The Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed With Race and IQ

It's only a rough guideline. There's Olympic athletes that would be considered overweight based on their BMI that are basically all muscle. It's a decent guideline for your average person, but there's outliers that don't fit in that scale. After all, you're making a judgment based on just 2 parameters.

I was considered obese by BMI standards in high school, when I was outside with friends riding bikes all day and phys ed at school where I lifted weights daily. I would be impossibly thin if I tried to achieve it now.

No, BMI is directly a function of weight.

Overweight and obesity are defined as abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that presents a risk to health. A body mass index (BMI) over 25 is considered overweight, and over 30 is obese (From the WHO)

Obesity is quantified using BMI by medical organizations because there isn't an effective way to quantify it otherwise, but it's in the same way as using IQ is a shorthand for intelligence or the DSM is used to describe mental illness. It needs a qualified professional to use the raw data point in combination with other factors in order to tell you if your body fat is actually unhealthy.

High body mass does also add its own strain independent of fat, but the actual intent of the term obesity is about whether you have a level of excess fat that lowers health outcomes, not size by itself. (It also wasn't actually ever intended by it's creator as a measure of health, just as the broad stroke data point it is.)

It's correlated to a very narrow subset of skills that are a small part of intelligence. It's a predictor of successful outcomes in the broad sense, but considering the strong correlation to access to education and other similar environmental prerequisites to healthy development, claiming there's a particularly strong causal relationship between IQ and success is relatively bold.

My whole assertion is that using IQ as a value measurement is fundamentally not very useful. In the specific case of race (or cultural background, or whatever), there's no functional way to control for the confounding factors, so you can't really draw any conclusions about the "merit" of the relevant population at all, even if IQ did that.

You're getting push back because people loathe the idea than an intrinsic value like IQ might define them. Same reason the bullies kicked my ass up until high school. They thought I had something they weren't born with, couldn't compete with, thought I had an unfair edge.

Sorry folks, IQ is a large component of who you are, and no, you can't control that number. OTOH, back to my childhood ass beatings, I wasn't much smarter than the other kids. 119 IQ, tested the same at 6 and 16-yo, "bright normal", nothing to write home about. I did well in school due to my parents drive and my love for knowledge. None of my friends took a diploma on graduation night and none had as low an IQ as I. Go figure.

IQ is a legitimate part of you, like it or not. Emotional quotient is as well. I know damned well that my IQ is far higher than my wife's, and her EQ is stunning compared to mine, makes a nice balance. But does that mean I'm smarter than her? I would argue it does not. People called my last boss a "dumbass", but only because his IQ outstripped his EQ.

tl;dr: IQ scores are important and defining, but there is much more to get the gestalt of a human being.

This is such an interesting topic!

I completely agree that race as an idea as steeped in false science and racism, but I always find it really difficult to consider race when it's used as a positive force as well- movements like US civil rights have massively reduced racism, partly by using race as a concept (such as black pride).

On the flip side, neoliberalism often advocates "color-blindness" as an idea (don't acknowledge/consider people's race) which is a great ideal, but in practice often seems to amount to turning a blind eye to on going racism.

Framing it this way makes things worse, even though it's true. The focus has to be on moving towards everybody understanding, talking like, and acting like it's the bullshit that it is. We don't want to state the truth in a way that hand waves it away and centralizes the lie.

Race is a bullshit concept and we need to fix the damage caused by idiots not getting it.

Great explanation

My discovery about how the human cognitive system works on this some years ago has led me to the conclusion that everybody defaults to being prejudiced via this pathway - we all just assume shit about people we don't know purely based on how they look and talk - hence racism is the default.

So not being racist isn't a simple passive act of not being so, it's the active trying to stop one's natural tendency to prejudge others on how they look and prejudge entire groups of people whose "membership" is defined in our minds by things that have nothing to do with their actions or ideologies, and spotting when we do fail to stop ourselves doing it and walking back those prejudgements we made about other people.

This is why so many people who think they're not racists still go around prejudging entire groups of people, but they only do it on the positive side (ex: "Jews have Modern Values") or reserve their racism for groups against which it's not unfashionable to be racist (ex: " Muslims are violent"), when the real non-Racist posture would be to not even consider group "membership" in passing judgment, only the actions and words of the individual or ideology you're judging (so both Zionists and Islamists are violent and do not have Modern Values, because that's their ideology - something they chose, not something they were born with or into - and you can't prejudge entire ethnicities or religions based on some people in those having certain behaviours or ideologies)

Philip Glass shouldn't throw houses. There, I said it

People shouldn't throw glass rocks.