I fail to see how it's filled with racism. If you're referring to the theory that it's immigrants and poor people reproducing more, you must not have read the next paragraph before you got angry about it:
>One potential explanation was quasi-eugenic. As in the movie “Idiocracy,” it was suggested that average intelligence is being pulled down because lower-IQ families are having more children ("dysgenic fertility" is the technical term). Alternatively, widening immigration might be bringing less-intelligent newcomers to societies with otherwise higher IQs.
>However, a 2018 study of Norway has punctured these theories by showing that IQs are dropping not just across societies but within families.
The article (and study) make it clear that IQs are dropping from parent to child, even.
Where? The one sentence mentioning immigration? It seems to me that the article goes over and above to try to attribute this change to environmental factors.
SAT tests are rooted in eugenics theory. IQ testing, despite the original developer warning of incorrect application, was weaponized in that direction.
So, hypothetically, if objective measures of intelligence show correlations with ethnicity, we should just ignore them because they're inconvenient? Isn't that a little irrational? How can you make any use of intelligence measures if you cherry pick according to your preconcieved notions of what you want them to show? What then is the point in practicing any sort of psychology or sociology at all, if your conclusions are so unscientific?
We don't even know if ethnicity and IQ are the common factors here. I have a hunch is it's far more weighted on culture than genetics but I don't have any evidence to back that up.
Well because it confuses causation and correlation in addition to being a fertile ground for confirmation bias. Not to mention the rich history of "last time".
Even if group X is lower it telks you nothing about Y and allows the jump to justification for travesties like eugenics if it is "clearly their genes", wiping out culture and engaging in mass child theft "if it is their culture" and whatever other sick and twisted rationalizations occur.
Except oops - it was comparing subsistence farmers in a disease ridden area to vaccinated and well fed and educated upper middle class! Or the tests are based upon preconceived notions themselves and they did worse because the "neutral" puzzles assumed left to right as associated with temporal flow.
>Well because it confuses causation and correlation in addition to being a fertile ground for confirmation bias
How do you already know this a priori? We know intelligence is strongly heritable, there's no reason to prematurely conclude that there are no variations among ethnicity tied to genes.
>Even if group X is lower it telks you nothing about Y and allows the jump to justification for travesties like eugenics
Nonsense. Slippery slope fallacy. Acknowledging that people have different levels of intelligence does not imply that we should deny them rights to life. But it would, for example, potentially explain certain discrepancies in socioeconomic outcome, which is critical when considering efficient allocation of resources to combat inequities.
>Except oops - it was comparing subsistence farmers in a disease ridden area to vaccinated and well fed and educated upper middle class
You seem to imply that all IQ studies are and will be poorly constructed. This does not have to be the case.
There is an unfounded presumptive bias in society currently that all people are born with identical potential IQ and that all discrepancies arise from socioeconomics. Moreover, we've been strongly conditioned not to question this assumption, lest we be shamed with accusations of racism. But this is a fundamentally unproven assumption and denying evidence to the contrary will likely lead to worse outcomes for society.
They get called racist because they /are/ racist. They don't spend their time looking at genes and interactions but the cosmetics and tautological assumptions that potential = outcome. I have never seen them find intelligence in a place that didn't align with their prejudices.
Read the research. Read the links. Study sociology. When you invent a metric and model, you imbue it with bias.
“Objective” is something that has been up for debate since the dawn of epistemology. It hasn’t been solved yet. It’s also worth understanding the Demarcation Problem.
Lots of things are “rooted” in dark places. Rocket technology developed in wartime Germany. Some pesticides came out of gas chambers. Agent orange is a herbicide now. Should we throw out everything developed by someone who holds a bad idea by today’s standards?
I have yet to be convinced that comparisons of IQ between cohorts have as much practical utility as rockets or pesticides (on the contrary, the sole utility of intergenerational comparisons of IQ tests seems to be in highlighting the limitations of IQ as an objective measure of intellectual capacity...)
