An attempt to recreate Levi's market subject to less personal judgement and bias.
This market resolves based on the "popular science" consensus at the beginning of 2060. (i.e. the sort of thing reported in Wikipedia and posted on Twitter by the loudest scientists.) In the United States, or whatever culture is most similar to it if it's stopped existing by then.
If I were to resolve this at the time of market creation, it would resolve to NO, since Wikipedia stated at that time:
Today, the scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain differences in IQ test performance between groups, and that observed differences are environmental in origin.
and other popular science resources tended to agree.
This is about the causes of the IQ gap that exists in 2023, not any IQ gap that may exist in 2060.
Resolves to N/A if the consensus at market close is that average IQ of white and black people in 2023 was the same to within 1%.
1,000
1.00The sole classifying of people according to their race is problematic type of inqury. Even if we disregard the possible rasism introduced by that act, we are left with problematic classification. If i know that one person can be classified as one race in one society and another race in other society, then the variable/construct becomes impossible to handle ...
I kind of agree and kind of don't
If the grouping is mostly arbitrary then we shouldn't care that "balck people in the US only make X% compared to white people"
If we do care about that statistic, then "the group of people we classify as black" is a relevant group to ask about the genetics of
I don't think anyone is claiming that having more melanin reduces IQ, only that the group of people that we call black is likely to have a lower IQ at least partially due to genetic reasons
Even before that, we have to settle if race is consistent criterion (for instance, does one person self reports the same race or not whole time)... This is not the case in many countries, I do not know about US of A, but it seems that there is a hurdle on the way...
I mean, there are serious scholars and intellectuals who don't appear to be racist who believe the hereditarian point of view. David Reich, one of the world's leading geneticists, wrote in the NYT about the possibility that genetics research could discover something like this. A professor in Utah wrote a paper arguing for the hereditarian conclusion. Scott Alexander endorsed it too. Black Stanford economist Thomas Sowell writes that James Flynn, who was more skeptical of the hereditarian hypothesis, praised the integrity of hereditarian intelligence researcher Arthur Jensen, and Sowell has his own praise as well.
Anyway, I think "genuinely what the hell is wrong with you people" does not do this subject justice. What we should be aiming for is a world where all of our great grandkids and descendants, whatever color or race, are much more intelligent than people today, whether through amazing genetic enhancement technology, merging with AI, or both.
I object to the premise of this and similar markets.
It's one or more of the following:
Opportunistic - controversy gets clicks
Uninformed - fundamentally misunderstands race, intelligence, and statistics
Cynical - promoting racism using pseudoscience
I assume some of the people in the comments are well-meaning but unaware of the insidious nature of the question.
The fact is, this comments section is a forum for racists to justify and promote racism - it's abhorrent that this market could remain on this site until 2060.
The market is asking an empirical question, which is mostly well-defined (except for the definition of race which is blurry). If you think that you know the correct answer to this empirical question, you can bet on it.
@OlegEterevsky I’m thinking of a negative stereotype about my minority identity which I believe is correct. Nevertheless I’d feel insulted and threatened if I encountered a manifold market about it. I’d wonder if the Manifold crowd contains many people who want to harm those who share my minority identity. It might ruin my mood for an hour.
Is it worth it?
Well you don't have to make such a market and you can mute such a market if you come across one. All right, let's consider an example with black people replaced by Jews, a group that has a lot more users on Manifold.
I think that someone should be allowed to make a market on whether the first PGS for genetic propensity to commit large scale financial crimes of the SBF or Madoff will show Ashkenazi Jews with a higher average than Northern Europeans. Perhaps higher IQ, lower agreeableness, higher general factor of personality mean that there will be a noticeable difference. I wouldn't create such a market, and I would probably ignore such a market if someone else made it, unless a PGS study was about to be done and I believed I could actually make mana off it in the short-term off a reasonable timescale. Especially now that loans are gone. As for how much I would be personally offended, it depends on the intention - if the creator is an autistic rationalist / edgelord, or a Nick Fuentes type. It also depends how threatening these people actually seem, or if they just seem clownish. Of course, I would never want the manifold admins to censor the market because it's an antisemitic stereotype. Offensive markets should still be allowed.
As far as things offensive to most Jews go, consider extreme and unfair anti-Israel bias, which I agree is not necessarily anti-Semitic, but still awful. We already have some terrible markets like https://manifold.markets/Accuracy/will-the-oct-7-rape-claims-be-subst, a market with very stupid criteria to make it look like the October 7 rapes did not happen. We had BTE making tons of terribly biased anti-Israel polls before he was banned. It was very noxious, and I'm sure most Jews would find it offensive, but that alone is not a reason to ban him. Of course he did get banned for unrelated reasons.
It's wrong to ban markets just because they offend the sensibilities of some groups of people. Free speech and free markets are important.
@ElmerFudd I'm sorry that you take this question to heart, but I think that it's important to know the answer to it.
If different ethnic groups have very close average IQ, then the inequalities in education attainment and representation in various professions directly indicate systemic biases against some ethnic groups. Conversely, if there are significant differences in average IQ, then these biases have to be measured in some other way.
@nathanwei I’m not sure how this invalidates what I’m saying. If we assume that ethnic groups have the same average IQ and that Ashkenazi Jews are more represented in some groups of people, then you have to explain it in some non-genetic way, like them having better work or education culture, or some other factors at play.
I mean, if there’s some statistical discrepancy and its explanation can’t be found in one place, then it has to be in another.
Of course I agree with what you write in this comment.
What you said in the original comment is different. You said "if different ethnic groups have very close average IQ, then the inequalities in education attainment and representation in various professions directly indicate systemic biases [emphasis mine] against some ethnic groups". Saying some group has worse work or education culture is not the same as saying that there is a systemic bias against them.
Well, Scott says that if Jewish achievement is cultural, then studying how to replicate it should be one of the most important problems in the world. People don't seem to be directly prompted in that direction.
You can't really separate genetics from other factors. Imagine a plant with two mutations, mutation A and mutation B. Mutation A makes it grow 30cm taller in wet conditions, and 30 cm shorter in dry conditions. Mutation B is the reverse.
Which mutation makes the plant taller? Entirely dependant on environment.
Black and white people can have very different environments while living side by side. The standard left position holds that there are no meaningful genetic differences between races, and it's entirely environmental differences.
You can still tease out genetic differences, and figure out if all the environmental differences between black and white people are actually irrelevant. But it's not an easy task.
By "the average environment of black and white people", I mean you would have different average environments for each.
In reality, though, I don't think it would affect the results much. It would only be relevant if there are genetic traits that black people have but white people don't, or vice-versa, that cause a large difference in IQ, but that difference depends so heavily on the environment that the trait is in that it's not well-specified to ask what percentage of the gap is caused by it vs. by the environment. I guess maybe I would be more worried about it if I thought this was at all likely to resolve to yes.
If an environment is specified to separate them, why isn't the environment causing the difference? In fact, the real problem here is that when there is significant and extensive interaction between causal variables, the total causal contribution here is likely to exceed 100% (and normalization will change the meaning of causal contribution, you can think about why). So discussing the contribution ratio in the presence of a large number of interactions may not have serious scientific significance