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Having lived or worked with indigenous peoples on three continents, and having known several Nobelists, I found they share at least one tangible characteristic of intelligent people: they could all perform and/or explain extremely complex matters in extremely simple ways.

Our IQ tests are not as broadly applicable as its advocates imagine them to be, but their predictive value remains high for parameters that we deem highly significant.

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With all due respect, it seems like you're taking offense to the hereditarians and using the vernacular "dumb" where I don't believe they do. Perhaps their ethnography is impoverished and therefore their theorizing for why IQ differences have emerged incorrect. It would be interesting to read better informed theorizing for these differences. Surely the Bushmen have evolved a type of intelligence that as you say is different than what is measured by IQ and similar tests. Nevertheless, IQ remains a useful measure of the type abstract reasoning that is predictive of many positive modern outcomes at the individual and group level. Isn't this broad result something that should be dispassionately considered by anyone interested in understanding the different rates of modern economic and social development around the world?

I think we have done great damage to our ability to understand the world and its diversity by conflating IQ with all types of intelligence and conflating that with intrinsic human worth. The latter conflation is rightly considered repugnant, and the emotional response leads us to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

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Fascinating!

I'm also always fascinated by the tendency of scientists to just grab their favorite measurement tool and apply it to explain basically everything

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Every one of us is only smart about our own world. This essay made me think of pilotage navigation and the cognitive faculties needed to use the sea and rivers, not just for fishing but for trade and movement. The inferential evidence for humans doing it is ... old. Older than Homo sapiens. In fact, all that fish protien has likely played a key role in the evolution of our brains, so no ancient people fishing, no Bell Curve of any sort.

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