"...Yet these qualities, fundamental though they are, do not make a painter or mathematician worthy of the name, nor indeed are they the most important factors in the case. MORE
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"Other qualities of a far more subtle sort, chief among which in both cases is imagination, go to the making of a good artist or of a good mathematician." (http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Quotations/Bocher.html …).
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Do you have to be smart to be a research mathematician? Sure. Does the fact that black Americans score lower on IQ tests, on average, let other Americans off the hook for the extreme racial imbalance in research math? Uh, no. Because, like I DID spell out in my story, there is...
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1) no genetic evidence to suggest the average IQ gap between racial groups in America reflects genetic differences caused by natural selection acting differently on human populations in different parts of the world over millennia (their argument)
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....as opposed to environmental/cultural/political forces like centuries of legally-enforced racism that have resulted in vast racial disparities in education, income and wealth.
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2) No reason to think that even if the IQ gap is in fact partly genetic, it would not also be affected by culture/environment. (The average genetic contribution to various human behavioral traits IS likely different across geographic ancestry groups, population geneticists say...
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...there's just no evidence how different or in which directions for IQ in particular, not to mention cognition more broadly. And, the geneticists say, untangling it is going to be exceedingly hard).
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3) Most pertinent to this specific flavor of Race-IQ Twitter's interest in the right-tails of IQ curves, to which they attribute the explanation for much of social inequality: No evidence super-high I.Q. is the key to math ability, per quotes above and others (h/t
@MathPrinceps)4 replies 1 retweet 14 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @amy_harmon @MathPrinceps
Yes, mathematicians like to talk about how they are inspired artistic geniuses rather than merely very smart. No, this is not evidence against mathematics requiring a very high level of general intelligence.
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Please be specific when you use a phrase like "very high level of general intelligence." Name the psychometric instrument (Raven APM? Stanford-Binet V?), as well as the threshold z-score, that you have in mind. Then we can speak of facts, rather than vague generalities.
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Also please state what you mean by "mathematics requiring" a very high level of general intelligence. Presumably you have in mind some success metric. What is it, and why do you prefer it to others?
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