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Monday, July 17, 2017

Leftist/Liberal Hypocrisy on IQ

In 2016, Germany was horrified by this sickening crime in a subway:



Now Svetoslav Stoykov, the perpetrator of the crime, has been sentenced to 2 years and 11 months in jail after being convicted of causing grievous bodily in a German court (see here and here).

The perpetrator was reportedly a Roma Gypsy from Bulgaria, who was in Germany only because of the EU open borders policy, but this an issue for another post and time.

In his defence, it was claimed that Stoykov was under the influence of alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and crystal meth when he committed this attack.

But, importantly for our purposes, a psychiatric expert testified for him and claimed that Svetoslav Stoykov has an IQ of about 63 (see here).

An IQ of 63 is very low, and even 70 is considered border-line mentally retarded.

Presumably, Svetoslav Stoykov’s lawyers invoked his low IQ as a defence and as evidence that he was not fully responsible for his actions, and so therefore in support of the view that he deserved a more lenient sentence.

Now leftists and liberals quite often do invoke low IQ as a defence against law and order Conservatives who push for the death penalty for violent criminals.

But, at the same time, leftists and liberals have a schizophrenic hostility to the very idea of IQ as a meaningful concept, or as a reliable measure of the general intelligence of human beings.

But you can’t have it both ways.

Either:
(1) culturally-fair IQ tests are a meaningful and accurate measure of the human trait of general intelligence (also called Spearman’s g), which is also a meaningful and real phenomenon, or

(2) IQ is meaningless and does not constitute a meaningful measure of general intelligence, since the latter concept is also not a coherent, meaningful nor real phenomenon.
So which is it? You can’t have it both ways.

Either (1) is true and (2) false, or (2) is true and (1) is false.

If you think (2) is true, then you cannot invoke IQ as a defence for low-IQ criminals, because you actually think IQ is meaningless.

By contrast, if (1) is asserted as true, then you can in fact defend low IQ criminals as not being cognitively normal, and not necessarily having the same level of agency nor control as human beings with a higher IQ.

But, once you have acknowledged that IQ is meaningful and an accurate measure of the human trait of general intelligence, this opens up a whole world of issues that are normally ignored by the Left and Liberal Left, e.g., the issue of differences in the distribution of IQs of men and women, as described here.

4 comments:

  1. I don't believe IQ is a reliable measure, my experience is that I can get a 100% rating on most IQ tests, if I just deliberately take my time and go through it in the most systematic way possible - this takes a lot of time though.

    This doesn't make me super-intelligent, it just means the tests aren't accurately measuring what they claim to.

    I really don't see the use of trying to generalize someone's intellect into a single number - I think that is, ironically, a very ignorant and stupid idea - which has a bad history of being hijacked for a whole string of socially regressive causes.

    We already know enough about the human brain, psychology, personality, social behaviour and effects of our environments, to know that there are an enormous number of different things which can act to nurture or impair individuals ability to acquire/retain information, to be interested in said information, to be motivated to work with that information or acquire more information about a topic etc..

    Lets not ignore the complexities of how knowledge and learning is nurtured and occurs, at a very detailed level - just to piss about with a generalized number which is less of a meaningful indicator, and more of an ego/arrogance booster among people (or worse, a political weapon for dividing people...).


    Many of the most 'intelligent' and 'smartest' people in the world (or in their particular fields), such as string theorists and mainstream economists, are - as you know - too stupid to see the basic fundamental faults in what they are doing, that renders their work as borderline-unscientific - and are completely wasting the majority of their efforts.

    We don't even have a measure for that level of catastrophic stupidity - where peoples 'intelligence', is completely undermined by being based on a foundation of bullshit - which renders all of their skills/efforts mute.

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  2. I believe you ironically like most of the Alt-Right are over focusing on "IQ Question" when it comes to criminality.

    Higher time preference+low IQ is what required from criminality.

    How else do you explain why the highest income black neighborhood in America has a higher violent crime rate than the poorest white neighborhood?

    High income blacks are likely higher IQ than the poorest whites but they don't have the same time preference. Blacks have 55 repeats of MAOA gene variants whereas Whites have 4-8 and Asians 1-2.

    Scientists are thinking this gene complex regulates anti-social behavior but almost all anti-social about is dopamine regulation and dopamine regulation= time preference.

    The biggest problem with our justice system is that based on the false metaphysical belief in "free will" which the scientific concensus agrees doesn't exist in any classical sense.

    The closest thing is unpredictable adaptation from complex systems but we can't use that as a basis for a system of law and thus we rely on primitive religiously based norms for our system of laws.

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  3. when laws are written they already take into account that those who break them don't fit into the norm. otherwise there would need to be exceptions made in each and every case.

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  4. Want to hear about another hypocrisy: LK you are critizising the left for it's identity politics and SJWism, yet your blog is turning more and more into another culture warrior outlet (yawn) and is ironically dealing more and more with identity politics.
    Can we have the old LK back, please? You know, the sharp critic of economic ideas, be it from marxists or austrians (for example).
    The world really doesn't need another blogger banging heads in the culture war.

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