[ExI] didn't know he was at the party... was: RE: Wrath of the Old Ones

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Sun May 3 15:17:48 UTC 2015


Well now, here's a thing:  I read awhile back that the genetic diversity
was far greater in African villages than it was in the entire USA.  I don't
know how to interpret that, but clearly the genes are there for all kinds
of diversity including intellectual.

As you point out, tests for people who have little to do with modern
society are highly suspect at best.  I did see some data where only
nonverbal tests were used in Africa (not specifically with pygmies) that
showed that the nonverbal skills were comparable with ours.

Also, you can't compare African data with USA Afro-American data.  There
are many reasons given for the white-black IQ discrepancy here and I think
it's just not known what factors are responsible.  The liberals will put it
down to environment and the conservatives to nature.

Wackiest theory:  the Afros who were picked up by the black and white
traders were below average to begin with.

Bill W

On Sun, May 3, 2015 at 12:37 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki <
rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Sat, May 2, 2015 at 12:00 PM, William Flynn Wallace <
> foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> While discussing IQ with my undergrads I pointed out that IQ geniuses are
>> in every population.  Does that mean that somewhere in deepest Africa is a
>> pygmy with a bone through his nose who has an IQ of 190 and is potentially
>> the greatest mathematician since Fermat?  Yes it does.  Maybe there isn't,
>> but there could be.
>>
>
> ### Highly unlikely. The IQ of pygmies is estimated at 53. I don't know
> the standard deviation of IQ among pygmies but if it was the same as among
> normal populations, an IQ of 190 would be more than 9 sigma above their
> average. I tried to use a couple of online normal distribution calculators
> but none were designed to go so far off the mean and all of them gave 0 as
> answer. As an example, an 8 sigma outlier is found with a probability of
> 4x10e-13.
>
> Considering that the number of pygmies is less than a million, we can be
> expect with a likelihood of > 1-((4x10e-13)/1000000)= 0.9999996 that there
> are no pygmies with an IQ of 190 or higher.
>
> Of course, this is a silly calculation - IQ tests are not properly normed
> for outlier populations, both far below and far above the average, so the
> true likelihood of extreme genius among pygmies is unknown but certainly
> very low.
>
> Rafał
>
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