Rex Kerr
1 min readApr 29, 2023

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Evidence indicates that the "race realists" are wrong. When you search for explanatory factors for IQ differences, the best study I know of has an interval for race that includes zero and, more importantly, the confidence interval is only about 2 IQ points (see supplementary data for https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7506587/).

Note that the same study also indicates that most of the factors you mention--which are indistinguishable in this study from genetics of race!--also don't matter to IQ.

Anyway, you don't need to argue this one indirectly by bringing up systemic racism. It's been tested, and the evidence says: no, that does not seem to be how it works. Maybe the "race (un)realists" need to be reminded that facts don't care about their feelings.

(Fiddly technical point about race x variable interactions not being tested and/or lack of mediator variable analysis omitted in the interests of space. tl;dr is that it's not totally locked down statistically, but nonetheless our best evidence is: if it does anything at all, at most it's a very small effect not "almost entirely genetic differences".)

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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