The article you linked to failed to factor in stereotype threat, which suggests the authors have no idea how accurate the IQ test really is. Just because you're not asking questions like "Does the salad fork go on the outside or the inside?" doesn't mean the test is bias-free.
The book this "evidence" comes from is the much derided "Bell Curve." The poster is a HN racist troll. I checked his comment history and he pretty much only posts stuff similar to this.
I gave a link to stereotype threat earlier - http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/10/john-list-on-virtual-none... And keep in mind, even if the studies were replicable, the studies did not even show that stereotype threat shows up in the real world, or that it causes the one standard deviation gap. What the original study showed was that on a non-meaningful test, if the professor suggests a stereotype, the gap in test scores grows bigger than one standard deviation.
I think the whole idea of stereotype threat is ridiculous. Just because of a stereotype I'm going to get dozens of questions wrong on the SAT? That just does not make any sense. (And now that we have a black president who was from Harvard Law, wouldn't we see average LSAT scores start to converge, surely there would be less of stereotype against black people in law).
HN accounts aren't supposed to be used just for ideological purposes. HN is a community, and the threads are conversations. That dynamic isn't served when someone shows up only to post lengthy, prepared screeds on tendentious topics.
If the top article on the Hacker News home page contradicts the evidence and the data that I have read, what am I supposed to do? I did not paste in a pre-written screed. I have read a lot on this subject, so I had a bunch of links and sources at my fingertips. It seems to me that posting as someone who has read a lot on this issue, and who can cite sources, is a much greater net contribution to the discussion than otherwise.
And yeah, I understand that my particular account has an ideological bent to it. I wish one account could fully represent who I am. But I am a active HN member with a long history of posts on all sorts of issues. But for obvious reasons, in cases where I believe the truth is highly politically incorrect, I have to post on a different account. I do try to respect the spirit of the guidelines, but I am not sure what I should do differently going forward.
The very idea that you can abstract IQ from socio-economic status has no basis in science. The idea that IQ is a measure of intrinsic intelligence is also not accepted. There's a reason race is not accepted as a biological handicap anywhere but in white supremacy circles and it's not political correctness.
Please don't do this; the HN guidelines ask you not to.
Also, on (understandably) emotional topics, it's best if you represent your view more substantively and less angrily. People often downvote the latter kind of comment even when they agree with it.
All human fields of study are very messy, they are not precise sciences in the way that Newton's laws are.
IQ tests are designed to be excellent proxies for what we generally understand to be intelligence. They can be better or worse proxies depending on the circumstance. In the particular case of testing black Americans, the IQ tests are quite predictive, and the world looks like what we would expect, if the tests were indeed actually testing intelligence. What is your evidence that IQ tests are poor proxies in the case of testing African-Americans?
A great deal of data seems to show that IQ still is very predictive, even when accounting for socio-economic status. That is exactly what they were originally designed for. SAT tests for instance were designed to find students from poorer and more marginalized backgrounds who nonetheless were still very smart and could achieve if given the chance. This is all covered in the Bell Curve, and well some professors thought that Murray exaggerated the degree of certainty, no one showed that his data was false, nor that the conclusion was false.
Believe it or not, I used to be much more in your camp, but after reading a bunch of sources, including the Bell Curve, Gould's the Mismeasure of Man, dozens of papers from scientists contesting the Bell Curve, responses to those papers, and so on, I came to the conclusions I did. Personally, I would much prefer if the evidence had said otherwise. I don't like being called a racist asshat. But given the evidence is what it is, I don't think it is fair to accuse Silicon Valley of judging people by race over merit, simply based on hiring statistics.
race is not accepted as a biological handicap
That's not an accurate phrasing of my view. If a black person has a 130IQ, they have a 130IQ and their race is not a handicap. No person should view their race as a handicap, or be personally stereotyped based on their race. It is just statistically less likely that a black person has a 130IQ. And that was what the original charge was based on -- the statistical underrepresentation of black people in Silicon Valley.
