Race and IQs

[ohreally]

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.

Thanks for indulging me.  Ok to make an analogy, using something else that some people believe to be true:   The evidence for no relationship between the location of stars when your are born and personality is that the average personality of any randomly selected person from different astrological signs always shows difference in personality of less than magnitude of statistical uncertainty.      

But normally don't we just say there is no evidence for astrology.  Or no evidence that stars locations when you are born impact your personality.    So if someone said well what makes you think that stars and personality aren't related, what's your evidence?  I would think I don't have any evidence, but technically I should say let me present you with my evidence of (see my above analogy). 

Just like I would say there is no evidence that race impacts your IQ, in a non technical way but I could say in a more technical way that my evidence is that (your last sentence above that i've quoted).