I don’t disagree with you really. I was hoping Chief would clarify what he was saying there. I just think the issue isn’t really bias, but whether the disparity, is reasonable. I understand what you mean though. You are saying the test doesn’t do something that makes it impossible for some people to score as high as others, like adding or subtracting points according to skin color. And I can’t disagree with that.
But many police exams do have that. Check out the NYPD one I linked to, which has questions testing for spatial perception, navigation/map reading, visual scene analysis.
Great for the NYPD. Not so much for other PDs. If each jurisdiction has it’s own exam, doesn’t it seem likely that some are better than others, some more biased than others?
Constructing good, valid tests is not an easy task. Everyone reinventing the wheel just makes it that much harder.
I agree.
It’s long been a popular perception that one explanation for persistent score differences among SIRE groups is some sort of “cultural” bias. In practice though, despite the sort of study you mention which purports to show “bias issues,” there isn’t much support for it.
First of all, exams such as the one in question here, like the exam that precipitated the Ricci case, are written against a standard body of material, the study of which is available to all. The exams are created by third-party firms in the testing business, and great rigor is maintained in making sure they are not culturally biased. While they may not be perfect, no one in the Ricci case, where the exam was carefully dissected, ever found any actual cultural bias–and that case went all the way to the Supreme Court.
Second, it’s not as if the SAT (in your example) is an isolated exam. What about exams on quantitative material? What about exams on sciences? What about exams on historical facts? The gap persists across nearly every academic discipline and every type of standardized exam. There is a persistent and immutable difference, as immutable as the performance gap for basketball or sprinting.
Third, if one looks at the SATs in particular, black children of wealthy and educated black parents underperform white children from poor and uneducated families. This hardly promotes a notion that that particular exam is somehow “culturally biased.” Those educated and wealthy parents are working and living in the same culture, for the most part, as their white counterparts. A black physician is more likely to be my neighbor than parked in a poor community somewhere.
It’s time to face a blunt truth: getting diverse representation in the workplace requires race-based Affirmative Action, and that means a separate and lowered standard for blacks on standardized testing. If you just lower the standard for everyone, you won’t get the best white or asian applicants from their pool. We already have black attorneys and physicians who, on average, have lower scores on entrance and licensing exams than their white counterparts by an enormous margin. Surely we can find a way to be more inclusive for police departments, many of which have to deal with predominately black citizenry in their particular area.
From that study:
Until you can show me a genetic tendency for physiological differences in brain function analogous to the muscle fiber difference that contributes to better performance in certain sports, I’m going to stick with the theory that language and the infrastructural education difference account for the performance difference.
Performance is composed of many factors. Moving the family to an upscale neighborhood doesn’t magically change the culture in which they’ve been socialized. And it doesn’t magically erase expectations of teachers and other students in the new school.
This is a classic fish in water problem? “There’s no issue with the water. We all thrive in it. It’s water.” You don’t even have the perspective that lets you think about the issue and ask the right questions.
Here you go:
See also, Paul Thompson’s work:
Of course there are individual differences in brain structure.
The context of this discussion is racial differences. We have measured differences in muscle fiber type distribution associated with better performance in some sports as suggested in the analogy.
But neither of the cites you provide even talk about racial differences. Until they can show that there is a physical difference in brain structure between the two racial populations that is linked to intellectual performance in the area being tested, I’m going to stick with the theory that there’s no significant biological difference.
I’m curious about something. You seem to acknowledge that there are physical differences among races. If so, why are you so sure that there wouldn’t also be differences that go to brain function? Why are you so apparently invested in there not being? Seems to me that since physical differences do, in fact, exist, that those differences might very well include the brain, no?
I don’t start with the assumption that any are biased, much less “more biased.” That’s because no one’s shown a scintilla or proof that the test itself is biased in any way that can be described or quantified. No one’s pointed me to a single question where I could say Aha, that’s so unfair, you can’t expect a black person to know X or determine Y!
The inability to prove any meaningful bias in any specific portion of the exam by reference to a single criterion other than the politically undesirable test outcomes achieved by blacks (whose circularity – the argument’s I mean, not the blacks – I hope should be obvious to all) is why I’m not willing to debate or consider whether a particular test was “more biased” or “unacceptably biased.” You don’t get to have (much less win) a debate by arguing “accepting that some unicorns are white and some other ones are different shades of red, isn’t it reasonable to assume that some unicorns will be pinker than others?”
What if it is a mostly older white community in a southern state with citizens that are bigots? Wouldn’t an all-white police force better serve them than having to put up with orders from a black guy that they all hate?
I think you would be against that, but seem to support the policy when it is a mostly black community that hates white police officers.
There could be such differences. But you start by hypothesizing that there are none. Once you falsify that hypothesis, you may then proceed to measuring them and subsequently try to figure out what those differences might mean.
It’s quite a bit easier to track physiological differences in muscle tissues and relate that to certain kinds of physical performance than understand brain function and physiological differences and how those might be reflected in higher order mental tests.
Well there is preliminary evidence of recent sweeps in terms of genes relating to cognitive function (ie. genes in a biological pathway called NRG-ERBB4 that controls brain development and brain synapse function and that has even been linked to cognitive function. The new versions of these genes didn’t occur in all groups). Signals of recent positive selection in a worldwide sample of human populations
Also, there has been consistent evidence that overall volume (which is correlated with cognitive abilities) differs across groups.
http://www.loni.ucla.edu/~thompson/IQ/NRN2004_IQ.html
Whole-brain size and general mental ability: A review. International Journal of Neuroscience, 119, 691-731.
Fair enough.
If your premise is true, I hope we can become more successful finding exactly what those non-genetic barriers are, and solve them. To date, here and elsewhere; across every political system, every educational approach; every economic paradigm; every everything–we’ve not had much success.
But I recognize that the motivation to hang onto the assumption that the persistent performance difference among SIRE groups given equal opportunity just cannot possibly be based on gene prevalence differences is a noble and well-intentioned one. Let’s hope we stumble upon that secret hidden nurturing variable we’ve missed all these years so we can correct it.
In the meantime, I maintain that whether or not performance differences can be proved to be genetic or not, we need race-based Affirmative Action to get a broad representation of the best possible candidates from every race. Until we find and correct that heretofore unknown variable, we’ll continue to see enormous performance differences on standardized exams. It’s a universal rank order, so for now I think we need to get past arguing why it exists and establish race-based Affirmative Action.
For what jobs? Police and teachers are among the only categories where I’ve heard an even plausible rationale for why “a broad representation of the best possible candidates from every race” is necessarily a good in even the slightest degree. Taking “diversity” as a universal good is certainly question begging as to many professions, both in terms of “getting the job done right” (how does a black accountant account any differently or insightfully, despite having lower scores, than a white accountant) or “making the user population feel not-excluded” (never met a white woman who felt othered or underserved by the 100% Vietnamese female staff at the nail salon or a black lush who would strongly prefer if he could be served by someone than an Irish dude).
Because discriminatory policies (and AA is undeniably discriminatory on the definition of treating similarly situated people differently) usually are evaluated on a strict scrutiny basis, you’d have to justify race-based AA on a job-by-job, industry-by-industry basis and identify specific reasons for why letting the chips fall where they may, as opposed to putting a thumb on the scale with AA, created some “public bad,” in which “failure of minorities to get the jobs they want” is not, in itself, a sufficient public bad.
You’d also need to consider the inevitable externality costs of AA. In effect, most AA programs end up being, IME, completely driven by the quota, with the attempt to seek “the best blacks” taking a back seat to “getting enough blacks.” Even if a given black with a 58% score could do not a lot worse than a white with 75%, and again IME, when your emphasis is first and foremost on hitting the quota, you get a lot more guys who aren’t just 58% on the test but are kind of a mess across the board. Once hired, someone like that either flames out quickly (with great cost and inconvenience to the organization, and him for that matter) in the private sector, or stays on forever in the public sector. You could try to address this on the front end by really serious attention to making sure a 58% test AA candidate really was, in every other way, a solid character, but that’s an additional cost.
Just to give you an idea of the kind of score differences we deal with in real life in Medicine, here are Medical College Admission Test Scores for applicants by race.
Verbal: Black 7.2 Asian 9.0
Physical Science: Black 7.3 Asian 10.1
Biological Science: Black 7.7 Asian 10.2
These are enormous gaps that Medical Schools have to deal with. As a practical reality, only AA will bridge them. They haven’t changed in decades, all efforts to the contrary. (Medical schooling deals with this by having a number of historically black schools, which amounts to the same thing as AA. That is, maintaining two different standards in recognition of the inability of higher education to close the standardized score gap in preparing students.)
For nearly every job, unless you want the enormous economic disparity among race classes to persist.
In a perfect world, we get rid of race as a Self-Identifier. Since we’re hard-wired as humans to identify with own tribe, this doesn’t seem likely to happen any time soon.
And in a catch-22, one of the ways to eliminate a self-identification with race is to promote diversity in the first place as one of the greatest goods. If, at a Hospital, every doctor is asian or white and every black is cleaning the place, we’re not going to get to a color-blind society. On the other hand, a black physician is as likely to identify culturally with me as opposed to the housekeeper.
Right now, if you were to look at only whites, you’d see that there’s an approximate individual success correlation with intelligence. The smartest ones get into better schools (or are smart enough to find success outside the normal education pathway), make better life decisions and perform better in the real world. If we wanted to get that lower-intelligence tier of whites into a more successful tier, we’d have to establish a separate standard for them. There’s no pressure to do that because, as a group, there’s no charge of discrimination and therefore no divisiveness. This is not the case with racial categories.
So if an entire race group levels a charge of discrimination as the cause for their lack of success, and if no attempt to improve their performance on standardized measurements that serve as job qualifications are successful, we have no alternative but to establish a separate and lower standard to serve the greater good of diversity. The alternative (as with Dayton) is to lower the standard for everyone, and that will surely result in a less effective way to get the best candidates for a job.
The practical result of assuming there can be no genetic average differences among SIRE groups is that every performance gap must be the result of discrimination or differential nurturing that is not the fault of the individual. The only way to address that disparity is to establish a separate and unequal standard until such time as the discrimination and differential nurturing are eliminated. Because I believe the differences are genetic, I don’t think the gap will ever go away until the gene pool is more evenly mixed.
The root cause of performance differences is irrelevant, however. Whether it’s nature or nurture, we need race-based AA to get race-based success ratios.
Neither are you going to get a colour-blind society if you discriminate against asians or white people on the basis of their skin colour.
If an entire race group blames their failure on discrimination, they should have to prove it if they expect preferential treatment as a result.
No, it’s only an indication of straight ahead speed and does not include the ability to interact with other players and move from side to side. It’s the intrinsic ability to run the ball down the field while avoiding others which counts and that doesn’t show up in a speed test.
Sound familiar.
There’s black people in Dayton?!? :eek:
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j/k…I know there’s a lot of black people in Dayton; I’ve been there…which makes me wonder if they hadn’t already lowered the standards so the white people there could pass the test…Ba Dum BOOM!