Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Innumerate pundits: Taki's Mag decided to be nice and let me post again, so I take back all the nasty things I said about them.

Here's a quote from Justin Raimondo's post on race pseudo-science and my comment:

“...but if blacks are so low on the IQ totem pole, then how did the Great Transcender get to where he is, and sound the way he sounds, with half his genetic heritage supposedly dragging him down? The racialists can’t answer that, because it refutes their worldview...”


The innumeracy among our punditry is embarassing and all too common.

By my calculations, there are 1.4 blacks per 1,000 with an IQ of 130 or above, assuming a mean of 85.

For those who are half black/half white, assuming a mean of 92.5, there would be 6 people in 1,000 with IQs 130 or over.

4 comments:

  1. this is a pedantic point, but it seems to me that you're assuming a normal distribution. seems like you'd see major "fat tailing" at 3 standard deviations, right?

    ReplyDelete
  2. and right, raimando should stick to anti-war polemics.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Being allowed to post at Taki may be a bad sign.

    ReplyDelete
  4. razib: Right. Many more high-IQ folks are observed than predicted by a Gaussian distribution. I should have mentioned that.

    ReplyDelete

Are gun owners mentally ill?

  Some anti-gun people think owning a gun is a sign of some kind of mental abnormality. According to General Social Survey data, gun owners ...