Race and IQ gap

No. if you assert that it is a fact then you must prove it or its just an opinion.

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You don't get it do you?

You are asserting that race determines intelligence...THAT is something you have not provided the proof of.

AboveAlpha

 

You don;t get it YOU are asserting that if all other variables are removed then IQ between racial groups will be identical. I have just asserted that your assertion is just that..an unsubstantiated assertion.

You have made a claim and now you prove it.

 

Do you want to provide the data for this?

We've already seen that Chinese/Hong Kong residents have higher levels of lead and mercury than American Whites but higher IQ.

 

I would like to criticize on one count my previous post (re in utero lead). I suggested that calcium deficiency would account for the very high lead (extremes). While that would probably account for some of them, pica and other forms of paint exposure likely would account for more. However, even then, the geometric means are likely to underestimate the American exposure, relative to the Chinese---note that the Chinese exposure is fairly tight (30th decile around 7ug/dl, 70th below 11ug/dl). Another problem is that the pidan contributes the lead as a preservative---I previously wrongly criticized Rayznack on the assumption that it was an environmental contaminant. One would have to calculate the steady-state intake.

To see the problem, keep in mind that the biological half-life of lead is around a month. I'm yet to do the math, but a roughly steady-state blood lead distribution, with each affected child (for simplicity's sake) consuming only in one episode (e.g. over a period of a month) would lead to these children having exponentially decaying blood lead. Thus children who previously had high blood lead, would later have had lower blood lead, and as the magnitude of the time derivative drops as the blood level drops, the distribution of highly exposed children with low blood levels at the time of measurement would be higher than highly exposed children with high blood levels at time of measurement.

The math will probably take me a while, especially for doing commonsense checks, so I'll probably not make very substantial posts again for a month or so.

 

If lead is the main factor causing the 30 point black white IQ drop, shouldn't we see it among whites who have lived for generations in the area of lead smelters? We don't do we. Would you expect Haitians to have significant lead poisoning?

Find Chapter 19: Lead exposure pdf, 245kb - World Health Organization

On page 25 they estimate similar lead/IQ drops across the board, with 3.5 points the top category. 14% of central Africans are estimated to suffer from this maximum drop, with other world regions varying higher or lower.

 

I'll try to find that reference. As to lead smelters, my suspicion (I've only started to set up the differential equations to estimate the missed lead exposure) is that those whites would have lower IQs than other whites, and that whites are often mainly behind east-Asians on account of lead---although iodine deficiency is again showing its head in Europe. I used to think that a substantial portion of the current US black/white gap was due to mercury, although it might be lead. Africa has several additional causes---Nigeria is not nearly violent enough for the gap to be entirely due to lead (or similar) causes---as the iodized salt generation reaches adulthood, the evolution of the IQ gap should be very interesting---then again, they did just ban lead, and the Southern Nigerians (from whom the US blacks descend) do consume yoghurt (no lactose, so safe), so my suspicion is that they will break the lead transmission chain relatively quickly, although they will probably compete with Honduras's current murder rate before reaching that point.

I'm not sure to what extent Haiti has significant popular lead technology (a big part of Jamaica's problem was backyard lead smelters for recycling car batteries---non-infant children were found with even 150ug/dl). If you watch Kevin Pina's Haiti the Untold Story, the one market woman (interviewed after thugs burned down a market) is clearly on a mercury-based skin-whitening cream---her face looks daft. Malnutrition is a fluctuating problem, as is protein deficiency, although there are groups addressing these, e.g. by having urban agriculture. I'm not sure of their iodine status.

These factors suggest that your (and my) hypotheses will be tested vividly, especially in the next twenty years, although lead might take up to fifty years (two generations) to test completely.

I should make clear that I suspect peak exposures on the order of 20-50ug/dl for the US population, but that NHANES would have missed these; for my argument to work, I need to show that a steady-state BLL of 2-10ug/dl, less lead would be absorbed (for racial equality on account of lead). This is my current project, so I won't be saying much more until I've completed and met success or failure as the case may be.

 

That's interesting. Can you show us what you've done so far on these differential equations?

 

Sure. A bit of context first---I intend to reinterpret the NHANES data using their distribution data (e.g. number with 10-15ug/dl, etc.).

Now, a small portion of the population will be measured to have more than 50ug/dl, e.g. due to consuming paint chips. The biological half-life of lead in the blood is about a month, so we expect an exponential decay as 2^(-t/1 month), or exp(-tln2/1 month), assuming no new exposure, i.e. the diff equation is

dBLL/dt= incoming BLL rate minus BLL ln2 / T_half

I will model incoming BLLs as Dirac delta series in each case for comparability (and lazy integration).

Now, if someone consumes to e.g. 70 ug/dl once, (s)he will, over a period, from right after to (e.g. a year) T_a after consumption, have probability density function of BLL:
f(BLL)=T_half/(BLL times T_a times ln2)

But lead's half-life in the brain is about two years, so one is nearly integrating the blood lead at the sensitive ages, e.g. 2 years. Take a collection of individuals, who may have consumed lead once anywhere in the last year, and the distribution will change a bit, but many of the low BLL individuals must be reinterpreted as being part of the high-exposure distribution. Thus my complaining about the apparently narrow Chinese distribution---it is as if theirs is a much lower BLL maintenance intake. But that is something I must check---I'll probably have to request a library to get that Chinese paper that Rayznack cited, as it is not available online. Another matter (seeing as it is a linear 1st order ODE) is whether a sustained 2ug/dl does substantially more damage than a single 2ug/dl peak... here I will rely on fitting, as I don't imagine the topic has received much attention.

Also, alternative scenarios must be generated for a distribution of outcomes, so that I don't interpret outlier possibilities as the most likely, without special evidence. I'm not sure anymore that a month will be sufficient...

The reason I continue with this, is that for several populations (Chinese, US black, white contemporary), the murder rates and IQ loss (given that earlier equation) suggest a hidden lead exposure.

EDIT: Note that the probability density function is zero below the minimum (final in period), and above the maximum (initial in period). Otherwise the integral diverges...

 

Great. I especially like the part where you assume what you're trying to prove that population differences are due to 'hidden' lead exposure.

Let us know when you get your hands on some relevant data to fit into your impressive but possibly dubious equations and then you can submit it to the UN to show that their across the board 1-2 IQ point depression is off by 30 points in Africa.

A nobel prize I'm sure.

 

For Africa, I'm thinking a bit less---lead is not the only significant factor, as I indicated here before. Anyhow, one mistake I made above---the time before exposure, in order to produce a distribution, will not be separate, so no convolution of that distribution with a uniform distribution---that distribution is the expected population distribution for a single exposure with uniform distribution of last exposure.

The next step is to figure out what things would look like with 2, 3 etc recent exposures, then the results with a Poisson distribution. Then I'd have to get it published (peer review etc.). But that's why I'm grateful for those e.g. UN, Chinese and other studies---if I'm going to criticize them, it is better to do so explicitly than implicitly.

But the ODE I used is utterly standard for half-life dominated processes.

 

That is not true....you are confusing Aptitude Tests of Knowledge with Intelligence....as they are NOT the same.

AboveAlpha

 

I'm also curious as to the level of your mathematical understanding. So I have a fundamental question for you. If a child consumes a number of paint chips, sufficient to raise his/her BLL to 80ug/dl, and his/her BLL is measured (without further consumption) four months later (four half-lives later), what level is measured?

 

As to your (sarcastically made) point regarding challenging the UN, I frequently challenge them. As an example (this relates to their involvement in US/Canadian/French terrorism in Haiti, namely MINUSTAH), they claim that 2006 minus 2003 equals 24:
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=18421
http://www.ihsi.ht/recensement.htm

(Sarcasm Alert) Which is about the right order of magnitude

 

I'm not confusing anything w/ intelligence as I mentioned IQ in reply to your post mentioning IQ.

http://www.politicalforum.com/showthread.php?t=317838&page=61&p=1063248499#post1063248499

 

IQ ratios even even poor African countries are not much in difference to wealthy countries.

Just because a person may be knowledgeable in various fields does not determine various Intelligence Levels which exist as analytic, emotional, social....and many other ways.

The problem you are having is that you don't even understand the issue or argument.

AboveAlpha

 

Please feel free to open two threads.

1) Mikemikev's math test
2) TSTFA shows off his knowledge of various abstract math functions without applying them to any data on a subject

since neither of them are relevant to this thread. Sadly, I probably won't bother to contribute to either of them.

BTW, preemeptively, if A says "but do you know 1 + 1?", and B says "stop being a (*)(*)(*)(*)ing idiot", that doesn't mean B doesn't know the answer, it means he doesn't have time for stupid games.

 

even at lowest sea levels swimming across the Wallace line was not possible, otherwise they would have been considerable animal migration and there wasn't......dwarfism effects large animals whether it effects humans is questionable and if does the speed in which it would occur is unknown...radio carbon dates of the dwarfs of the Andaman islands suggests they have only lived there 2000yrs, were they dwarfs before they came or did they evolve in the last 2k years?

bears aren't social animals and are well equipped/armed for a solitary existence, humans are not and social interaction/co-operation, long range planning, tool making requires a more sophisticated brain than a bear needs...

I never meant to imply you did... as a forum resident you'll agree there are many of those morons about...

our ancestors innovated very little as well, we were well suited as hunter gatherers just like erectus was and we did very little for most of our existence until the neolitic era about 15-10Kyrs BP...like all animals when there is little or no reason to change, they don't...

 

true ...the irony being the topic, intelligence...

 

There has been some recent blah blah in the science community about the effect of poverty on IQ.
That is to say there is an association between poverty and lower IQ.

So now the question is among socio-economically matched groups, is there a measurable difference of IQ's between the races,
White / Black, Jewish / Gentile

And What are we going to do about those poor Asians Americans ? They were very poor at one time.
That's why I reference "it", blah blah.


Moi

 

That's why the intelligence gap increases w/ highly g-loaded tests between races - Raven's progressive matrices, mathematical calculation reaction time, backward digit span tests, etc.

 

Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function
Anandi Mani,1 Sendhil Mullainathan,2 * Eldar Shafir,3 * Jiaying Zhao4

The poor often behave in less capable ways, which can further perpetuate poverty. We hypothesize
that poverty directly impedes cognitive function and present two studies that test this hypothesis.
First, we experimentally induced thoughts about finances and found that this reduces cognitive
performance among poor but not in well-off participants. Second, we examined the cognitive function
of farmers over the planting cycle. We found that the same farmer shows diminished cognitive
performance before harvest, when poor, as compared with after harvest, when rich. This cannot be
explained by differences in time available, nutrition, or work effort. Nor can it be explained with
stress: Although farmers do show more stress before harvest, that does not account for diminished
cognitive performance. Instead, it appears that poverty itself reduces cognitive capacity. We suggest
that this is because poverty-related concerns consume mental resources, leaving less for other tasks.
These data provide a previously unexamined perspective and help explain a spectrum of behaviors
among the poor. We discuss some implications for poverty policy.


Fig. 1. Accuracy on the Raven’s matrices and the cognitive control tasks in the hard and easy conditions, for the poor and the rich participants in experiment 1. (Left) Performance on the Raven’s Matrices task. (Right) Performance on the cognitive control task. Error bars reflect T1 SEM. Top horizontal bars show two-way interaction (poor versus rich × hard versus easy).

The data reported here suggest a different perspective on poverty: Being poor means coping not just with a shortfall of money, but also with a concurrent shortfall of cognitive resources. The poor, in this view, are less capable not because of inherent traits, but because the very context of poverty imposes load and impedes cognitive capacity. The findings, in other words, are not about poor people, but about any people who find themselves poor. How large are these effects? Sleep researchers have examined the cognitive impact (on Raven’s) of losing a full night of sleep through experimental manipulations (38 ). In standard deviation terms, the laboratory study findings are of the same size, and the field findings are three quarters that size. Put simply, evoking financial concerns has a cognitive impact comparable with losing a full night of sleep. In addition, similar effect sizes have been observed in the performance on Raven’s matrices of chronic alcoholics versus normal adults (39) and of 60- versus 45-year-olds (40). By way of calibration, according to a common approximation used by intelligence researchers, with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 the effects we observed correspond to ~13 IQ points. These sizable magnitudes suggest the cognitive impact of poverty could have large real consequences.

http://web.natur.cuni.cz/~houdek3/papers/Mani%20et%20al%202013.pdf

 

Remember....Analytic Specific IQ....is just one form of Intelligence as Creative Intelligence is not properly measured by such tests nor is Emotional, Social and various other forms of IQ.

AboveAlpha

 

Look....I know some people who could not break 80 on a standardized IQ test who are considered some of the most Brilliant Minds in existence.

For some time I was an Assistant Professor at a world renown Massachusetts Higher Learning Institute and I worked with a guy about my age who talked very SLOW....he was extremely brilliant and thought in way's that I could never hope to think and because of him we figured out ways to properly use Fractal Based Algorithmic Equations specific to understanding aspects of the distribution of icy planetesimals within the Oort Cloud.

Now if you didn't know this person who I call a friend....you would think he was an idiot or perhaps retarded mentally and he CERTAINLY COULD NOT SCORE WELL ON AN IQ TEST.

But he was more brilliant than anyone here posting.....except maybe me....no...he was smarter.

AboveAlpha

 

No you don't. I don't belive it for a second

Hilarious

he is your special invisible friend.

quite