants. Of course, it would probably be a good idea to refrain from taking in too many low-IQ immigrants so that one’s country won’t become a dump and to select low-IQ immigrants for things such as a low inclination to engage in criminality. That said, though, a country can survive taking in a decent amount of low-IQ immigrants (ex.: the US) if they and their descendants are peaceful or at least relatively peaceful and don’t cause that much trouble (such as Hispanics and Latinos in the US–at least in the Southwestern US, which is full of Mexicans as opposed to groups such as Puerto Ricans that could theoretically be somewhat more violent due to them very possibly having a higher percentage of African ancestry).
Sampling bias by responder self-selection. The deplorability index of the authors was established at 80.29%.
This means 80.29% researchers do not want t have anything to do with the deplorable authors.
Once again Psychology, the short bus of academia, is pushing itself as a relevant discipline. Liberal arts are for fools and/or trust fund babies. Nothing but elitist pukes that would try to control the world with their propaganda. Get a real job, Sigmund.
I went to the your Coffee Salon Demographics article and…
Extremely cringe-inducing places used:
Occupy Wall Street 2011
Burning Man 2014
Transhumanists 2012
LessWrong 2014
LessWrong 2016
Effective Altruism 2017
Slate Star Codex 2018
These aren’t places for anyone consided smart. Smart people are elsewhere.
Could you provide a citation for the following in the salon demographics article?
I’m particularly interested if the divergence in verbal IQ between men and women differs by race.
I am waiting for the comments of the leftist virgin loser of Tiny Duck who lives in a basement.
I’d say that US cities are not stimulating, but the opposite.
That die Zeit scored high is weird, they’re as liberal and biased as it gets, including their science reporting. The latter wasn’t true ~20-30 years ago, when they published the occasional gadfly or maverick, but that’s dead and gone.
Hundred flowers something something.
Better headline…Do Intelligence Experts Think?
Really? Lots of pretty girls…and bullets to dodge (if you’re in Chicago, anyway.) Stimulating? In some ways, for sure.
Which is better-informed, this conclusion or that found here in a discussion of the effects of White Flight: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/city.htm ?
I pose this question seriously; can these statements be reconciled, and if not, which is a better map of the territory?
With the addition of James Thompson, it’s safe to say that The Unz Review is the world’s leading media source on this subject.
You forgot a shout out to Fred.
Does Chicago offer a better quality of life for a middle to upper middle class person compared to Xiamen, Qingdao, or Harbin?
Pretty good headline…
US cities are car-centric, with urban planning making the center full of office skycrapers surrounded by suburbs.
That’s disgusting.
A real city is something akin to most European cities (not all, as places like London are rotten) such as Prague, Vienna, etc
The old European cities look charming in movies, and that’s the closest I’ve been to one. Just another reason that the fratricides of 1916-18 and 1939-45 are so tragic. Perhaps one day we’ll learn to avoid the “let’s you and him fight” crap we get from certain quarters.
I’m not sure that the term, “planning” applies to anything urban in the USA. Everything since the 1860’s looks like a bunch of retards were behind it. (My father used to tell the story of how GM successfully lobbied to get bus subsidies in place, which he blamed for killing the trolleys and a large chunk of other railed intra-city transit. Americans have long had the best government money could buy, it just wasn’t the citizens’ money…at least not until after it was laundered through a corporation.)
The way that Chicago developed is probably an entire Ph.D. worth of studying political corruption.
The University of Chicago would be a perfect place to study this topic; they could use it as an exemplar.
This survey is from 2013-2014. I wasn’t known as an IQ blogger much at this time. I published my first IQ study in December 2013. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260509121_Predicting_Immigrant_IQ_from_their_Countries_of_Origin_and_Lynn's_National_IQs_A_Case_Study_from_Denmark
My blog is a lot older, English one going back to late 2007.
But yeah, it is a bit weird they didn’t include my blog now in the paper. Perhaps ‘higher powers’ intervened and decided this was For The Best.
I wondered about that, too, but I think they just used a stock photo of Dieter Zimmer which, incidentally, had ‘Die Zeit’ in it. There seem to be no more articles by or about him in Die Zeit than in other publications, at least, that’s the impression a quick Startpage search gave me.
Exactly. How’d you reconcile this:
With that:
https://imgs.6sqft.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/16130832/StuyTown-aerial.jpg
I think you’re dead wrong here, and that you even mention the prime counterexample yourself, Chicago, which, in spite of its criminal / financial problems, is quite a handsome city. The basic story here is that after the great Chicago fire burned the whole place down, the redevelopment was thoughtfully and carefully devised by burgeoning urban planners. Chicago’s rationally oriented grid street system, for instance, constitutes one product of this phenomenon. It’s well reputed ubiquity of alleyways (of which New York suffers from a comparative paucity) comprises another, affording sanitary and convenient isolation of waste as well as providing for space in between structures in the case of fires. One might also mention Chicago developers’ general choice of building materials in the aftermath of the great fire. And there is much more to be said about all of this. For just a taste.
https://www.chipublib.org/blogs/post/from-chaos-chicagos-street-system/
I might add as an afterthought that I am mainly confining my remarks to Chicago here, and would perhaps grant what you say of many other American cities. One possible exception here might be Pittsburgh, which, on by brief visits seemed to me beautifully laid out, in the way that the city integrates with the surrounding ravines, river, the topography of the streets, and so forth .
Yes, the automobile was a tragedy for urbanism, and 20th century America was one of the greatest victims.
Although, at least – it is not Cairo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6wb7Sb2lNQ
Was that seriously the response rate? So the survey is, essentially, meaningless.
Like almost all such surveys.
It amazes me that people who think of themselves as belonging to some kind of cognitive elite will fall for nonsense like this.
Do you know what is the name of the University of Chicago’s library? It’s the Pritzger library.
Pritzger, as in the family to which Illinois’ current governor, a close ally of Mike Madigan (perhaps one of the most corrupt politicians in the Western Hemisphere) in a state where a fair percentage of ex-governors are in prison for corruption.
My irony meter might be misaligned. Possibly your comment was intended as humor.
Obviously you’ve never visited Chicago in winter.
Fair enough; I can accept your view that parts of Chicago are quite nice, but understand that I used to work there (in sales) and it focuses the mind when murders occur near where your job takes you. Colleagues’ stories of leaving hospitals (customer accounts) only to have the way to their car blocked by crime scene tape (and a corpse) also focuses the mind.
The grid system is a plus for nagivation; the grossly inadequate roads, given the volume of traffic, are a major negative. Chicago’s relative racial segregation is a positive…unless you have the bad judgement or bad luck to accidentally drive through a shooting gallery.
I stand by my view that the forces governing that city are a combination of low IQ and popular insanity. Also, know that bankruptcy will come to Chicago…unless arithmetic can be Orwelled…and when it does, Heaven only knows what will follow.
Write to them about this (such as via e-mail) and ask them why your blog wasn’t included.
With Sailer first and Anatoly second, I’d be interested to know some examples of what they viewed Karlin as “inaccurate” on that Sailer presented more accurately. A lot of what Sailer presents (at least on unz, can’t speak to taki’s) seems pretty bare-bones compared to Anatoly’s analysis.
If this is not a penname used for blogging (and I assume it is not considering how you write initials for two middle names), are you possibly related to the family of the legendary Danish philosopher? (Which while it would be amazingly cool, could also have a downside, if we believe his claim that his family was cursed by god).
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91YyVjz3EvL.jpg
AFAIK, he isn’t. After all, his last name is spelled differently from that of the legendary Danish philosopher.
(1) Only if you have convincing reason to believe that a fuller range of responses would have substantially changed the result.
But in reality, who was logically the least likely to respond?
People who (1) were less interested in the topics covered by the questions, and (2) people who had politically incorrect opinions, and may have feared having their identities leak out in deanonyzed form.
(2) You also need to demonstrate that this is a very bad response rate by the standards of expert surveys in general (e.g. there have been numerous such expert polls of AI scientists on the timeline of strong AI).
Seems my blog is too broad in scope. That is true.
No, see here. https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?page_id=4726
No-one has any way of knowing whether a fuller range of responses would have substantially changed the result. Which means the result simply doesn’t mean anything. It might be accurate. It might not be.
These kinds of surveys are all pretty much worthless. Polls of voting intentions are different because they can be tested against reality – if the polls are consistently wrong you know you have a problem, and if they’re consistently wrong in the same direction you have a chance of finding the problem or at least allowing for it. But surveys that cannot be tested against reality have no value. They’re essentially entertainment or a fancy kind of gossip. They belong in the tabloid press.
And when the subject is politically contentious there’s always good reason to be very very suspicious of small self-selected samples.
No. Actually the onus is on those who conduct such surveys to demonstrate that their surveys are based on genuine random samples and that they have some mechanism (apart from wishful thinking) for dealing with the problem of low response rates.
do ‘intelligence experts’ think? it seems to me a lot of them don’t do much thinking at all.
there’s always a dozen ready to speak up in magazines and newspapers whenever actual new work gets published or presented, denouncing the new important work as wrongthink.
The nice things about large cities with a lot to do is that winter isn’t a big deal.
Chicago is 1/3 Toronto but whiter, 1/3 some sort of semi-decent Mexican-American barrio, and 1/3 Detroit warzone that makes the worst east coast ghettos look safe and welcoming.
The nice third, with over a million people, is probably the nicest urban space in the USA.
In contrast to the urban core that is much nicer than, say, New York’s, Chicago suburbs (with the exception of the old wealthy ones north of the city, on the coast) are awful and worse than Long Island, Westchester or CT.
It is very unfortunate that the city has been declining the last few years and faces financial collapse.
I think that this is an apposite characterization, though if I had to quibble, I’d say that some of the southwestern suburbs are decent. Naperville is high end. And Lemont, the home of the Argonne lab, somewhat interestingly houses fairly sizable Polish and Lithuanian communities, which were pushed out of the Marquette Park area of Chicago when the blacks took over and got violent.
One thing which baffles me about the city’s imminent financial collapse – which is essentially guaranteed – is the insouciance which businesses, real estate investors and such have exhibited towards its inevitability. For one example, many businesses in very recent history have continued to expand in Chicago by opening up new offices there. This includes sexier tech companies like Google, Salesforce, or Uber, as well as corporate stalwarts like Coors and McDonalds. As another example, Chicago has undergone a recent and continuing building boom which has produced several 800 foot + skyscrapers such as one Bennet Park, the NEMA tower, or the wonderful 1200 foot Wanda Vista tower. Indeed, a coming 1420 foot Tribune Tower East just went (I think) through one of its final stages of legal authorization this week. I don’t get why this is happening in a metropolis of ever draining population and soon to be fiscal cataclysm.
Another baffling feature of all of this is: what will happen when the bankruptcy comes? Unlike Detroit, whose bankruptcy was the result of long standing structural economic problems, Chicago remains a highly diversified economy, whose financial implosion will have been rather artificially caused by grossly unrealistic pension overpromises rather than by some organic and structurally inevitable decline of economic output. With several decently credentialed universities in its vicinity, and a decent stock of living spaces, office buildings, and infrastructure, what’s going to happen when the bubble bursts? Will residents and businesses leave overnight or will the reset somehow be more forgiving? Has there ever been a comparable scenario in recent Western history?
Isn’t the response rate for the “97% of scientists agree on climate change” either the same, or worse? Considering that agreeing with climate change is hardly heretical in this day and age I actually think this response rate is good progress.
And the “97% of scientists agree on climate change” is just as meaningless.
You can come up with a survey that will say whatever you want it to say. Remember in Yes Prime Minister when Sir Humphrey tells the Prime Minister that you never conduct an inquiry unless you already know what the result will be? Similarly, if you’re smart, you never conduct a survey unless you already know what the result will be.
You don’t find the truth by conducting a survey.
Dr. Thompson thinks that because of perceived anonymization problems here (comparable to “doxxing” fears), there was effectively a self-censorship not unlike what experts often are quoted as saying in public, in interviews with the New York Times, or the like.
This means a penalty towards the ‘left’ (environmental) of some degree (which we may even be able to make a good-guess at quantifying in the future). In other words, if an expert thinks it is 20-80, he would answer 60-40.
When someone gives an of-course-wrong answer like that (100% genetics or 100% environmental, in this case), it’s likely a case of using the opportunity to rhetorically “grandstand” (even if in a small, anonymous way) — to make a point by overselling one’s real position — and not actual belief. Often this is going to be a function of ideology.
http://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/iq-experts-black-white-gap.png
The skew in the responses there suggests there is a pool of committed, hardline left-wingers in the sample (a usual academic type familiar to those of us now living). But in fact it is not so large and this suggests to me that the committed, hardline left-wing group is <15% of the respondent pool (the “0% genetics respondents” on the far left being 17%, vs. the “100% genetics respondents” on the far right being 6%; the latter being in line with a normal-like distribution and the former skewing in such a way that deserves explanation).
We see the ‘left’ bias fade to zero when expanding the tails of analysis:
The true political leanings of the respondent sample (mainly Western men born 1940s to early 1980s) may, then, look a lot like this:
15% hardline environmentalists, keepers of the Marxist flame, including those who eagerly misrepresent their own position and-or findings/data for political reasons (in the grand old tradition of Boas and Gould);
20-30% conventional left-liberals who tend to lean ‘environmentalist,’ but who are much less willing to misrepresent their positions or findings;
40-50% centrists to right-liberals who tend to lean ‘geneticist;’
10-20% right-wing racialists like Ed Dutton (who afaict was one of those eligible for the survey).
From the paper:
Note that the middle-90% of the survey respondents were born between about 1938 and 1985; the middle-80% were born between 1945 and 1982 (Fig. 1).
Ages are important here because the fall-off in apparent religion-identification, between childhood in the mid-late 20th century and adulthood as of the 2010s, is chronologically associated with the much larger cultural shift in the West during their lifetimes. It’s not necessarily because this select group was too smart for religion or something like that, as many might attempt to take away from this. FWIW, Dr. Thompson (born ca. 1946) is a churchgoer.
The sample sizes leave much to be desired, so it is risky to any attempt to say that the relatively larger reported Catholic “fall-off” is something real.
For the most comprehensive data we can get, we should also tack on an extra n=34 for the subgroup of the overall sample that chose not to answer the religion question but answered some other part of the survey (N max = 102). This is 33% of the respondent sample.
It’s hard to guess at who these n=34 No Answer people might be. Might it be fair to assume they are, if anything, modestly less Christian than the n=68? If so, the sample might be more like 55-60% Christian family origin, 30-35% Second-Generation Atheist/Irreligious/post-Christian.
To you, maybe. I recall quite vividly when Naperville had two (count ’em, TWO) stoplights, Ozwald’s was the only “drug store” (where you could buy Terpin Hydrate with Codeine Elixer, an outstanding cough suppressant, with just a small sum and a signature), the butcher shop had a bare wooden floor, the stores all closed by 6 PM and a kid could ride his bike from the far south of the town to the far north without dodging cars. Naperville was a quaint far-west backwater. Today it’s an overcrowded slice of Downtown Chicago where large numbers of 1950-1970 homes were torn down and replaced by million-dollar mansions built right up to the utility easements. It’s sold as a nice little town, but that’s as fake as just about everything else there.
This baffles you, but the 8% compounding growth rate of medical service spending in the USA, the relationship between astronomical credit market debt growth and the DJIA and perhaps a quadrillion dollars worldwide of total debt is no biggie?
We’re surrounded by wildly insane beliefs, unsustainable trends in every direction, an invade-the-world/invite-the-world lunacy and the fact that each household in Chicago is, for example, on the hook for $140,000 in pension costs (not to mention all the other unsustainable idiocy) seems inscrutable?
To me, finding something about which to not be “in panic” is the difficult part. Small wonder everyone on this Titanic is still dancing to the music even as water wets their shoes. Face one fear, face them all…and no one wants the music to stop.
Have to agree with dfordoom here. Even with non-controversial topics, any survey with a 19.71% response rate would draw massive criticism from serious pollsters. I have seen this first-hand, as have surely many others. I also find the lead time (2013-14 data — come on!) simply laughable. This stuff shouldn’t take more than a few months at most to put together.
The trouble here is that both biases — at least to my mind — seem equally likely: some will not respond for fear of being open about politically incorrect ideas, and some will not respond for fear of doing damage to the blank-slate narrative. We just can’t know.
This parenthetical comment omits the important fact that US Blacks are not 100% Subsaharan by ancestry.
Doesn’t Lynn say the genetic IQ of 80 for Subsaharan Africa?
Given an ideal environment:
US Whites = 100
US Blacks = 85
Africa Blacks = 80
Observed:
US Whites = 100
US Blacks = 85
Africa Blacks = 70
USWhite-AfricaBlack ideal-environment gap: 20 points
USWhite-AfricaBlack observed gap: 30 points
Given that US Blacks are around 75-80% Subsaharan by ancestry and 20%+ European by ancestry, this is to be expected. At a simple (80.8)+(100.2), we would expect a US Black genetic IQ at 84 (+/-), which is what is observed.
The Africa-FirstWorld IQ gap overall looks more like two-thirds genetic, one-third environment.
Please keep in mind, though, that it’s possible that the duller blacks were the ones who became slaves in the first place. So, it’s possible that the average IQ ceiling of US blacks and African blacks is roughly the same–as in, with the initial negative selection for becoming slaves and US blacks’ 20% white admixture roughly canceling each other out.
It’s also possible that duller/weaker people died in captivity and did not reproduce. It’s possible the 20%-plus White component is lower IQ than the White average. It’s hard to guess at the magnitude of all of these possible selection pressures. It is all conjectural.
I admit my knowledge of these places is superficial (I took my younger sister to a popular under-21 disco on one of her birthdays in the late 90s) but Naperville looked like ugly charmless sprawl to me. Generally speaking suburbs built after the 40s are ugly, unless they are every expensive, and many of those are ugly also. Places like Grosse Pointe (Detroit), Lake Forest, Winnetka etc. (Chicago) are very nice because they preceded the uglification. But mostly the Midwest is full of ugly ones. It’s a huge contrast with the Victorian beauty that is the city of Chicago itself. Or the charming old towns that serve as suburbs in New England or around New York.
You are absolutely right and this is a fascinating question. You have a pending municipal/government collapse (the state budget is in shambles, too, I’ve heard, so it’s not like the state can save the city somehow) combined with an otherwise healthy place.
Yes, this is true. People think Chicago is some sort of Hellhole, but no. A lot of it’s really nice. But I still don’t want to live there….
And I REALLY don’t want to drive in Chicago. Chicago drivers are madmen. I’d die within a year, if I had to drive extensively in that city.
Would the average US white slave-owner have really been duller than the average US white person, though?
What about the semi-decent Mexican-American barrio?
No, but his overseer might’ve been a pretty dull and brutal fellow.
It provides the urban wonderland with its maids, housekeepers, dishwashers, and other laborers.
It’s not a bad place, it is suitable for students, artists, or off the boaters. Chicago has the best urban architecture in the USA.
So you think survey data is meaningless?
When the response rate is 19%, yes.
Those who conduct surveys and opinion polls are the modern equivalent of snake-oil salesmen.
As I said earlier, the only surveys that are worth anything are those that can be cross-checked against the real world. Polls on voting intentions can be checked against actual election results. That means you can find a reasonable measure of just how inaccurate your poll is and take that into account when making predictions. And polls on voting intentions are dealing with simple straightforward questions – are you going to vote for Candidate A or Candidate B. Surveys on attitudes and opinions are dealing with questions that are not straightforward, and there is zero checking against reality.
Added to which is the problem that very many (possibly most) surveys are not conducted in good faith so the data is not just meaningless, it’s deliberately misleading. You can deliberately distort the data in countless ways.
Surveys are worthless.
Read Kevin McDonalds culture of critique. Psychology is most certainly dominated by Jews and Marxists. I understand that alot of academics and science bloggers like yourself are afraid of being called “nazis” or antisemitic but at this point its unavoidable, the Jewish Question is Inherently tied with the academic Establishment, the History departments, the Media (everyone with at least a 1/4 of brain knows that at this point) and the people who demonize you. They call you a Nazi on rational wiki (a Jewish run Neo marxist disinfo factory with a Mentally ill Recluse (something Oliver). We need to spread info on JQ wherever we go, we can’t let the Jewish stranglehold starting with Boas continue. We need to fight back and its academics like you that can do that.