When confronted with environments like Africa, IQ maximalists expose their deepest bias almost immediately. I once asked an idiot in my mentions whether IQ is “highly” predictive of financial success in, say Nigeria, and the response was an instant but predictable retreat to population averages. Even instinctively, they seem unable to accommodate the possibility of a genuinely high-IQ individual whose intelligence has little correlation with the success that environment structurally permits. Despite insisting on paper that they are speaking about averages, the implication quietly becomes universal. The variance is only acknowledged linguistically but it has been conveniently erased cognitively. Rather than grapple with the delta between individual capacity and environmental affordance, they insist on general categories. “Average” is really just a proxy for essence if you listen to many of them carefully enough. Conveniently, they do not subject their own environments to the same scrutiny; the averages that flatter them are left uninterrogated. But of course, people who live truthfully and congruently with the world as imperfect as it is, know that a person can be exceptionally capable and still unable to convert that capacity into outcomes because the environment limits the conversion function. IQ does not override borders, sanctions, or immigration regimes if you’re unlucky to be born in a war torn country. It does not compensate for weak institutions, absent markets, or political instability. Yet instead of conceding that the relationship between IQ and success is deeply contingent and therefore not remotely universal they prefer to argue about why a nation is “the way it is,” as though that salvages the predictive claim. This is why one must never assume that the presence of statistical language guarantees fidelity to truth. Fidelity to truth is an ethical quality, not a function of empiricism. People who benefit from a distinction rarely have incentives to interrogate it honestly. Humans are remarkably adept at masturbating information into narratives that serve them. Humans, as Nietzsche put it, are all too human. This is also why it is dangerous if not arguably evil to discuss people ad nauseam as data. What usually begins as a supposedly neutral data point almost always becomes a totalizing signal. A person labeled 130 IQ (prolly even self labeled as these idiots can be so solipsistic) listening to someone labeled 100 IQ is no longer listening to understand; they are listening to interpret, retrofit and confirm what they already believe. The interaction collapses into a loop. Very little of value is produced for society as a whole. For this reason, I am perpetually distrustful of people fixated on temporal classifications of any kind unless within environments of honest research and learning. People tend to replace understanding with interpretation and these conversations are rarely about honest inquiry and truth.