this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

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How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates

Isn't It Super-Racist To Say That People In Sub-Saharan African Countries Have IQs Equivalent To Intellectually Disabled People?

No. In fact, it would be super-racist not to say this!

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to

archive: https://archive.ph/BJ6bd

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[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

The follow up article where normally he retreats to the motte and cherry picks comments from the previous one is somehow worse, we're now treating Lynn as obviously correct as "has been confirmed by later research which is harder to bias."

Yeah, many people tried to gotcha me with claims that Lynn did this or that or the other thing wrong. Lynn tries to defend his methodology here, but I think (and tried to argue in the post) that at this point, that debate is of historical interest only - there’s too much confirmation now. One commenter brings up World Bank Harmonized Learning Outcomes as an example. Another points me to this preprint, which tries to update Lynn’s numbers using all modern standardized testing data and correlations with social development index and GDP. They find mostly similar numbers to Lynn: Malawi goes from 60 → 66, and new last place goes to Sao Tome & Principe at 62. This is by people affiliated with Lynn and scientific racism, and you can choose not to trust their judgment either, but I think at least the SDI correlations are an extremely simple regression that it would be hard to fake.

If only someone had written a pretty interesting case study in how you can use valid-looking data to prove anything, even the existence of psychic powers. And people have been trying to scientifically justify racism for just about as long as the scientific method has been a thing, while studying psychic powers didn't really pick up until the latter half of the 20th century.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

Lies, damn lies, racist statisticians, but P-VALUES ARE THE TRUTH I TELL YOU