Of course, nobody agrees with THE NARRATIVE about institutional discrimination against Black people.
As for the second point, in many respects, people with lower IQs are treated worse. They are not allowed into the best schools or hired for many of the top jobs – and justifiable so because they are less competent, on average. But when it comes to race an exception is made. Establishing that racial differences are natural largely disembowels the justification for this exceptionalism and therefore makes worse treatment, in proportion with IQ differences, justified. Which is just to say, it makes preferential treatment (e.g., disparate impact) unjustified.
But I really don’t care about that. If society wants to discriminate for Black people I think that’s great. My issue is with the cultural marxist clap trap.
You keep referring to African-Americans as “blacks” or “negroes”, yet you insist that Latin Americans can’t be considered “whites” or “caucasians” because they are a “hybrid”.
If you insist that Castizos(who are of almost %100 European descent) aren’t “white” or “caucasian” isn’t it intellectually inconsistent to repeatedly refer to African-Americans who are of both African and European descent as “blacks” or “negroes”?
False argument.Refusing to offer housing, jobs, or promotions at work to individual people who are of a different color QUOTE]
Provide some cites using nationally representative samples. We’ll see how much of this supposed “racial discrimination” reduces down to the all too common and
permissible “human capital discrimination.” Which is the whole point.
You don’t seem to be getting the idea of g differences.
If, by that, you mean that I do not believe in the mythology of “g” on which a number of psych types have chosen to build their careers, that is hardly a matter of “not getting” something, simply a recognition that their tests show them what they want to see. Even your most recent attempts to show that it has some relevance to reality demonstrated nothing more than that the same group of believers had chosen to correlate separate test score with similar things that they choose to decribe as different to support their claims while failing to actually demonstrate a difference.
The discussion under this thread has strayed off topic. In light of this, I am requesting that commenters stick to the thread topic, which is: “Can the Black-White racial IQ gap in the US be environmentally explained?” Those who wish to discuss related matters can open a new thread and link it to this one. Based on the comments left, two such threads might be: “Are there non-racist reasons for discussing possible genetic causes of racial IQ differences?” or “Are contemporaneous US racial disparities in income, education, health, employment, housing, and so on mostly due to discrimination, past or present, as many argue?” As for myself, I will no longer reply to off topic comments or questions.
Well, following up on my earlier post, let’s assume (for the sake of argument) the answer to the OP is “no” and it can be quantified in some manner, i.e. we have scientific proof that 1% of whites (assuming also that “white” can be defined in some useful manner) are genetically prone to violent criminality, while 5% of blacks are (same assumption regarding “black”). If 5% seems too low a number, I invite suggestions (5% is roughly in line with the rate of incarceration for black male adults, if that means anything), but I daresay estimates of 40% or higher are clearly preposterous - if the rate was that high, American society wouldn’t be troubled with mere “crime”, but would be facing a full-on racially-delineated insurgency several orders of magnitude worse than post-2003 Iraq.
So barring arguments to the contrary, I’m going to assume on top of all other assumptions that a majority of blacks (and quite likely a vast majority) are not genetically prone to violent crime. We know, however, that environmental factors (poverty, abuse, addiction, contact with criminals, etc.) can lead to criminal tendencies (in fact, a large part of these discussions is the claim, even among people who believe in the genetic predispositions, that it explains variations that are not covered by environmental effects).
NDD’s suggestions of what we “do” with this knowledge strike me as guaranteed to vastly increase the environmental effects by ensuring blacks who are poor will stay poor, blacks who go to jail and learn from other criminals will have longer sentences in which to do so, blacks who might benefit positively from educational opportunities that let them escape poverty, addiction and contact with criminals will be denied these opportunities. Net effect: more criminals - whatever the genetic influence might be, it’ll be used as a justification for creating environmental effects that will aggravate rather than alleviate the problem.
I daresay this line of reasoning is not driven by some liberal PC nonsense about fear of talking about inferior racial groups and whatnot, or whatever the prevailing accusation is. I figure it’s just math.
Why would they be denied opportunities? It is pretty well known that men are genetically more likely to commit crime than females. Has this lead to discrimination and loss of opportunity for males?
Well, it would be if society decided males should be denied government benefits, access to better schools, harsher criminal punishments simply for being male… That’s what I derived as the intent of NDD’s suggestions.
Anyway, there are too many race-themed threads open now, and NDD is active in most or all of them, saying the same basic stuff and they’re all starting to blur together to me to the point where I’ve misread the title question of this particular thread, so I guess I’ll take a break from the overall topic.
Note Professor Flynn’s comments about criticism of g not being a reason to discard Jensen’s arguments.
In any case, there is quite a bit of evidence on the usefulness of g & [neurobiological correlates](http://www.yale.edu/scan/ GT_2004_NRN.pdf). It’s more than people just seeing what they want to see.
I’ll comment on this since it’s germane to the thread topic. Wiki has a surprisingly good article on this. The only thing seriously debated now is the theory of g. As it is, when I refer to g I am limiting my reference to g in the statistical sense of a positive manifold and I am making no commitment to a specific g theory (e.g., Jensen’s g). If you find a published psychometrician who disputes the existence of statistical g, please point him or her out. Otherwise, we will take statistical g as a fact. Now the reason statistical g is important is that (a) it has biologically robust correlates (b) it is the most heritable cognitive factor (c) it is the factor common to cognitive abilities (d) it has the most predictive power and (e) it has numerous social correlates. The issue of causality between g and the social correlates has been resolved through SEM and some clever sib methodologies. I can dig up the studies if you want. So I’m not sure what the objection is. If you read my discussion, you’ll see that much of it assumes a non-Spearman/Jensen g theory. If it turned out that Spearman/Jensen’s biological-g theory was correct, there would be nothing to discussion, because the B-W gap can not be environmentally biologically explained. So on this ground there is really nothing you can object to. I am granted the objection that the positive manifold does not arise out of a property of the brain a la Spearman and Jensen.
I don’t know the answer to any of these differences but I think we often underestimate the influence of culture. Blacks in the US were treated (effectively if not legally) more or less as subhuman animals well into the 20th century.
While lots of people like to think we’re heading to being a more accepting society, as a white man who deals mainly with the upper income cohort of the population I’m here to tell you that vast and deep stretches of the white US population are hardcore racists who may be be polite in public, and when the beers get cracked open, and the wine glasses are filled behind closed doors it is quite evident they have no use for black people. And these are the supposed “better quality” white people with nice houses and university educations who should know better.
And now just two generations past this astounding degree of human oppression on every level possible, we’re scratching our heads and wondering why they aren’t as good at abstract intellectual exercises as we are. Why more black families don’t value a life of the mind to the same degree some white households do.
Two (2) generations and we’re wondering why they can’t shrug all that baggage off and get cracking.
It took 400 years to grind black people and their families into paste and make them chattels and draft animals, and we wonder why they aren’t playing three dimensional chess 50 years after legal racism ended in a culture where de facto racism still suffuses their everyday lives.
Some may argue all that is irrelevant, but I do not believe it is. The arrogance of expecting black culture to throw off the effects of being ball peen hammered for 400 years in two generations is a little much IMO.
We will do no such thing. You might take it as a"statistical fact." I will understand it as the closed loop desires of a particular group of people. Once you have decided to rely on “published psychometricians,” you have already accepted their premise. I do not. Nothing they have published looks remotely like what they claim it to be, to me. Accepting their claims is begging the question and I see no reason to fall into that error.
More begging the question. Hsu wants, (needs), to have a some shorthand method of disparaging or exalting various groups. That does not make his desire desirable, in general.
His thesis is
However, he provides no reason for us to believe that this is even desirable. What is a single number for athletic ability? What fool would even try to boil down the myriad characteristics necessary to analyze those traits into a single number? Yet, for intelligence–that is clearly as complex as athletic ability–he insists that it is both a good idea to do so and that people who buy into that unrealistic desire have actually found a good way to do it.
I don’t know. I do know, however, that testing “intelligence” is usually done from a hugely culturally bound perspective. From the way the questions are framed to the assumptions underlying how people will view them. When I applied to Mensa on a vanity lark 25 years ago I tried taking a suggested free IQ test. It was British and appeared to be from the 1950s or 1960s. Some of the questions were (to me) barely comprehensible. It took minutes just to ferret out what they were asking. I wound up using my GRE scores which were more than sufficient to meet their standard. I did not renew membership the next year.
In the context of testing other countries and other cultures, that a test offset by just (guessing) 30 years or so, and the difference between American and British English threw me for a loop vs testing native peoples who have probably never had an introductions to abstract reasoning and expecting they will perform in a way that allows us to make scientifically valid determinations about their inherent biological capacity for intelligence, is questionable.
The persistent ethnic differences the study refers to are largely those between white Britons on the one hand, and Asian Britons on the other. It’s not a “black” issue at all. (Of course, absolutely none of the subjects are black Americans, so it wouldn’t have any bearing on the US situation at all.)
You continue to cite sources that work against you. It’s the damnedest thing. Do you read your sources, or just link to anything that seems promising?
Yes, they are meant to have tests that adjust for cultural factors (see Jones & Schneider). They also point out that environmental factors may account for between country differences.
The difference has certain psychometric properties that call into question most cultural explanations. That’s a semi-complex topic, though. As for the whole subhuman treatment explanation, if you mean a legacy of abuse, compare the descendants of Blacks slaves to the descendants of Russian serfs. Thomas Jefferson gave the most poignant reply to this line of argument almost 225 years ago:
The difference 225 years ago could not have been explained by a cultural legacy of abuse, since the majority of Blacks were imported after 1750. And there is no evidence in other populations that historic deprivations depress contemporaneous IQ except though contemporaneous influences. So the cause needs to be contemporaneous, which means that we should be able to identify it.
With regards to racism, this is an empirically testable hypothesis. You can see if tendencies towards racism positively correlate with wealth. You’ll find that they don’t. Whatever the case, this doesn’t supply a causal mechanism. One possible one suggested by your comment is market discrimination, discouraging Blacks from accumulating “human capital.” You can evaluate this by comparing the premium placed on Black versus White IQ. It there was market based discrimination Black IQ should be less valued. However if you check the NLSY97, you will find, as discussed, that a higher premium is placed on Black “human capital” than white human capital. This doesn’t look like market based discrimination or rich people not wanting anything to do with Blacks. It looks like they prefer Blacks relative to Whites of the same IQ level.
I suppose that the evidence for our purported ubiquitous racism is the racial inequality. Let’s put aside our putting the cart before the horse. Noticeable is the massive amount of institutional discrimination for Blacks under the guise of disparate impact and affirmative action, let alone the numerous “anti-discrimination” lawsuits routinely filled by the DOJ on the basis of racial outcome difference. Or the Media bias for Blacks (e.g., reporting about crime). Or the [URL=“APA PsycNet”]effusing liberal bias](Loving v. Virginia - Wikipedia) for all things diverse, the darker the better. One would think that were the IQ difference the product of such discrimination, it would
vary with the magnitude of the discrimination. And yet the IQ gap for 25 year olds is the same now as it was in the 1960s and probably was in the 1920s. This of course is why the US must be suffuse with subtle, secretive malice against Blacks. How could one otherwise explain the secular persistence of the difference, despite the clear decline in overt racism, if racism is said to cause the gap.
As for that racism though, again, it needs to act in some manner. Somehow it needs to cause Black children to achieve their piagetian stages latter than Whites. To be behind in learning algebra. To be retarded at a higher rate.
You mentioned marriage and school segregation. As for the former, miscegenation, I see nothing wrong with outlawing it, despite my own racial infidelity. So I don’t see that as a naughty thing, per se. I do fail to see how depriving Blacks of White spouses could have environmentally caused the gap. As it is, mixed race kids preform intermediate to monoracial kids. You can see this in recent nationally representative samples. So nothing has changed in this regards in the last 225 years. This type of integration decreases the gap no more than a genetic hypothesis would predict. Why so if “marriage segregation” was effecting the difference? As for attending the same schools, if this was the cause,
then Blacks who attended more “integrated” schools should not be depressed in IQ. But this is clearly not the case. Nothing has changed since the 1960s in this regards. From the Coleman report to the latest NAEP report.
To be exact, we wonder why the children of the highest class Blacks preform little to no better than the children of the lowest class Whites, when, presumably, the upper class are more cultured than the lower. And why this phenomena has not changed in the past 80 years. We also wonder why Hispanics who value the “life of the mind” less, as judged by the correlation between GPA and popularity, and who are linguistically disadvantaged, and who have a worse average SES, do better than Blacks on the same IQ tests. And we wonder why the general intelligence of Blacks is specifically affected, and not memory, and personality.
Where there no stereotypes about Lazy Blacks? Why then is there no difference in level of measured conscientiousness? Why was willingness to work also not affected?And we wonder why the differences are greatest in the factor common to mental abilities rather than those specific which are more readily culturally developed. And we wonder why more negro looking Blacks preform substantially worse than less negro looking Blacks. And why the many early environmental interventions have had little lasting effect. And why the differential is no less at the upper ends of the IQ spectrum than the lower. And why the heritability of IQ is not substantially depressed in the Black population compared to the White as it is in populations that are known to be highly environmentally affected compared to those not. And, most of all, we wonder why no specific explanations have been forthcoming. So called “oppression” must act by some pathways? What are they, specifically?
And yet, as we said, the difference was reported in 1775 so it must have formed in less than two generations as the average year of importation was after 1750 (which of course means that on average Black genealogical lines were only in this country for less than 210 years.) If the difference was capable of arising so readily, why should we not be surprised that it has decreased so little in the last 100 years amidst such social change?
And here I was worried that I badly misjudged the straightdope crowd.