Lex seemed to have a good instinct that this whole thing was a little wrong somehow, but couldn't quite put his finger on it. For those looking to explore that...<br><br>Let's start with g. It isn't quite the solid object it's often billed as. It can just as easily be split into fluid and crystallized intelligence. There's also the idea that types of intelligence aren't really correlated with each other in the first place. The guest said most of the tests are time-limited, and sort of justified that by saying it's all about processing speed, but that fails even within its own computer analogy because why is that more important than RAM (how complex a thing you can hold in your mind at once) or HDD/SSD (how much you can remember)?<br><br>Not so sure neurodiversity can be written off as just not being a good measure of for individuals.<br><br>And what about relevant things that IQ tests don't cover?<br>• social intelligence<br>• emotional intelligence<br>• wisdom, which could be an umbrella for the above two, or could mean a sustainable synthesis of them<br>• athletic intelligence<br>• artistic intelligence of many kinds (visual, musical, etc)<br>• storytelling<br>• bravery (intelligent risk assessment and actuation)<br><br>If those strike you as more like learned skills than areas of intelligence, I challenge you to prove math is less learned than art. Some languages contain shockingly few numbers, but literally every culture creates art, as if it's just IN us. So we start to get the idea that g, even if it's a single real thing, is possibly incredibly narrow.<br><br>Now the controversial part... race. But races aren't really solid objects either. It's weird to me that the discussion is supposed to be about science and about average intelligence across races, when race isn't really a scientific distinction this century. Races turn out to be mostly a weird mashup of skin tone, nose shape, hairdo, language, and clothes. Trying to squash the concept of races back into science as genetic distinctions doesn't really hold water.<br><br>This conversation was a lot about comparing individuals in ways that might operate at the group level, not actually saying that they DO, so let's not just make that leap by way of blurring those lines. But if that did eventually prove true, that shouldn't be surprising in small amounts, because average heights are different in different areas. Speaking of height, American whites (if we want to call that a race) probably wouldn't end up having the highest average g factor. I mean, what are the odds? They don't have the largest average height, so why intelligence? I know to some people I'm stating the obvious there, but a lot of comments here and elsewhere seem to assume whites in general, or any one kind, is the likely contender for smartest, for no apparent reason other than racism.<br><br>Black populations are very diverse in general, so that's a better bet, or maybe I'm being influenced by my anecdotal experience of the smartest person I've ever met who happened to have been black. That's fine culturally, but if we're talking science here, are white and black supposed to be races? That seems to be the idea in the USA, but are black people in the UK a different race than black people in the USA? Are we then saying all of Africa is one race (silly) or that American blacks are a separate race from any and all in Africa? And if so, how can we not make the same distinction for the many different heritages in India, for example? But then what about all the Americans with Indian ancestry?<br><br>But like I said, that's all talking about small differences, inconsequential. If you've spent a lot of time with a lot of people of various races, it's self-evident this is a non-issue in a practical sense. Let me put it this way: Winning the "smartest average race" trophy is like winning an endurance race, where there is no trophy, in a photo-finish, where all the runners were in the same photo separated by millimeters. But people will cheer and fret regardless (and take it way too far beyond that).<br><br>If we did define black Americans as a race and just skip anyone who wasn't clearly part of that, it would end up still having a lot of arbitrary calls made and be kind of ridiculous, but at least stats could be done on that. If we did see a large average difference in intelligence correlated with that, there's no need for a weird hidden mechanism that links melanin and cortical neurons, nor a need for a revision of evolutionary history to include being right at the cusp of speciation, because there's a very, very simple explanation (Occam's razor) for how a rather superficial difference in appearance could correlate with something so unrelated as intelligence:<br><br>chronic exposure to racism --&gt; chronic physical and emotional stressors (+ self-fulfilling prophecy expectations) --&gt; a very wide variety of chronic health conditions including poorer average performance on cognitive tasks / life success outcomes<br><br>The brain is a part of the body. Why would it not be affected by racism when we know lots of parts of the body suffer from exposure to racism? If anything, it seems like mind would be the part of a person most impacted, and the brain isn't exactly unrelated to the mind.<br><br>It's not just the topic itself that's a tired old racist meme mixed with the crap science of yesteryear, passed around by well-meaning white people who fancy themselves brave for doing so. It's also the way it gets discussed. We can see it even in this discussion between two white people with stated intentions of empathy and grace who nonetheless discuss the topic in terms such as giving a theoretical IQ pill to less intelligent people, particularly minorities, most particularly black people to "fix" a problem. Do you see the real problem here yet?<br><br>When white people discuss black people's problems, I've noticed the focus is almost always on (or drifts inexorably towards) how black people can change, or be educated, or altered, or assimilate more, or compensate. Whereas in reality, usually it's the white people who need to change to solve the root problem. That's because the people in the majority usually cause the majority of situations, both good and bad. So the majority of solutions will be a change within the majority population. That's just how reality usually works. But since the majority makes the majority of the narratives too, that most likely pair of root cause and solution is usually exactly the one that's missing. Ironic. I'm not saying that's due to bad intention necessarily. Emotions steer conversation and topical choices. But there are consequences.<br><br>This case is no different. Even if an IQ pill were actually invented (with no deleterious side-effects) as a result of this "research" (which it wouldn't be -- that would be other sciences) an IQ pill might treat some of the symptoms of lower black academic achievement, or even IQ, or even g factor, but it would be treating one symptom while leaving the disease of racism intact and eating away at everything (except IQ), and of course steering the discussion away from real solutions, just like it did in this case.<br><br>To the degree the guest indulged in social media "cancel culture" type memes, when does it occur to us that maybe minorities are usually correct when it comes to issues that impact minorities? Maybe it's called racist because it IS racist, in ways we don't and maybe can't comprehend. Maybe it's racist because it's soul-crushing to keep hearing it but minorities are a sacrifice we're willing to make "for science!" Maybe it's racist because it's been asked and answered already. A thousand times and a thousand ways, but we just keep asking.<br><br>It gets couched in white discussions like "the brave researchers and their valuable research being suppressed unjustly just because racists will try to twist it and lay people will misinterpret the noble pursuit of knowledge" but maybe it's more like "the clueless white fringe scientists who won't or can't grasp that this cave is empty and always has been, and so scrape the barren walls for the thousandth time, releasing poison for the thousandth time, because that's what the walls are made of."<br><br>Hearing people (mostly white people) talking about whether or not your race may have inferior intellectual capacity overall and whether or not there's anything that could be done to you to correct your defectiveness...? That grinds trauma in deeper. Especially on top of the crap people already have to go through. Yes, I know it's said much more tactfully than that, but I'm saying it that way because there comes a point when a boulder with tactful paint and a boulder with ugly paint weigh about the same on the person being crushed.<br><br>I'm not saying stop doing science. I'm saying, maybe white scientists deserve a little 100-year break on this topic since we've been working at it so tirelessly over the centuries. Or at least hold off grinding on this meme until we're not in the middle of a reputation crisis, oops, I mean, a replication crisis.<br><br>There seems to be no interest in psychology in the mainstream or in the fringe as far as I can tell, in figuring out if average intelligence can be correlated to blood type, hair porosity, skin capacitance, salivary viscosity, or any number of other biological features, but when it comes to correlating with race as we define it by little more than skin tone (and some genetic markers that we noticed go well with skin tone, current national borders, or language groups, lol) or however we try to square our ideas with actual people... there seems to be no end to white people interested in solving this burning mystery that could (somehow) result in all sorts of marvels of technology, or be valuable as "knowledge for the sake of knowledge", but for salivary viscosity... crickets.<br><br>Racial average intelligence is a white question, asked by white people, to white people, for the titillation of white people. Can we please stop?<br><br>HTH,(reply>), @Mr Mando If it's too long for you, that's  certainly understandable, but then why pretend to reply? I said right up front that my post is for people who are looking to explore the feeling that something is off about the whole topic. Are you such a person?,(reply>), TL:DR Its all genetics and from evolution, Some hunters, Other gatherers and so on. The idea was to improve quality but actually they've put profits over innovation and outliers. Dummies, All of them!