If we see huge variation in intelligence scores intra group, that strongly suggests that there are social/cultural/environmental factors in play driving a large part of this.

It may be true that some racial backgrounds offer an advantage; but there is no evidence to suggest that this advantage is materially large relative to many of the social structural drivers that are obvious.

The subtext of the claim is not that a statistically significant effect exists. It’s that there is a big important difference in intelligence across races intrinsically derived from genetics. And there’s no compelling evidence to support that.

Correlation does not equal causation. Variation in genetics in a group can realistically be a factor as well. Three probable possibilities here: Only environment, Only genetics, both genetics and environment. Common sense says it's both genetics and environment.

>It may be true that some racial backgrounds offer an advantage; but there is no evidence to suggest that this advantage is materially large relative to many of the social structural drivers that are obvious.

I never commented how large this advantage was relative to the social driver. I agree with you... the social structure likely the greater driver. But the genetic driver is not insignificant.

>The subtext of the claim is not that a statistically significant effect exists. It’s that there is a big important difference in intelligence across races intrinsically derived from genetics. And there’s no compelling evidence to support that.

There is evidence. But there is huge political debate and attacks around the evidence. There are many studies that study IQ among races independent of environment and many of those studies show there is a statistically significant difference. Those studies suffer from the replication crisis, but so do all conflicting studies within psychology as well.

1. Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study • Design: Black, biracial, and White infants adopted into White, middle-class families in Minnesota. • Findings: • As children, Black and biracial adoptees scored well above national Black averages — strong evidence of environmental uplift. • By adolescence, average scores diverged again: White adoptees ≈106, biracial ≈99, Black adoptees ≈89. • Critiques: • Equalizing family SES ≠ equalizing peer environment, discrimination, or racial identity stress. • Some adoptees were placed later or under selective conditions. • Attrition and different test batteries complicate comparisons. • Counters: • Even within the same families, mean differences persisted into adolescence, suggesting environment raises averages but doesn’t fully eliminate gaps in this design. • The pattern is consistent across multiple test batteries and waves. • Even environmental theorists acknowledge this is the hardest case for their position.

Citation: Scarr & Weinberg (1976, Intelligence); Weinberg, Scarr & Waldman (1992, Intelligence).

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2. Texas Adoption Project • Design: Hundreds of adoptees reared in middle-class homes; IQs of both biological and adoptive parents measured. • Findings: • Adoptees’ IQs resembled biological parents more than adoptive parents, showing strong heritability. • At the same time, adoption into advantaged homes raised average scores. • Critiques: • Sample was mostly White, so not directly a race-gap study. • Possible selective placement inflated genetic resemblance. • Counters: • Demonstrates the principle: environment lifts the whole distribution, but genetic differences remain visible within the same rearing context. • Longitudinal data show both genetic and environmental effects over time.

Citation: Horn, Loehlin & Willerman (1979, Behavior Genetics); Loehlin, Horn & Willerman (1989, Personality and Individual Differences).

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3. SES-Controlled Large-Scale Datasets • Design: National longitudinal samples (e.g., NLSY/AFQT, NAEP) where Black and White individuals are compared after matching or controlling for parental education, income, and related SES variables. • Findings: • Gaps shrink substantially but often do not vanish. Residuals of ~0.5 SD (7–10 IQ points) remain in some analyses. • Critiques: • SES controls are incomplete — they don’t capture school quality, wealth, neighborhood safety, health disparities, toxin exposure, or cumulative disadvantage. • Gaps have narrowed markedly over decades, inconsistent with a fixed genetic explanation. • Counters: • Residuals are real and cannot be dismissed; they represent variance unexplained by measured SES. • Long-term trend data (e.g., NAEP) show that policy, resources, and social changes can close much of the gap.

Citation: Herrnstein & Murray (1994, The Bell Curve); Neal (2006, Handbook of the Economics of Education); Reardon, Kalogrides & Shores (2019, American Journal of Sociology); NAEP Long-Term Trend Data.

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4. Smaller Adoption and Foster Care Studies • Design: Transracial adoption in Britain and Europe; biracial children reared in Japan. • Findings: • Minority adoptees gained substantially over national averages. • In some cases, their averages remained slightly below White adoptees in the same homes. • Critiques: • Small sample sizes, often nonrandom placements, and institutional rearing environments complicate conclusions. • Counters: • Consistency across multiple settings shows substantial environmental effects; where gaps persist, they tend to be smaller than national averages.

Citation: Tizard (1972, Race); Tizard & Phoenix (1974, New Society); Eyferth (1961, Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie); Nakao & Treas (1994, Social Science Research).

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The Bigger Picture • Persistent Gaps: Some adoption studies and large-scale SES-controlled datasets show that residual group differences remain even under attempts to equalize rearing conditions. • Critiques: These designs don’t fully equalize environment — schooling, peer context, health, and discrimination are all hard to control. • Counters: The fact that residuals persist shows we cannot dismiss genetic explanations entirely. At the same time, environmental levers (education, health, toxins, nutrition, early interventions) have been shown repeatedly to narrow or close most of the gap.

ChatGPT wrote this according to my specifications.

This is a utter lie: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you're going to continue lying to my face, don't bother talking to me.

>If your uncertainty was whether we could set up dueling ChatGPT sessions: we very definitely can.

I posted sources here and had chatgpt summarize the sources simply because I don't have time to do a research session just for a thread like this. I'm sure you don't have time to do an actual research session either, so your welcome to do the same.

My opinions and analysis of the summaries are my own.

You also have the freedom to leave the conversation as well. Frankly your initial bullshit lie has left a bad taste in my mouth and I'm caring less and less about continueing this conversation.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

This would be the fault of the moderators for not directly putting it in the rules if that was the case.

Though I doubt they'd be ok with this entire thread as it's heated and the topic is flamewar-like even though I tried to direct it in a different direction initially. It already went off the rails with the other guy once he told me I was dumb and trying to establish race superiority among asians. Too late. I think I'll get warned or banned.

Anyway, I'm not disguising the content human generated. Additionally All I'm doing is asking the LLM to cite and summarize citations which you asked for. Manually finding those citations are tedious.

My opinions and thoughts are still human written and not AI generated.

What I find incredulous is that you have some problem with content that's AI generated even if it's actually true and even it's just flat summaries of citations. Like I told the LLM to find specific resources and summarize studies I have already seen so you don't have to go through the entire paper and you have a huge problem with that? Fine. You can just refuse to engage. Commenting on it is also "against the rules" per your link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44808351

I mean if you want you can flag my post and vote it down. I think it's extreme and an ass hole move so I don't do that to people I have different opinions with. It's up to you.

I literally said to you that chatGPT is JUST citations. My comments are my own, you can respond to my comments can you not? What if I used AI to spell check and repair grammar? End of the world and you can't respond? Are people so against AI that they lose all common sense?

>"Please don't post AI-generated comments, or any generated comments" seems pretty clear to me.

Did he say please don't post AI-generated citations? Is he referring to the entire post or all comments? Why not make it an official rule on the rules page. What does Dang say about this? Seems unclear. I think you're just being deliberate.

Bro. You don't need to respond if you don't want to. My citations are still there. You asked for it, you got it. You don't like it? I'm not going to manually do what chatgpt ALREADY did so conversation is over if you don't want to continue.

Good thing I used AI to assist me. I knew you'd leave. Mainly because there's really no solid evidence so a lot of this will go in circles. Good day sir.

Common sense says nothing about the weight of these factors nor does it say anything about “genetics” being archetypally delineated by race. Genetics for sure plays a role in intelligence.

You are appealing to non cognizance as a premise to support your biases. But that’s… dumb.

You are welcome to point to specific studies if you wish but the general consensus is that there is no statistical evidence of what you’re claiming to be obvious.

Most studies that attempt to normalize against socio cultural features recognize that it’s basically impossible to do. That’s why the best available premise is that since we broadly observe huge gains in population intelligence based on economic development within racial groups; it is most likely that economic and cultural differences occupy the lions share of any observable difference between racial groups currently as they’re all in different places.

Common sense says many things about genetics. In fact it’s the basis behind my entire premise which you didn’t even address. Genetics plays a role in the physicality and even temperament of a race (testosterone is measurably different across races). What black magic makes intelligence the only factor that is independent of race? Common sense says it’s a factor.

Common sense also says environment is the greater factor. If a person lacks practice or education vs. a person who practices math puzzles everyday. Obviously that is the bigger causal factor by common sense.

Both are factors by common sense. Environment is the bigger factor also by common sense but by that same reasoning genetics is not insignificant. The best way to put it is that environment influences IQ but genetics influences potential.

Why appeal to common sense? Because there’s lack of solid causal evidence. Evidence exists, but the replication crisis and the lack of causal experimentation makes all the tests not as solid as the correlative tests.

The stupidest thing here is that we are not in disagreement on what the evidence points too. It’s just I’m able to rely on induction and logic to predict conclusions where scientific evidence is lacking while you’re entire model of the world is essentially “if the science doesn’t exist then it must not be true“

If the science doesn’t exist, it means it’s unknown. I hope this was educational for you.

I’ll point to some resources when I have time. Im currently not able to cite them atm.

Does genetics influence intelligence? Yes. Does genetics influence race? Yes.

Does that mean that race is a _material_ driver of differences in intelligence? No. That just doesn’t follow at all. Every difference between groups is statistically significant at some obscene sample size but the claim in question here is about whether it is _material_ and important. That is not at all clear. Nor is intelligence the only thing that this applies to. There’s a basically infinite list of human traits, competencies, and capabilities for which race-affiliated genetic advantages alone is pointlessly small in terms of effect.

The word I used is “significant”which I will specify here as a different mean value.

It applies because among top countries of different races with extremely high wealth, gdp and education standards there are clear differences in IQ. You can still attribute this to environment but it starts to lean towards genetics once you match wealthy countries.

None of this is solid but neither is your conclusion that genetics doesn’t influence racial intelligence in any significant way. If your conclusion is “we don’t know” then my counter is common sense and evidence suggests otherwise.

> The word I used is “significant”which I will specify here as a different mean value.

There are statistically significant differences between any two populations where randomness is included provided your sample size is big enough. Your thinking here is novice and misinformed. If an effect size is immaterial and unimportant then it definitionally does not matter. You win no points for saying HA! Technically there is an immaterial advantage for Asians! If it’s immaterial, it doesn’t matter.

> It applies because among top countries of different races with extremely high wealth, gdp and education standards there are clear differences in IQ. You can still attribute this to environment but it starts to lean towards genetics once you match wealthy countries.

Wealth is one of many things that matters. It’s not the only thing. As I have said before, culture is a huge one.

> None of this is solid but neither is your conclusion that genetics doesn’t influence racial intelligence in any significant way. If your conclusion is “we don’t know” then my counter is common sense and evidence suggests otherwise.

You need to learn how to interpret statistical effect sizes. The basic 101 conclusion of failure to reject null hypotheses is that you cannot conclude that population A is different from population B. But “different” doesn’t mean much. The important takeaway is much rather that there’s no evidence of a strong effect size showing that one race is materially intrinsically smarter than another. If there were a big gap, it would be visible in available statistics. It’s not, so we can largely conclude that there’s no material difference.

You’re talking a big talk about people being biased by trying to be equitable but ultimately you’re just saying “well I can’t provide it but my common sense biases say my race must be superior, even if it’s by a meaninglessly small margin”. Yeah, ok buddy. Take a lap.

Immaterial and unimportant are words with nebulous definitions. Something you think is important may not be important to me or anyone else. Also this isn't about winning points. Nobody cares about "points" here.

What you're likely referring to is something called confidence intervals and if confidence intervals overlap that could be one criterion someone personally chooses to be important. But you have to know confidence intervals exist on a gradient. Are you 100% confident? If that's the case the interval extends to infinite and all measurements are not "important" or "material".

What we do know is that there are gaps between groups where the IQ points exceed confidence intervals of 95%. But that's an arbitrary number. It's just a number for when someone wants to be "really" confident and it's normalized to be around 10 points.

For the US and China, the gap is about 7 points and that's an 83% confidence interval. Now you can call that "immaterial" if you want that's your call.

>Wealth is one of many things that matters. It’s not the only thing. As I have said before, culture is a huge one.

I never said wealth is the only thing that matters. Wealth, education, culture and even pollution levels matter. In fact they are all correlated and influence one another.

More wealth creates cultures that increase IQ and vice versa.

>You need to learn how to interpret statistical effect sizes. The basic 101 conclusion of failure to reject null hypotheses is that you cannot conclude that population A is different from population B. But “different” doesn’t mean much. The important takeaway is much rather that there’s no evidence of a strong effect size showing that one race is materially intrinsically smarter than another. If there were a big gap, it would be visible in available statistics. It’s not, so we can largely conclude that there’s no material difference.

Bro. I know statistics. There are MEASURABLE average differences between IQ for different groups and individuals AND races. Statistics doesn't actually come to any 100% conclusion. It just leaves you with fuzzy probabilities and you choose the amount of rigor you want. If you want 100% confidence then the confidence intervals extend to infinite which basically is another way of saying: "In reality, statistics and science CANNOT prove anything or conclude anything to be true"

For black people and non-black people living in the US there is a gap and that gap exceeds the 95% confidence interval of 10 points. It is 15 points which is the STD. There is a "statistically significant" difference here according to the arbitrary 95% percent rigor that's common. The question here is causality. What causes the gap. Causality is a whole different ball game and it is EVEN HARDER to verify causality with any level of confidence. In fact in the medical world the only way we can establish causality is by putting peoples lives and health at risk. We have to in actuality give people chemical medicines that put peoples health at risk. We even have to do placebo control trials where we LIE to people about giving them medicine.

There is NOTHING definitive about your stance or my stance, but given anecdotal evidence and common sense my stance is much more likely. We know genetics influences intelligence AND we know genetics influences differences between race and we see differences in intelligence between races... the conclusion is therefore quite likely to be that there are differences in intelligence among races.

>You’re talking a big talk about people being biased by trying to be equitable but ultimately you’re just saying “well I can’t provide it but my common sense biases say my race must be superior, even if it’s by a meaninglessly small margin”. Yeah, ok buddy. Take a lap.

My race must be superior? My race didn't enslave black people. Fuck you. Do you want to know what race actually has the highest measurable IQ? It's a sub group among white people. Jewish people.

You know what? Your last comment was utter fucking bullshit. I don't want to talk to your racist white supremacist ass.