throwaway468883
throwaway468883 on Hacker News
The main issue is that intelligence isn't well-defined. Laymen can't agree on a definition. Specialists from different fields (say, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, developmental biologists and animal behavioral biologists) can't agree either. More egregiously, specialists within a single field can't agree either. For all the 1994 manifestos people like to throw at people in internet arguments, it doesn't mean everyone in the field (which was mostly psychologists and little else) agreed with it and it doesn't mean the people who did sign it could pin down what they said onto a single definition that made sense from both a scientifical and general understanding.
Apologies, I'll amend my previous comment.
>You haven't met many Europeans have you. Not all of them are Dutch, Scandinavian, urban youth, immigrants or throwawaybbb's great-grand-mother.
This is true of all subbredits. Basically the best way to use Reddit if you get into a hobby is to go to that hobby's sub, meticulously read the sidebar and leave the site without ever posting.
>A majority of Europeans speak 2 languages, a quarter speaks 3 or more.
You haven't met many Europeans have you. Not all of them are Dutch, Scandinavian, urban youth or immigrants.
>a majority of them are not really all that good even in their mother tongue as we can see from standardized testing
This makes no sense. You can't be not good in your mother tongue - it's your mother tongue. Standardized testing has no say about how a language is structured, that's an absurdly prescriptivist point of view. As for foreign language ability, in real life it's not assessed by making them sit down and pass test questions, it's assessed by having them speak and write close to a native. Someone who casually uses slang, "bad forms" and occasionally makes native-sounding mistakes is more proficient at a language than someone who speaks an academic version of it and got good grades at a test.
That would throw under the bus a lot of race-and-IQ suppositions seeing how Africans commonly speak 3 or 4 languages, sometimes more, and a large majority of white people and Asians are monolingual.