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06/09/08 - A Texas Reader Says Lou Dobbs Is "Starting To Cave" To Ethnic Special Interests

From: Theowne (e-mail him)

Re: Steve Sailer's Column Lynn's Race Differences In Intelligence: PC Won't Make Them Go Away

Why does Sailer still quote Richard Lynn's old IQ tables as being absolute truth? 

Just by glancing through them I can spot a places where less emphasis is placed on research and more is put on broad generalizations. 

Take Singapore, for example.  The IQ of the Chinese is measured at 108, and the Malays at 92. But the Indians aren't measured at all. 

Now, in every socioeconomic and educational statistic including test scores, income, educational attainment, etc, Indians score in the middle, between Chinese and Malays, and in some spots higher up towards the Chinese. 

This would indicate that Singaporean Indians are somewhere in the 98-102 range. 

Ignoring all of this, or perhaps simply not researching it, Lynn assigns them an average of 81 and uses this in the calculation for Singapore. 

Obviously, this will affect Singapore's average score. Sailer might claim that this is a small difference.

But to me it shows that Lynn's IQ tables aren't quite as perfect as Sailer would have us believe.

Steve Sailer replies: Lynn's and Tatu Vanhanen's national average IQ tables are, of course, not perfect, as we pointed out here at VDARE.com way back in 2002 and again in 2004.

We've especially emphasized the inherent uncertainty in coming up with any national average figure for India (and Indians overseas, such as in Singapore), because India is the most complex, most stratified country on earth, and thus the hardest place to assemble a nationally representative sample. And we've pointed out that it's silly to get into arguments over reported small differences between, say, Denmark and Sweden, because the margin of error in Lynn and Vanhanen's approach is necessarily sizable.

But, here's a crucial point: Despite the imperfections in the data, a high positive correlation between national average IQ and national average per capita income can still be seen. The various kinds of imperfections, being largely random, would tend to lower the measured correlation, so the actual correlation, if perfect IQ data were available, might be even higher.