No, those statements aren't in tension at all! The idea that there
would be reliable data for country-by-country or even state-by-state IQ comparisons is an extraordinary claim. Think about the amount of work that would go into generating representative samples. Globally? Forget about it.
It does not follow from the intractability of that problem that nobody's doing intelligence or behavioral genetics research. Plenty are, which is why there are front page stories on HN about the "missing heritability" issue.
Again, I think it's interesting that the notion of these data sets don't flunk more people's sanity checks, because most of us have no recollection of ever being asked to take an IQ test. I sure haven't. A mass testing regime none of us have ever heard of, apparently run in secret, is generating global IQ rankings? That doesn't sound weird to you?
