IQ? Genetics? Culture?

This post was requested by ColdSoldier and seconded by Filthie in the comments a few days ago.

I used to work with a gentleman named John Keersmacher. John not only had a Ph.D. from U.C. San Diego but had done post-doctoral work on IQs John had contributed to the body of work that became the book The Bell Curve. John was very generous in sharing his knowledge.

So with very little humility, I might know a bit more about IQs than the average duffer from Eaton Rapids.

I must also share that Mrs ERJ's Uncle used to be a pastor at a church that served Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Southern University is a public, historically Black, Land Grant University. Being in a warm climate, it attracts many students from the Caribbean and from Africa.

Keersmacher's understanding about IQs

A dunce

The only useful predictive ability of a high-IQ is the potential for successfully completing your first year of college.

People WANT IQ to mean far more than it is capable of delivering. It is NOT a prism to a person's soul or worth.

That said, if you cannot successfully complete your first year of college, your chances of becoming a CPA or performing ground-breaking research or getting a Ph.D. is limited...and yet my buddy MTV flunked out of MSU after his first term, joined the military (Go Artillery!), got his CPA and eventually became the CFO of series of multi-million dollar businesses.

The most stable portion of an IQ test is vocabulary.

John claimed that he could estimate a person's IQ within five points by asking them three questions. Then he demonstrated on me. He had a slight advantage because we had worked together. His third question was "Talmud".

After answering, John said "Your IQ is over 115."

"I thought you would answer it to within 5 points?" I protested.

He dodged. "For all practical purposes, all IQs over 115 are equivalent because you all have an almost 100% chance of breezing through your first year of college."

At this point, let me tell you about one of my former bosses, Jim Dimbulb. Jim demonstrated that low-I.Q. people can get through their first year of college if they develop coping strategies.

Every time Jim heard a word he did not understand, he wrote it down. Then he went to a "smart" person in his frat and asked what it meant (giving the context) or he looked it up in a dictionary. Once he heard the word used by a prof (signaling to him that he had to learn it) he was good-t0-go.

The example he gave me was "tenuous", as in "The conclusions reached by Saur and Kraut were tenuous given the limitations of the sample size and lack of controls." Jim was in awe of people who used high-falutin' words like "tenuous" because nobody in his home-town ever talked that fancy.

Low I.Q. people CAN get through their first year of college and later on get an M.B.A.

It is impossible to separate an I.Q. test from the culture

Critics of The Bell Curve wrote an I.Q. test that was virtually impossible for anybody who had not lived within a mile of intersection of Broad Street and Cecil B. Moore Street in Philadelphia to pass.

Culture informs us that "tenuous" is more important than "Sisyphus" is more important than "zyzzyva". At least OUR culture does. Some other culture may place different priorities on what is important to know.

Ultimately, any widely accepted I.Q. test (SAT, ACT, GMAT, GRE) is a consensus of the collection of facts that are a high priority to know in the larger culture.

There ARE racial differences

African-Americans, in aggregate, have an average I.Q. that is one standard-deviation below the total for the U.S. population.

Asians from northeast Asia, in aggregate, have an average I.Q. that is one standard-deviation above the total for the U.S. population.

Same dunce, a few years later

Ashkenazi Jews, in aggregate, have an I.Q. that is two standard-deviations above the U.S. population.

The differences transcend zip-codes and socio-economics.

Aggregate statistics are not everything. There are individual Asians and Ashkenazi Jews who are idiots and there are African-Americans who are geniuses.

Mrs ERJ's Uncle's observations

US born African-Americans deeply resented students from the Caribbean and from Africa (typically British colonies). The foreign-born students invariably "set the curve".

While the highest-performing, native American-born students might get 70% on a test the foreign-born students invariably got 95%-to-100%.

That resulted in the (formerly) smartest students getting a C and the other students who had been comfortable getting a B or a C getting a D or failing.

My wife's uncle attributed it to study habits. If a math teacher assigned problems 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 for homework, the foreign students did ALL of the 27 problems at the end of the chapter. That did two things for them: They really understood the material and the mechanics of solving the problem AND they had a leg-up on the test because the instructors usually chose unassigned problems from the back of the chapter for test problems. The foreign-born students had already solved those problems so there was no choking on the test.

A third bit of information to consider

Jordan Peterson makes the claim that there is no place in modern society for people with the lowest IQs, a quantity that he broadly identifies as the lowest 10%. He points to studies made by the military at the start of WWII as the basis for that claim, suggesting that the military is an analog for modern society.

I respectfully disagree with Peterson's conclusion for the following reasons.

The modern model of "education" is to first soak the student in theoretical and abstract methods and then, if there is time, teach them applications. It is very efficient to print black ink onto white paper and use that as the channel to push information into children's heads. It is efficient from a manpower standpoint (one teacher pushing information at 30 students). It is efficient from a material standpoint (paper and ink are relatively cheap and the book can be used for a decade or more). When it works, it is efficient from a time standpoint since abstract ideas can be applied in a multitude of different situations.

For all of those reasons, the modern model of education is what had to work during a crisis, mass mobilization of an agrarian, civilian population into an industrialized, military population. That is exactly the context when the US Military made that study and reached that conclusion.

There are exceptions to that model

Today, there are hundreds-of-thousands of examples of brain-damaged people who are productive in our modern economy. For the sake of simplicity, let's say that they have the mental capability of an average six-year-old and enough manual dexterity to tie their shoes.

They work in motels changing beds and scrubbing bathrooms. They do janitorial work. They shovel snow. Some of them manually dig trenches or do roofing or "lump" materials at construction sites. Some of them patrol parking lots to pick up trash and provide the illusion of security. Some of them fill cracks in pavement with liquid asphalt. Others work in factories and meat-packing plants.

They were "trained" rather than "educated". Many, many repetitions with one-one-one trainers. And they are stone-cold reliable. They will be making beds exactly the way they were trained until the heat-death of the universe....unless....something changes.

The change could be as simple as the supplier providing the cleaner in a container that is a different color or shape or size. Or it could be sheets that are slightly different. Or the supervisor on the job-site is replaced. Then it is deer-in-the-headlights time.

But to dismiss them as "unusable" is to ignore the context of the original study and to deny the hundreds-of-thousands of EXTREME exceptions. If a person with an IQ of 60 can be a productive citizen, then why can't a person with an IQ of 75 also be productive?

Another Exception

"Africa always wins" is a phrase that gets bandied about. I mostly agree with the statement for cities in Africa, but does it ALWAYS apply?

On-the-whole, the students at Southern University from the Caribbean and from Africa, the ones who "set the curve" are blacker than the native-born Blacks who resent them.

By most accounts, the British Virgin Islands (72% Black), Bahamas (91% Black) and Bermuda (50% Black) are very pleasant and relatively safe places to visit. They are also places that benefited from English Common Law and they did not reject traditional values "and invented their own".

How does one reconcile the reality of those places with the belief that IQ is destiny?

Conclusions

Culture can dominate genetics and IQ if people are willing to make the sacrifices to nurture the culture with the best overall outcomes.

IQ is grossly over-rated.

IQ is not destiny. It does NOT mean as much as most people desperately want it to mean.

A high-IQ politician who rejected traditional values with predictable outcomes

IQ is blind to ability to defer gratification, deal with frustration, to act honorably, to not lash-out at people. Those things are skills that can be learned....which is a function of culture.

Training is grossly under-rated, primarily due to our industrial approach to education.

Training is "Do it this way because it works" and is less fulfilling to the person doing the teaching.

Culture will NOT dominate entropy as long as modern education glorifies "Do it your own way" and "Derive your own solutions" and "Make the song your own by adding a bunch of extra notes."

Part I: Black-White Mortality Differences

Part 2: B-W Mortality Differences: Part 2