Whether or not this is true, it says nothing about which groups have these more evolved neurobiological genes. So even if this is accepted (and it’s far from accepted in the scientific community), this offers zero evidence that black people have inferior genes for intelligence.
So, nothing new here.
If only we stopped complaining about racism, racism would go away. After all, ignoring racism and bigotry has such an amazing history in stopping racism and bigotry. Just look at human history – replete with vile, bigoted actions… but what stopped it? Certainly not complaining about it! After all, slavery didn’t end until we just decided to ignore it, right? And the Holocaust didn’t stop until we just decided to pay it no mind, right?
Thank you F-P for solving racism and bigotry!
And thank you, F-P, for giving me such an excellent opportunity for snark and mockery!
You’re cute.
(I’m sending you a virtual pat on the head. Now stand there, beaming.)
Wait, I thought Clothahump did upthread. Is this one of those things where two geniuses come up with a solution at the same time? We truly live in amazing times!
M&Ms and cell minutes were actual interventions tried. Read the story.
“Laziness” is another way to say “lack of motivation,” and I use that to point out how ugly it is to pretend we should motivate blacks with M&Ms so as to improve performance on their exams.
Luckily, no one pretends “we should motivate blacks with M&Ms”.
Actually, it does not.
Perhaps you would like to quote the part you think does.
The cited reasons either don’t apply to the problem of high-income families underperforming low-income whites, or else they are not actual outcome studies. They are suppositions. The only explanation associated with any study is Steele’s research; we’ve discussed elsewhere at length the limitations of that research.
But if you want to find reassurance there; have at it.
In the interim, race-alone preferences are at risk because there is absolutely no truth to the notion that making opportunity equivalent for blacks creates anthing remotely approaching score equivalency on standardized academic or workplace competence exams.
When you have finished gloriously convincing everyone the score differential is from stereotype threat and lack of opportunity, the public sentiment will accept that the wealthy black physician’s child should not be accepted ahead of the white welfare child unless his scores are superior. They aren’t, and there goes another slot to a white kid.
Don’t bother. If you are going to point to mean test scores and pretend that no individual within any group is liable to score (or is capable of scoring) higher than any individual in a different group, (which has been the weight of your claim), then your logic is so faulty as to be not worth pursuing.
The article does note that “almost” no black students score at the highest levels, while you have elsewhere persistently claimed that “no” black students score that high.
::: shrug :::
I wasn’t going to post anything except the two quotes juxtaposed, but apparently such a message would be too short. Gotta have at least two letters of my own creation.
v.s.
(vide supra)
Note that reporting what an article says (which, by the way, is not "we should motivate blacks with M&Ms) is not the same as advocating a policy.
Another CP fail.
I did not say that, but…
I think you are thinking about this article, and these quotes from it:
*"If these institutions were to choose their students solely on test scores and college grades, it is clear that in the intense competition for places at medical schools in the United States, African Americans would be at a severe disadvantage in relation to the highest scoring whites. Under these circumstances no blacks would be admitted to the nation’s most selective schools of medicine.
The average GMAT score for admitted students at the nation’s leading business schools is over 700. Perhaps only 1 or 2 percent of all black GMAT test takers score at this level. Therefore, without continuing affirmative action admissions programs at Harvard, Penn, Stanford, Northwestern, MIT, and other top MBA programs, the nation’s leading business schools will have very few black students.
In 2004, 10,370 blacks took the LSAT examination. Only 29 blacks, or 0.3 percent of all LSAT test takers, scored 170 or above. In contrast, more than 1,900 white test takers scored 170 or above on the LSAT. They made up 3.1 percent of all white test takers. Thus whites were more than 10 times as likely as blacks to score 170 or above on the LSAT. There were 66 times as many whites as blacks who scored 170 or above on the test.
Even if we drop the scoring level to 165, a level equal to the mean score of students enrolling at law schools ranked in the top 10 nationwide but not at the very top, we still find very few blacks. There were 108 blacks scoring 165 or better on the LSAT in 2004. They made up 1 percent of all black test takers. For whites, there were 6,689 test takers who scored 165 or above. They made up 10.6 percent of all white students who took the LSAT examination.
The nation’s top law schools could fill their classes exclusively with students who scored 165 or above on the LSAT. But if they were to do so, these law schools would have almost no black students."*
Don’t be any stupider than you can help. The study using M&Ms was to test the impact of motivation on test scores. No one is proposing that motivation problems can be solved with M&Ms.
Do I really have to explain this to you? It appears that I must. Must I also remind you to breath occasionally?
Lets put it this way: If giving a black student an M&M for each correct answer equalizes scoring (whether because it motivates them, or they just think it’s a neat decoration), I and everyone I know would be demanding this become public policy. Clearly the intent of this study, and EE parroting it, is to create an implication that it is not a fundamental difference which separates group average skillsets in the test at hand; it’s just motivation. And motivation so lame that coughing up an M&M per answer fixes the disparity. How can you even read that and no recognize bullshit when you see it?
This kind of silly study, particularly published and taken seriously by folks like EE, demeans blacks in a very ugly way. I am deeply disappointed at EE propagating it.
From a scientific perspective, the various real-life followups done (apparently in response to it) should have killed the silly notion for good, were it not for EE and folks like him dragging it out as if it had substance.
But in this study, as breathlessly reported by you, Mr Evil, the lack of motivation WAS solved with M&Ms, to the point of equality.
So IF that’s true, you’d have to be even stupider not to give an M&M to blacks taking test scores. Cheap and effective.
Unfortunately, of course, it’s not only not true; it’s beyond ridiculous to assume blacks are undermotivated and beyond ridiculous to assume M&Ms ameliorate, much less eliminate, the gap.
Your analysis is wrong (not surprisingly). The study does not suggest that the problem can be fixed by M&Ms. It suggests that a significant portion of the test-score gap is due to lower motivation, not lower intelligence. If this is the case, it doesn’t make it necessarily an easier problem to solve – it’s just a different problem. And though most of the long-term results of these particular attempts to fix the motivation failed, there were some positive results, as the article notes. This suggests that there might be something to the hypothesis – it just might be very difficult to fix low motivation on a large and long-term scale.
I ask you this, in all seriousness – do you really not believe that there’s a chance that lower-scoring students are some degree less motivated than higher-scoring students? Do you think motivation is exactly the same for low-performing and high-performing students?
You misunderstand the study, so this is not surprising to me.
Though it continues to boggle my mind that you don’t even entertain the possibility that your views, which match exactly the views of many fucking slave-owners on the intelligence of black people, might demean black people.
You continue to (probably deliberately) misstate the study. And further, it’s beyond ridiculous to believe that higher scoring students and lower scoring students are motivated to exactly the same degree. That’s just comical, dude.
It’s weird that you can get this far but no further.
Perhaps you could better explain the outcome of the study using your racial genetics explanation? I really am waiting to hear this one.
Of course it’s beyond ridiculous to assume that intrinsic motivation has anything to do with the test gap. Because you say so. And you’ve been right about so many things prior to this.
Perhaps you would like the study more if you were to read it and find a sentence that you could take out of context to support your crackpot beliefs? That’s seemed to work for you with other studies.
There were actually three studies. The first two provided M&Ms to students of all races. The low-IQ testers increased their results in all cases.
The question, which has occupied many minds better than yours, not that anyone would trumpet that particular achievement, is why students who clearly capable of high performance do not always demonstrate that ability.
In the short term, test takers can be motivated to do well. However, attempts to transform short-term motivation into long-term motivation have failed. This probably doesn’t shock for example procrastinators, who face similar difficulties, and who might for example occasionally end up debating mentally ill racists on the internet rather than finishing a memo.
You seem to be trying very hard to downplay this study. The obvious reason for that is because it destroys your entire racial genetics argument, and you know it.
Originally Posted by Evil Economist
“And while searching for that I found this, which says that the entire black/white IQ gap can be eliminated if the black test takers are offered one M&M per correct answer. Not sure what the primary source is for that though.”
(underlining by CP, to assist iiandyiiii in focusing on the actual verbiage used by EE)
Help me with how I’ve misstated it, as provided by Evil’s summary.
The whole study and conclusion is comical.