From my numerous conversations regarding HBD, I've come to the conclusion most liberal creationists have never taken a statistics course. These individuals make egregious errors in discerning my arguments. I'll summarize some of most common (and stupefying) errors with a brief explanation below.
Not understanding rates/probability/distributions: These are the most common mistakes. Generally, they don't understand the predictive value of IQ and racial distributions constitute probabilities and not definite proclamations. We don't care if you got a crappy SAT score and you still made a ton of money. These statistics can vary greatly for individuals, but individual variation is canceled out when focusing on increasingly larger groups. And there are plenty of blacks smarter than the white mean. Hence, racial intelligence following a distribution. As far as rates, one person, after I told them Asians have an incredibly low rate of crime, remarked that almost every single criminal in China is Asian, so my theory must be wrong. I just shook my head.
Confusing group averages with individuals: These are averages of large groups. They do not apply to every individual in a given group.
Providing anecdotal evidence or outliers as proof: I don't care if you worked with 2 black people and they were both great or you knew one Jewish guy who was great at basketball. Anecdotal evidence does not trump large statistical studies.
Confusing average racial hierarchies with individual hierarchies: Just because blacks have a lower average does not mean every white person is smarter than every black person.
Disregarding the concept of a skewed sample: The Eyferth study and African immigrants are assuredly skewed samples. Not every sample is representative of the relevant group.
Disregarding regression to the mean: The descendants of high intelligence blacks will eventually regress back to the mean. That's why black doctors' kids don't score as well as white/Asian/Jewish doctors' kids; it's not institutional racism.
Disregarding controlling for variables: We know blacks are, on average, poorer than whites. But of course, researchers have controlled for these variables by comparing whites/blacks/Asians of similar socio-economic class or education level.
3 comments:
In my view, it's not that they cannot understand statistics, it's just that they refuse to understand when it suits their purposes.
For example, suppose a liberal were to say "Blacks are disadvantaged from birth in American society" and you responded by saying "That's not true . . . I know plenty of blacks who were born to upper middle class backgrounds"
In that case, the liberal would quickly and easily see (and explain to you) that he or she is talking about group differences in general which don't necessarily apply to all individuals.
So it's not that they are blind -- it's that they shut their eyes now and then.
I agree with sabril that they *do* understand, but I think the unstated assumption is that statistical average don't *matter*. They believe it is immoral to treat individuals according to the groups they reside in.
Interbreeding skews the statistics a bit (in America especially) but I will safely guess that - accounting for a few Down's syndrome and the like- 95% of pure blooded Norwegians are smarter than every single pure blooded Nigerian on the planet.
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