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NFL player IQ by position

benfry.com

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Re: NFL player IQ by position

#91
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an explanation for why foot speed and intelligence are inversely correlated: "Upper body strength is relatively equally distributed between the races, but footspeed most definitely is not. So, tailbacks, wide receivers, and defensive players have a need for speed, so they are disproportionately black. I haven't checked recently, but in most recent years since Jason Sehorn's retirement, none of the 64 NFL start…

You seem to be assuming that intelligence and IQ are the same thing. Is that what you meant? Just to be clear, I believe in speaking frankly about race, so am not objecting to that aspect of your post. But I'm skeptical of attempts to bottle up something as grand as "intelligence" into a single metric. For example, I read somewhere that the original Stanford-Binet had to be modified because women were scoring higher…

Intelligence is certainly very complicated. For the sake of this discussion, I was taking intelligence to be "intelligence as defined/measured by IQ tests". Perhaps I was being sloppy and should have used a different word.

Re: NFL player IQ by position

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I noticed all of the comments you contributed to this community are effectively unsubstantiated racism. I suspect I am wasting my time replying, so I will keep this brief.) "foot speed and intelligence are inversely correlated...'[black people are faster and dumber and white people are slower and smarter]'" You are missing the point entirely. While there is an inverse correlation between footspeed and intelligence i…

The existence of a racial gap in IQ is simply not in dispute. It shows up in SAT scores, it shows up in military IQ tests during times with a draft, and it shows up in numerous psychological studies. See for instance this paper from Brookings Institute, which is about as mainstream liberal as you can get ( http://www.brookings.edu/views/papers/dickens/20060619_iq.pd... ) The only question is if the difference or envi…

1.Marian Woronin of poland ran 9.992 2.According to The Economist several groups of immigrants to America(italians, swedish, german etc) showed an iq of about 90 before integrating to society and about 100 after.Black americans seem to be stuck around 90.One possible explanation would be that they have a harder time integrating(if a swedish immigrant learn english good enough he can hide the fact that he is "a squarehead", what does it take for a black person?)

Re: NFL player IQ by position

#93
post #83
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a long time (silent) reader of Hacker News posts and comments, this comment easily ranks as one of the most offensive, and perhaps the most disturbing. The notion that race fundamentally has anything to do with intelligence should offend any sane, rational, science-minded person who is even just scarcely familiar with the history of the pseudo-science of eugenics and the countless studies debunking it many claims.…

Let me not speculate as to why not. Let me just say to all who know better, but said and will continue to say nothing – SHAME. Flinging self-righteous accusations about only makes you seem shrill and shallow. Your use of a sockpuppet account to do it makes it cheap as well. (Yes, the other guy did that too.) Most of what you're offering here is a personal emotional response. That would be more effective if you gave i…

1. No accusation was flung - I just wrote a tidy summation of what happened.

2. This is not a "sock puppet" account. As I said long time (silent)reader. Never have I felt the need to respond to a comment until I read that utter ignorance and saw that it went unchecked.

3. The only thing I am angry with is that this comment is being given credence on a site that deems itself the treading ground of intellectuals. It's quite simple really, his comment amounts to the proposition "Black people are more stupid than whites"; if this is a proposition that's falseness is even a question here, perhaps I would do best to find another place to spend my time.

Re: NFL player IQ by position

#94
post #82
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a long time (silent) reader of Hacker News posts and comments, this comment easily ranks as one of the most offensive, and perhaps the most disturbing. The notion that race fundamentally has anything to do with intelligence should offend any sane, rational, science-minded person who is even just scarcely familiar with the history of the pseudo-science of eugenics and the countless studies debunking it many claims.…

If there's one thing more poisonous than racism it's publicly equating the failure to denounce x with believing x. That is a classic tool of demagogues. In fact, arguably the classic tool of demagogues. So here's a denunciation for you: lexlibra's comment is lame, and yours is 10x lamer. People who advocate conclusions for which the evidence is weak merely lead one away from the truth, but people who drag debates dow…

I did not equate publicly or otherwise "failure to denounce x with believing x". Indeed (and listen well here), failure to denounce x, if one knows x to be false, is WORSE than believing x.

This is the mechanism by which ignorance persists. The above is the opposite of education and what makes it even worse is when the silent party has the demagogue-ic status to immediately educate the many with a simple statement.

I don't know what you believe - as I said before I won't speculate. All I know is that if you knew lexlibra's comment to be nonsense, your silence (and calling it lame (and my comment 10x lamer) - sigh - just an embarrassingly juvenile response of the type I thought you sought to avoid here) says something you perhaps didn't want it to say; if you didn't know - I really should be spending my time elsewhere.

Re: NFL player IQ by position

#95
post #93
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me not speculate as to why not. Let me just say to all who know better, but said and will continue to say nothing – SHAME. Flinging self-righteous accusations about only makes you seem shrill and shallow. Your use of a sockpuppet account to do it makes it cheap as well. (Yes, the other guy did that too.) Most of what you're offering here is a personal emotional response. That would be more effective if you gave i…

1. No accusation was flung - I just wrote a tidy summation of what happened. 2. This is not a "sock puppet" account. As I said long time (silent)reader. Never have I felt the need to respond to a comment until I read that utter ignorance and saw that it went unchecked. 3. The only thing I am angry with is that this comment is being given credence on a site that deems itself the treading ground of intellectuals. It's…

Sorry about 2. I mistakenly assumed "long time" meant you'd had an account for a long time.

I don't know what to say about 1 and 3 other than that I disagree.

Edit: I'll say one thing about 3, lest I seem to be secretly agreeing with your nasty straw man. Lower IQ is a factual claim (which no one here has disputed - are you saying it's false? or just that it's offensive to talk about?). This by no means implies lower intelligence unless you equate IQ with intelligence, a leap that I personally find rather dumb. lexlibra did use the word "intelligence", but the thread was entirely about IQ, so this seemed more like a careless word choice than an expression of racist hatred.

Re: NFL player IQ by position

#96
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be assuming that intelligence and IQ are the same thing. Is that what you meant? Just to be clear, I believe in speaking frankly about race, so am not objecting to that aspect of your post. But I'm skeptical of attempts to bottle up something as grand as "intelligence" into a single metric. For example, I read somewhere that the original Stanford-Binet had to be modified because women were scoring higher…

Intelligence is certainly very complicated. For the sake of this discussion, I was taking intelligence to be "intelligence as defined/measured by IQ tests". Perhaps I was being sloppy and should have used a different word.

"Intelligence as defined/measured by IQ tests" is just a verbose way of saying "IQ".

Re: NFL player IQ by position

#97
post #95
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. No accusation was flung - I just wrote a tidy summation of what happened. 2. This is not a "sock puppet" account. As I said long time (silent)reader. Never have I felt the need to respond to a comment until I read that utter ignorance and saw that it went unchecked. 3. The only thing I am angry with is that this comment is being given credence on a site that deems itself the treading ground of intellectuals. It's…

Sorry about 2. I mistakenly assumed "long time" meant you'd had an account for a long time. I don't know what to say about 1 and 3 other than that I disagree. Edit: I'll say one thing about 3, lest I seem to be secretly agreeing with your nasty straw man. Lower IQ is a factual claim (which no one here has disputed - are you saying it's false? or just that it's offensive to talk about?). This by no means implies lower…

If IQ was just an arbitrary measure, that is, if the purpose of the test was to determine how well one takes the test, than this whole thread would be of no consequence. It is because IQ is purported to be a measure of intelligence however, that this conversation makes any sense at all.

So, to suggest that lexlibra was not saying in summation "Blacks are more stupid than whites", and somehow conflated IQ and intelligence ON ACCIDENT, is absurd. Lexlibra used the word intelligence because thats what lexlibra meant. And this can be further confirmed in his/her subsequent comments.

Re: NFL player IQ by position

#98
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's true. Being "quick", which I think you're talking about, is all about strength.

It's not, really. As Galton discovered, reaction time correlates with other kinds of intelligence. I've read that modern tests show that some groups have a faster physical reaction speed, but a slower mental reaction speed -- e.g. the signal gets from eye to brain to hand slowly, but the hand moves fast.

The thing about football quickness and reaction time, is that it is nearly all physical reaction speed. You rarely think at all. You've just repeated in practice what you need to do so many times that once you're on the field it becomes automatic. Running backs and receivers for the most part just need to be able to get downfield really, really fast. The offensive line needs to memorize more plays and formations, so a few points higher on the Wonderlic might help them in that regard. But once you're on the field, you aren't "thinking" in the sense that most people use the term. I don't think the Wonderlic scores even figure very highly into what makes a great football player. If anything, the scores are used by the coaches and trainers as a metric for figuring out the best approaches to teach the players what to do.

note: I played tight end throughout high school. I'm a bit distraught that this infographic suggests that the offensive tackles might have been smarter than me.

Re: NFL player IQ by position

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not, really. As Galton discovered, reaction time correlates with other kinds of intelligence. I've read that modern tests show that some groups have a faster physical reaction speed, but a slower mental reaction speed -- e.g. the signal gets from eye to brain to hand slowly, but the hand moves fast.

The thing about football quickness and reaction time, is that it is nearly all physical reaction speed. You rarely think at all. You've just repeated in practice what you need to do so many times that once you're on the field it becomes automatic. Running backs and receivers for the most part just need to be able to get downfield really, really fast. The offensive line needs to memorize more plays and formations, so…

I don't mean mental reaction time in the sense of quickly weighing possible courses of action -- I mean literally the time it takes for you to register a change. The simple reaction-time experiment is to hold a ruler in front of someone, so it hangs down; they have a hand wrapped around (but not touching) the end of the ruler. You let go, they grab it, you measure how far it fell to see how fast they reacted.

The thing is, some people will start to grab it fast (high mental reaction time) and other people will actually touch it sooner (slow mental reaction time, faster physical reaction time). If you're running in a zig-zag pattern, this would mean that you would start turning faster, though other people might be able to execute a complete turn (start to finish) faster despite lower IQ.

Re: NFL player IQ by position

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about football quickness and reaction time, is that it is nearly all physical reaction speed. You rarely think at all. You've just repeated in practice what you need to do so many times that once you're on the field it becomes automatic. Running backs and receivers for the most part just need to be able to get downfield really, really fast. The offensive line needs to memorize more plays and formations, so…

I don't mean mental reaction time in the sense of quickly weighing possible courses of action -- I mean literally the time it takes for you to register a change. The simple reaction-time experiment is to hold a ruler in front of someone, so it hangs down; they have a hand wrapped around (but not touching) the end of the ruler. You let go, they grab it, you measure how far it fell to see how fast they reacted. The thi…

And I would guess that the larger the muscles involved, the more important physical reaction is. So if you're talking about moving your fingers (as in the ruler example), then mental reaction is going to be more important, but if you're moving your whole arm or your legs, the physical reaction is more important.
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