I said “That post,” meaning the one by New Deal Democrat that you were responding to.
I don’t see a reason to change the policy in GD, but I’m all for that.
I agree. I think I’ve posted this before, but I do think it’s surprising and disappointing that more people don’t recognize this stuff for what it is, and I think some people make too many excuses for it in the name of ‘it might be possible.’ This Bell Curve stuff is not well cited, reasoned arguments. It’s a patina of fake science on top of old fashioned racist bullshit, and stuff like that has been around for generations. It’s basically eugenics all over again.
That being said - we do allow some reprehensible stuff to be posted here if it meets the other SDMB rules. It we’re granting too much respectibility to crap like this, then that’s a problem. I do think it’s also true that if we barred all discussion of it and said “if you believe this, you’re a jerk and you can’t post here,” that would make it worse because we’d be playing into the hands of people like New Deal Democrat, who make the “you won’t allow us to talk about it because you know I’m right” argument (or the contrarian bullshit Rand Rover was posting earlier). I think you have to let people talk about this stuff so it’s clear you’re not tabling the discussion to hide the truth. I do think we need to be vigilant in exposing this stuff for what it is.
I was thinking of the three posters who go for this scientific racism garbage (we don’t hear much from brazil84 these days but he used to do the same thing). But in a more general sense I don’t think we have much racism here.
Because many Americans are obsessed with bootstraps? Honestly, it’s not just black folks who are poor. My (white) mother was on welfare for a few years after I was born. Several of my white friends grew up quite poor. According to the Census Bureau, only 24.1% of people in poverty in 2002 self-identified as black. 45% self-identified as white. I believe most of the rest were Latin@, a population which is notably mixed race.
You seem to be using anecdotal observation as evidence that Charles Murray was correct in The Bell Curve. The methodology of these studies have been eviscerated by people who favor rigorous scientific analysis, but you are failing to understand the significance of this. It may very well be the case that blacks test lower on IQ scores than whites in American or elsewhere, but it does not logically follow that Murray has established a causal relationship between IQ and race. He is, in fact, offering an argument to explain the existing disparities.
Now that the argument has been torn apart (and nobody in Murray’s camp seems willing to address the methodological flaws of this research, which I find very troubling) all we have left is the purported ‘‘fact’’ of race intelligence disparities - but we do not have a causal explanation for them.
Essentially, the failure of No Child Left Behind proves that No Child Left Behind failed. It doesn’t prove why it failed. There are a number of plausible explanations not at all related to one’s race. There are a million theories that address claims regarding the war on poverty, and many of them on either side of the political spectrum directly address U.S. social policy. Murray’s theory that crime increased because black people are dumb is but one theory in a million to explain what happened there (Murray’s claims are also fairly weak - I’ve read Losing Ground. It was interesting but he totally went off the deep end in the concluding chapter, jumping - surprise! - to unwarranted conclusions based on a limited understanding of the facts. The leap in logic was positively jarring even to a relative policy amateur like me.)
There is a whole world of information out there you are either deliberately ignoring or just haven’t been exposed to yet. There is certainly more than one explanation for racial disparities in income and education and the IQ theory is not even close to being the most plausible.
By the way, because it’s not clear in my post above - Murray’s argument in Losing Ground was not that the war on poverty failed because of racial differences. The argument was that it failed because of social policy - poor people were doing what was in their rational best interest to do. So in essence, Murray himself offered an alternative explanation to race - rational choice theory.
Of course he completely ignored the fact that people are not automatons that always do things within their financial best interest. If people made decisions solely based on economic best interest, nobody would ever have children. In his arguments he neglected the realities that many poor people have to face, the very hard decisions they often must make, the social and economic conditions, the sub-par education, and even the reality that the war on poverty was poorly executed and underfunded- particularly in areas of workforce development.
When he later came out with The Bell Curve, he then shifted his attention to race. I do not deny that the racially charged climate made it very difficult to rationally discuss his arguments - but it’s been done, and Gould is but one example.
I think the broader issue of people shutting out all discussion of racial differences is an interesting one. I’m thinking particularly about the Moynihan Report “The Negro Family,” which was a leaked insider document that Moynihan wrote to try to convince the Democrats to increase funding for social programs. My reading of it was that it was more sexist than racist, but it proposed that unemployment among black men as a result of discrimination resulted in the breakdown of the family hierarchy and created a number of social problems from drug abuse to domestic violence. A sentence or two taken out of context and that document basically ruined his career, and shut down all discussion of ‘‘race and poverty’’ for decades.
I’m about as left as they come and am skeptical of “culture of poverty” arguments, but I think that it is an important subject to address thoroughly and systematically. I also think shutting down that dialog may have been a tragedy for liberals, because conservatives went right on developing these arguments in nuanced detail while liberals looked the other way for decades. I really do think our intolerance for certain topics of conversation may ultimately be damaging to the liberal cause.
While I hear you, some of the stuff that falls under EvPsy isn’t just a collection of “just So” stories. Memetics, for instance, while it has a lot of work to do to become anywhere near a mature field, at least acknowledges the size of the role of culture as an explanation for human behaviours.
That is an increasingly tiresome dogma that can only be protected by the censorship of political correctness. Poor Oriental immigrants who move to the United States frequently perform better in school and on mental aptitude tests than whites.
Yeah we know, everything is a conspiracy, well, as it is clear your justifications are indeed on retreat and most of the time do not support your solutions, you are also so pathetic that can not produce a cite from one of those scientists (And some of them are not experts in the field) that you quoted as supporting your specific solutions, then one can with confidence say that you are just the current upper class twit of the year.
No matter how much truth there is to the statement that there is no such thing as biological race, it does not negate the concept of race and correlations that are being made betweenr ace and intelligence. As has been pointed out in another thread, the mere fact that you can’t draw a bright line between green and blue on the visible light spectrum doesn’t mean that green and blue do not exist. Combatting racists by saying race doesn’t exist is unsatisfying.
Whatever IQ tests measure, they do so consistently. If you want to attack the validity of IQ tests then attack the validity of IQ tests. Noone has ever met the level of proof with respect to the validity of IQ tests that we expect from the racists.
When you have study after study that correlates low IQ with poverty and teenage pregnancy (even after adjusting for the socioeconomic status of the parents), its hard to say that becoming a teenage parent made me stupid.
So, for example, you take the cohort of girls raised in high income families and you segregate them by IQ test results, you end up with significantly higher rates of teenage preganacy among the girls that score in the bottom quintile of IQ test scores and significantly lower rates of teenage pregnancy from those in the top quintile of test scores.
If you take the cohort of middle class kids generally and segregate them by IQ you see a significant correlation between their IQ and the incidence of poverty (being smart doesn’t mean you will be rich but it does likely mean you will not be poor).
For whatever reason, blacks do poorly on IQ tests relative to whites in America.
These are things we can’t simply ignore with accusations of racism, but one thing that doesn’t get pointed out nearly as much is that when you compare black children and white children who come from the same socioeconmic backgrounds and with similar IQ scores, the black child is STILL more likely to end up in poverty. At the very least, this suggests that IQ is not the whole story.
I have been called racist for simply acknowledging these facts because somehow facts can be racist.
Facts may generally have a liberal bias but in this case, they do not.
Nope, it has a very useful function, you can painfully identify who is following the science and who is just a twit. (Not you, but our hijackers here)
There is no need to, as the last links show, the twits are just ignoring the context of those tests.
And now you are indeed ignoring the context, the facts still have a liberal bias. (To be fair, the researchers are still insisting that we don’t know with high confidence whether cognitive civilities are mostly inherited.)
Perhaps combating racists by saying biological races don’t exist is unsatisfying for you because, IIRC, you believe in the existence of biological races? (however that post is ~7 months old)
The above statement rejecting biological races in humans (definitely not the 3-6 social constructs that are historically preached) does in fact negate racists who:
attempt to deny the origin of race in sociology
use race as a proxy for biological similarity
make pernicious, genetically deterministic claims on complex human behavioral traits like
a) theories on the racial ordering of intelligence
b) tendency towards violence
c) degree of athleticism, etc…
These are all statements which racists regularly and consistently make without any genetic proof (no genetic linkage to the traits themselves or to the “racial groups”). This racist science fiction/fantasy/myth/voodoo is both harmful and incorrect.[
I accidentally linked the Philosophy of Science that Ignores Science: paper twice. I meant to link that and the Race: A Social Destruction of a Biological Concept paper. You can get both, presumably in their final form, on Sesardic’s publication page here.
re: Ev psych, yeah I take a lot of it with a grain of salt. Robert Wright’s ‘The Moral Animal’ and Steven Pinker’s ‘The Blank Slate’ are probably the best ev-psych books I’ve read. Robert Winston’s ‘Human Instinct’ is good too.
Fair enough. It will be interesting to see how it develops. There’s been some cool stuff done with the origin of language and neuroscience, and it’d be interesting to have some of that wander over to the other aspects of human behavior. Most of the papers I’ve read on ev psych so far have talked about the idea of the human brain having compartments that haven’t changed since the Pleistocene? Sorry, not articulating well. If that sounds at all familiar, is that a common idea in the field? That’s another problem that I’d have with it then, the lack of recognition of human plasticity (which is related to culture).
The New Deal was possible because Franklin Roosevelt kept civil rights legislation off of the agenda. Many, if not most Southern Democrats and Northern white blue collar workers would not have voted Democrat if it meant accepting social and legal equality with blacks.
The reason hostility toward blacks persists is not ignorant prejudice but the knowledge that they have very high crime rates, and tend to be not very smart.
Those who want to “smash racism” had better tell blacks to start to behave and perform as well as whites and Orientals. Until then they will need to keep whites from expressing how we feel about what we know to be true.
Tsk, tsk, tsk. How many times do I gotta explain – if you’re going to try to pass yourself off as a Democrat, you can’t keep letting your Republican tells slip…
