Well, I can’t control how people discuss this subject and people simply start with that assumption. That’s the default.
Yes, if we stay within a ideal world of pure objective scientific inquiry, it doesn’t have to start with that assumption. However, legislative programs are not the execution of scientific inquiry, they assume socioeconomic factors as indisputable fact.
I’m totally aware of why programs build support and get funded. I’m simply saying that this complaint about standards-of-proof is not applied equally to both sides of the argument.
So you acknowledge that this is fundamentally a political dispute about government policy? Good. Now we’re getting somewhere.
Any government policy that applies to the 20 million or so black Americans with sub 90 IQ’s also applies to the 20 million or so Latinos, and the 60 million or so whites with sub 90 IQ’s
Can you cite one large government program that is available to blacks but not to whites?
Anti poverty programs are available to anyone who qualifies, and there are more whites than blacks on welfare.
Government backed minority scholarships don’t fit the bill, the money spent on them is trivial. Affirmative action at selective colleges doesn’t fit the bill either. Most colleges aren’t selective, and the number of slots designated for minority applicants are few. Ballot measures have effectively ended most affirmative action in government funded institutions in California, Michigan, and many other states. We will soon reach a point where government backed affirmative action is banned in a majority of states.
What then is the problem you seek to remedy? Perhaps you want to implore the folks who run Harvard to end their affirmative action recruitment of black students. These days, most black students at Harvard are high IQ foreigners from Africa and the Caribbean, typically children of their countries’ elites with test scores comparable to the rest of the Harvard class. Black Americans are fairly rare on Harvard’s campus.
Now if you want to make the case that discrimination laws are evil and should be abolished, make that case. With evidence.
Simply name-calling data presented to you a “wild exaggeration” is meaningless.
Perhaps you’d like to comment on which of these are wild exaggerations:
Blacks are substantially over-represented in the NBA despite a nurturing advantage to whites
Whites and asians substantially outscore blacks on the SAT (and every other standardized, quantifiable test), and neither income level, nor parental education nor opportunity nor stereotype threat accounts for the differences. In point of fact, no explanatory nurturing differences have been advanced that have reached a level beyond idle speculation despite an overwhelming support for the hope that one might be found.
Blacks substantially underscore white and asian groups on post-college and post-graduate exams even when they have attended the same schools and taken the same curriculum
Blacks substantially underperform white and asian groups in every cognitive arena in every political system in the world
No program or effort to provide equal or better opportunity, anywhere, anytime under any government or private agency has been able to eliminate differences in race-based groups
There are no examples, anywhere, even in political systems where blacks are the majority power, where blacks outperform whites and asians on any cognitive tests or financial success, and no examples where whites outperform blacks at power sports such as sprinting and basketball
It is anathema in modern academia and politics to publicly profess a position that races are innately unequal
Every available study for decades in every system everywhere shows a persistent performance gap and no studies exist where equalizing opportunity equalized results on any significant scale. (At least, I am not aware of a single one.) But if you have a good one, please post it so that we can evaluate it against the thousands and thousands of school systems across the entire country that find exactly the same results over and over and over again. Here’s a link to the Illinois tests if you want to start paging through them: http://iirc.niu.edu/Default.aspx
It is for these reasons and more, and what I see to be the obvious conclusion (along with attitudes such as yours which pretend to be objective but are overwhelmingly biased toward protecting egalitarianism) that I await genetic elucidation. Not so I can “gleefully” gloat but so that we can get past this ridiculous obfuscation of the obvious and get on with creating a decent world.
Nitpick: I wouldn’t characterize either of those as power sports, and I think I’d reverse the stereotype here. For example, strong man competitions are dominated by Russian, German, Eastern European, and Nordic peoples, AFAIK.
Most of them are just plain misinterpretations, misstatements, or false assertions. Point by point:
Your alleged “nurturing advantage to whites” is imaginary. As the article I cited above notes, the environmental pressures for developing basketball skills are much greater on the whole for blacks than for whites.
And by the way, Chief, I’ll ask again: what happened to the Jewish superiority in basketball skills relative to other white players, which was so apparent in the mid-twentieth century and has since been completely eliminated? Hmm? Did American Jews just somehow lose their “basketball gene”, or what?
But just because a particular subset of environmental factors, such as income level and parental education, doesn’t account for all the differences doesn’t mean that all environmental factors have been ruled out, so this proves nothing.
Again, this argument relies on the assumption that taking the same courses at the same school counts as equalizing all environmental factors, which is just silly.
This statement is so broad as to be meaningless. You don’t have data from every cognitive arena in every political system in the world, so you’re just making a sweeping generalization from more limited data. And again, none of this data represents studies that truly equalize all non-genetic factors.
But no program or effort has actually eliminated all differences in environmental factors across racial groups either, so that doesn’t prove anything. Note also that IQ differences, for instance, have significantly decreased between blacks and whites over the past several decades, so it appears that equalizing efforts have indeed had a non-trivial effect on differences in outcomes.
Again, this sweeping generalization depends on the vagueness of the statement. In particular, speaking of “power sports SUCH AS sprinting and basketball” disingenuously conceals the fact that you deliberately cherry-picked two specific sports where blacks, whatever their innate abilities may be, definitely have an advantage in environmental factors.
This is not a statement about the level of scientific support for your preferred hypothesis. Unless you’re trying to insinuate that scientific support for your preferred hypothesis is being suppressed as “anathema” by academic and political bias, which I gotta tell you is not the way to make yourself look LESS like a conspiracy theorist.
It is certainly true that over the decades, making racial opportunity and racial socio-cultural factors more equal has overall made outcomes more equal. It’s also true that outcomes have not been totally equalized, but then, neither have opportunity or socio-cultural factors been totally equalized, so that’s a wash.
And again, we’re left back where we started: we know that measured racial differences may be due to genetic differences or to environmental differences or to both, but we don’t know which.
As noted above, David Rowe found no X factor that is depressing scores for any particular group.
Again, as James Lee noted in the review of Nisbett’s book.
Review of intelligence and how to get it: Why schools and cultures count’ James Lee, Personality and Individual Differences 48 (2010) 247–255
Anyone who has read about the various protests and assaults on researchers (Eysenck, Herrnstein, Jensen) or efforts to break peoples tenure (Gottfredson (see below article), would not be so glib.
Of course social and professional pressure deters people from researching these issues. The Snyderman Rothman anonymous survey was revealing in that 3 times as many of the 661 academics surveyed considered genetic and environmental factors contributed to group differences as those who considered environmental factors alone were implicated.
Gottfredson, L. S. (in press). Lessons in academic freedom as lived experience. Personality and Individual Differences. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2010.01.001
I assume you are just being silly here, since IIRC , the professional basketball in the 20’s was neither the epitome of professions that it is today, nor was the track to it very open to black athletes. I am pretty sure you have the capacity to grasp that, in order to evaluate over-representation, the following criteria should be met:
A reasonable estimation of the numbers in the starting pool of candidates
A reasonable estimation that the primary preference of that starting pool for the pursuit exceeds other available pursuits
Is it your contention that in the 1920s basketball was a pursuit equally sought after by all, across a broad representation of society within a framework of availability equally open to all? Are you contending that the stars of the SPHA reflected the best talent out of a pool of all whites? Are you sort of thinking 5’ 4" Barney Sedran’s superstardom with the Whirlwinds makes a good case that the starting pool broadly encompassed the whole nation?*
I’m not so naive to think culture and environment never plays a role in which folks get the top-dog status at a particular moment. I do argue that the current starting pool of NBA wanna-bes is much larger for whites than blacks, and the opportunity given to white wanna-bes is much greater than it is for blacks. Moreover, the practical obstacles faced by blacks are a substantial offset to the advantage of any “environmental pressure.” While you may disagree, calling the alternate position a “wild exaggeration” is what stuck in my craw.
Perhaps you have some alternate suggestions for “all” those other environmental factors? Or do you just have some vague laundry list that creates a pretense of an untestable comparison because we can never account for “all” variables?
In summary, then, you are unable to come up with even a single example to support any contention that races are equal. You have characterized what I have given as “wild exaggeration” without even one study or one example across the entire world that supports an opposing position. You happily characterize this challenge to find something, somewhere, in the entire world supporting an alternate position as “so broad as to be meaningless” (because I could not possibly know every circumstance, everywhere) and yet you cannot cite even one example. I deliberately left that statement broad to give you every possibility of finding something. Did you?
Your contention that “we don’t know which” (of genetic or environmental) only holds when you set the bar for “eliminating all differences” so artificially high that it is meaningless. See [http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/table19-mcatpgaraceeth09-web.pdf]here
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for MCAT scores, as an example I’ve given you before, and then feel free to make a defense for why the preparation opportunity for black students taking those exams was so deficient relative to whites and asians that that enormous gap can be accounted for. (These are 2009 scores, so I assume they reflect the “more equal outcomes” you are referencing.) We may not “know” which, but we can certainly say that a review of the evidence renders an opinion that innate factors are a heavy influence is more than “wild exaggeration.”
*Read more about Jews and early 20th century BB in chapter 15 (“The ‘Scheming, Flashy Trickiness’ of Jews”) of Jon Entine’s book, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It, pp 198-203.
Not particularly, but I’m not surprised that’s what you chose to parse out here.
It’s not that sterotype threat does not exist; it’s that it does not exist as an explanation for observed differences on standardized scores, despite a popular conception that it does (including your use of it as an explanation).
From the full text of that cite:
“They (Steele and Aronson) have shown that stereotype threat can affect the performance of some students on some tests, an important finding worthy of careful exploration. What they have not done, and do not purport to do, is to offer stereotype threat as the general explanation for the long-observed pattern of subgroup differences on a broad range of cognitive tests.”
Every time you say this stuff, you show how completely ignorant you are of how people reach the NBA. Absolutely, undeniably, hands over the eyes, fingers in the ears, ignorant. I have shown you why the opportunities to reach the NBA are much higher for blacks. It is a game you can play anywhere. Equipment and facilities mean nothing. The black community completely gets behind the game and the incentives are huge to become the best player in the area because you also become the most popular. This holds for nearly every black community. It is culturally part of the black community in a way that is in no way comparable to the white community. It is seen as the only legitimate way to be successful by a very large part of the community.
You have not demonstrated in any way how whites are given a better opportunity to succeed in basketball. You are trying to rely on some kind of whites have more money, therefore they have access to better coaching and facilities argument. I reply that does not matter. The only thing that matters is playing as much as possible from a young age. Coaching only teaches immensely skilled players how to play the team game. I can guarantee you coaches would prefer the most skilled player they can find as opposed to the most coached. Coaching is a small part of the game. It is almost entirely up to the players.
You have not demonstrated any “practical obstacles” that hamper blacks. You tried to claim that blacks have to work more because they come from poor families. Are you suggesting there are large groups of black kids aged 9-18 laboring away all day? Because that is the age where now elite players were playing 8 hours a day.
Based on your replies, you appear to know just about nothing about the NBA. You see a bunch of black guys and then try to explain why you see so many. It has to be because they are black! I’ll tell you why - because they worked harder than everyone else. If white communities put everything they had into making the NBA, you would see more whites.
I suspect we’ve both made our points and each feel the other is talking past us.
If you want to believe that the pool of young white boys who start out with NBA dreams is not larger numerically than the pool of young black boys who start out with NBA dreams, you are welcome to that position. If you want to believe that black culture emphasizing basketball as a primary goal outweighs any benefit accrued to young whites by having more formal programs and coaching, fine. If you want to believe that playing as much as possible is somehow a particular trait of skilled blacks but not skilled whites, have at it.
But you haven’t “shown” me a thing. You’ve made an observation with which I disagree. I hold that although basketball may be proportionally more popular as a secondary pasttime sport for the black community, for the subset–white or black–which is filtered out as particularly skilled (and that’s the group that ends up making the Bigs), the notion that whites are undernurtured compared with blacks is baseless. If you take the enormously higher absolute number of starting pool wanna-be whites and focus on the best of the best all the way along the line, it is the whites who are given every advantage, and not blacks, particularly when all the other distractions of growing up black in a bad community are thrown in.
That the white drop-outs along the way choose lacrosse while the black second-tier labors on in their passion of basketball is completely irrelevant. Those remaining top-tier white kids who have the best aptitude are not sitting around eating bon bons while their black brethren are outworking them. And the large group of second-tier blacks chooses basketball because even at a second-tier level of performance, it is still a fun option (and perhaps an only option).
What is true is that we gravitate toward what we are good at. For a kid not that good at basketball, lacrosse is an attractive alternative if it exists. For a kid brilliant at basketball, it’s easy to stay focused and the secondary gain (stardom; success) keeps him–of any color–out there practicing and working hard.
If you are interested in some references for studies showing some of the physiologic differences in performance ability between blacks and whites, check out the reference section of chapter 19 (“Winning the Genetic Lottery”) in Jon Entine’s book Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It.
What you will notice, I think, is that no studies fail to show a difference between white, black and asian performances at sports, whether what is being studied is physiology or outcome. We are different across group definitions of many sorts, including racial lines, and including our capacity for sports excellence.
The question was answered pretty quickly. No, nothing has been proven. And you already started another thread for your second question. What else are you expecting from this thread?
Hereditary differences for athletic ability, if acceded to, lay a foundation for a further accession to the more general principle that there can be hereditary differences between groups which result in differing outcomes for various pursuits (whether athletic or academic).
It is for this reason, I think, that the notion is so aggressively fought by those who want to advance the argument that race is too loose a cohort, and humans too similar, for there to be any significant differences at all.
While sports ability is not cognitive ability, the underlying principle is the same: outcomes that result from hereditary differences dependent upon gene(s) prevalence can vary by race.
Nevertheless, it’s your thread so I’ll knock off the NBA line of argument. I’m perfectly satisfied to stick to (obvious and proven ) hereditary performance differences in cognitive arenas. I’m fine with getting back to figuring out why asians excel in Brazil.
What do you mean by proven? It’s not a mathematical problem where you have a certain answer. It’s an empirical question and you have to look at the evidence and what is the most parsimonious and logical explanation or theory.
And there is a lot of evidence for the hypothesis that genetic and environmental factors contribute to group differences, as opposed to the hypothesis that differences are 100% environmental.
, the professional basketball in the 20’s was neither the epitome of professions that it is today, nor was the track to it very open to black athletes. I am pretty sure you have the capacity to grasp that, in order to evaluate over-representation, the following criteria should be met:
) hereditary performance differences in cognitive arenas. I’m fine with getting back to figuring out why asians excel in Brazil.