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B1234's avatar

https://vdare.com/articles/how-the-death-penalty-saved-civilization

In this article the authors hypothesize that Caucasian Christian Europe's death penalty from the 1400s to the 1800s got rid of the low IQ , low impulse control, and sociopathic groups. Perhaps in the time since then whites are beginning to "regress to the mean" and the resulting low IQ low impulse control whites end up in prison while the sociopaths end up in Government or the Corporate world.

Blacks and Hispanics didn't have the same culture, so it is the average that ends up in prison.

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Daniel Povey's avatar

Perhaps the crime IQ correlation was only true due to between race differences in the first place.

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Enon's avatar

Sampling issues? Maybe the test was optional and the dumb prisoners disn't take it. Maybe the specific prisons tested were ones that were low-security ones or more desirable ones and the lower IQ prisoners had been effectively screened out.

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Zero Contradictions's avatar

Out of curiosity, what prompts were used regarding the IQ test in the image?

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Alden Whitfeld's avatar

I think it was just “prisoner taking an IQ test”, after which I tried repeatedly to get the AI to flip the test to have the correct orientation.

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David's avatar

There are too many confounding variables in the prison dataset. The proper way to do this type of study is to first separate the prisoners into people who committed violent crimes vs non-violent crimes. White collar criminals like Bernie Madoff probably has an ABOVE AVERAE IQ. I wouldn't be surprised if Bernie's IQ is at least 120.

I would like to see a study focusing only on prisons who committed violence on other people. Take out all the white-collar, drug dealers, and drunk drivers, etc.

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Alden Whitfeld's avatar

Unfortunately, it is not possible to separate the prisoners into violent vs. nonviolent in the datasets used.

Also, if that’s the confounding variable, and we assume that violent criminals are the “low IQ prisoners” within each race, this would have to imply that white prisoners are disproportionately comprised of violent offenders compared to blacks and Hispanics in order to explain why the IQ differential between the incarcerated and non-incarcerated population is almost entirely on whites only. This doesn’t seem to be very likely.

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David's avatar

Doing good science is hard, that's why these studies are flawed. How do we know that the prisoner samples are randomly selected? Were the surveys taken from minimum security prisons or maximum security prisons? If the researchers didn't bother coding the prisoner's sentence term and offense during intake for later analysis, they're doing bad science.

Haven't you read about the replication crisis? Studies don't replicate because they're bad.

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