When newspapers or generally mainstream media talk IQ, which occasionally they feel compelled to do, the reporting is often less than complete. You might term it desperate if you don’t want to call it dishonest. After all this is a topic where just mentioning an unequivocal fact might have very negative consequences on your career as a journalist.

In this post I want to point out several types of „lies by omission“ that one should look out for in these circumstances.

Trick number one: Compare childhood IQ, not adult IQ.

Childhood IQ is much more malleable than adult IQ, so this is a way to circumvent the fact that in the long term IQ has almost zero shared environment effect [1]. This trick can be used to show the efficacy of interventions (just don’t ever follow up on the kids) or to prove that disparities in abilities are influenced by some environmental difference. But it goes further than that. Some ethnic disparities in IQ grow with age. For Arab kids this is called the „Simber effect“ [2]. In some studies this effect also shows up for the black-white gap. So by looking only at children, you can effectively hide a big part of an IQ gap that explains disparities in income and other life outcomes.

Trick number two: Ignore the g-factor.

The g-factor is the part of IQ that is both the heritable part and the predictive part. The rest of IQ is basically a measurement problem, which among other things, leads to the Flynn effect. The Flynn effect, the rise of IQ scores observed in many countries in the last century, does not increase g. The increases for the different subtests are anti-correlated with how predictive they are of the g-factor. By omitting these little facts, the Flynn effect can be used to invalidate all kind of observations about heritability and predictiveness of IQ and of the relative permanence of IQ gaps between groups.

Trick number three: Don’t mention the sample size or other sample attributes.

Social science is full of small scale studies that do not replicate. Especially small scale studies with politically expedient results. So there is always something to cite, to prove your point of view. Here is the rub, the main IQ results are extremely robust and often have massive sample sizes. The gap between white and black Americans for example is estimated by a meta study with N=6.000.000! [3] So studies that „refute“ such a result with sample sizes of a few hundred or maybe even just a few dozens should sensibly dismissed out of hand. Especially because these small studies often suffer from egregious sampling problems.

[1] Wilson effect
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23919982/

[2] Simber effect
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320310317_Understanding_the_Simber_Effect_Why_is_the_age-dependent_increase_in_children’s_cognitive_ability_smaller_in_Arab_countries_than_in_Britain

[3] Ethnic differences
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2001.tb00094.x

A few years back I designed a better evolutionary ancestral environment for homo sapiens. It’s on an island of moderate size, where you can grow all kinds of stuff, but only on a small percentage of the area maybe 1% that is spread out over the entire island. In the rest of the ground only a kind of tuber growth which is very nutritious and doesn’t require any cultivation, but it has a small side effect: it’s a very strong contraceptive.

The idea is this setup prevents any kind of Malthusian trap. When is the population grows too much a growing number of people has to eat the tuber to get by. And because those people don’t have any children the population in turn starts declining in an entirely nonviolent fashion. Because the tuber is always available there is no famine, women are not dependent on a man for their children to survive. So they have no reason to evolve to be quite as crazy.

Because the normal diet contains the strong contraceptive, women don’t have to be very choosy with their partners because they will only bear children when they consciously stop eating the tuber. Because there is no overpopulation and women are not particularly choosy, men evolve to be less violent and boisterous. Because you don’t only have to get into a woman’s pants to procreate, but you actually have to convince her to want to have children with you, men evolve to be more supportive and stable partners.

Well, that was the idea anyway. I am absolutely sure evolution would find a way to fuck this up.

In my post The Problem with Polyamory, I opined that polyamory, the state or norm of having several partners, as well as dating apps and dating sites, make the human mating market more efficient. This is generally the case for sexual permissiveness.

This means that the political Left is against letting the invisible hand of the market work out the economic fate of people, but in favor of letting the invisible hand of the market work out the sexual fate of people, while for conservatives it’s the other way round.

Economic capitalism has the proven advantage of enabling unprecedented economic growth by aligning incentives for innovation and human nature. Similarly, we can expect sexual capitalism to improve partners and partnerships. For example, I assume that the current high rate of extremely fit people has a lot to do with sexual market pressures and opportunities.

Unfortunately for the Leftist standpoint there is a big difference between goods and partners.

Goods can be improved in quality and availability almost indefinitely. The possibility to innovate does not easily run out. A long history of economic growth can attest to that. That is the reason why we put up with the significant downsides of economic capitalism.

Partners on the other hand are limited by human nature. At least so far. There is no rising tide that eventually lifts all boats. Instead sexual capitalism just like economic capitalism leads to people winning big and people losing big. Without the redeeming feature that in the long run, even the losers of the future will be better off than the winners of the past.