Race and IQs

[Anomalocaris]

Yup.  To prove the assertion "there is a difference in IQ between races" correct, they would have to prove the null hypothesis "there is no difference in IQ between races" false.

And if someone wanted to prove the assertion "there is no difference in IQ between races" correct, they would have to prove the null hypothesis "there IS a difference in IQ between races" false.

With either claim, you (whoever is trying to prove one or the other) does the legwork, gathers the data, calculates all the statistics, etc.

And Jorm is correct - just because someone fails to disprove the null hypothesis doesn't mean the null hypothesis is necessarily true.  It just means that their efforts have not yet disproved the null hypothesis.  Like if some theist is unable to prove that god exists, that doesn't support the assertion that god does NOT exist, it just means that we lack proof for the existence of a god.  Or, just because I cannot disprove the null hypothesis of a number of gumballs in a jar being even, doesn't mean that the number of gumballs is actually even - we just can't prove that it's odd, right now, with the available evidence/methods.

If you could humor me or if you're bored.    So can I summarize what you said as the following:

Null Hypothesis A= "There is no god"  They do a test to find a god and don't find anything so the null hypothesis is not disproved yet there could still be a god.

Null Hypothesis B = "There is a god"  (so what test do we do here?  Exactly the same as A?) we don't find a god and disprove the null.

My thinking was that in either scenario above I'll never have evidence that there is no god, I'll just continually have no evidence there is one.  And I'll never have evidence there is no relationship between IQ and race, I'll just continually have no evidence there is one.

No hypothesis A doesn’t require you to provide proof that there is no god.

It is the devil’s advocate argument against the following proposition:

Proposition:  There is a god and here are the evidence of the said god.

Null hypothesis: there is really no god and such evidence as you’ve presented could still be there anyway.


Conceptually For proposition A to prevail it must show the probability that the evidence being presented for god does not have a reasonable probability of existing if there were no god, for some consistent and a priori defined threshold of reasonableness.

for proposition A to fail all that needs to be shown is such evidence as presented for existence of god could have a reasonable probability of existing anyway even without god, for some consistent and a priori defined threshold of reasonableness.

You can certainly have reasonable evidence that there is no relationship between race and intelligence. For example if the average intelligence of any randomly selected sample of people from different races always show difference in intelligence of less than magnitude of statistical uncertainty.