Do white athletes who are competitive share these same differences?
As an example, I think white kids have equal opportunity and equal access to the pathway to NBA fame and fortune. They have equal motivation. They have equal reason to put the NBA in front of all other pursuits.
Not every kid–black or white. Not every circumstance.
But–on average–the starting pool of white kids who would like to end up in the NBA is larger than the starting pool of black kids who would like to end up in the NBA.
I consider the opportunity to have at least been equalized. White kids have better coaching, more stable environments, better facilities, and so on. And yet blacks are disproportionately represented.
That’s close enough to normalizing opportunity for me to suspect inherent advantages. YMMV, and in fact for many on this board, blacks have some sort of superior opportunity or nurturing that generates their disproportionate representation. I remain unconvinced.
On the academic side, I find it hard to believe that poor whites from uneducated families have superior nurturing to wealthy blacks from educated parents. Yet SAT score differences are actually a little higher for those white cohorts. Superior opportunity? I don’t think so. And if you compare wealthy blacks or black kids from educated parents with whites of equal income or whites of educated parents, the differences are profound. Where, exactly, is the limited nurturing?
Why do you keep saying this, when purely on a mathematical basis it’s absurdly false? Seriously, if you would just take this one refrain out of your long laundry list of other (crazytown) refrains, maybe, just maybe, you could dupe a casual Doper into believing that your position derives from a logical place. But because you don’t, you end up producing an argument that anyone with even basic cognitive abilities would scoff at. And that is being charitable.
If the average pool of athletic white kids has five sports to chose from while the average pool of athletic black kid has two, guess what? The two groups do not have equal access to the NBA. The black kids with the highest aptitude will be less likely to stray into non-basketball sports and will be more likely to concentrate their attention on building skills necessary to get their foot in the NBA door. (You do know that countless hours of practice go into making a NBA professional, right? They just don’t tumble out of the womb dunking balls.)
If white kids are more likely to imagine themselves as physicians, politicians, and astronauts than black kids, who are more likely to imagine themselves as athletes and entertainers, guess what? The two groups are not equally motivated to be in the NBA. The black kids are going to more motivated, and on the flip side, they are going to be less motivated to become astronauts, etc.
Strangely, you don’t seem to have a hard time accepting the premise that whites and blacks have different opportunities and pressures. But for some reason you appear to have an inordinately difficult time grasping how these differences could into translate disparate outcomes wrt professional basketball. You say that whites and blacks are equally motivated to be NBA players. But wouldn’t this also mean they are equally motivated to be astronauts? Can you not see the flaw in this conclusion? How can you not?
CP, here’s a much more succinct thrashing of your thought process.
Question: Which of the following is most plausible explanation for why poor people win the lottery more than rich people?
a) Because they are more skilled at picking winning numbers due to a genetic advantage.
b) Because they are more likely to be Irish and hence have the leprachaun luck advantage.
c) Because they steal winning tickets from rich people.
d) Because they are more religious and God enjoys blessing them.
e) Because they are more apt to view the lottery as a gateway to the American dream and thus, more likely to buy lotto tickets than are rich people, who think education and entrepreneurship are surer bets to the American dream.
I keep saying this because it’s true.
It’s just an utterly specious argument that black kids want the NBA more than white kids. I happen to own a couple white kids, and I’m around them a lot out here in the 'Burbs. 
(And no; that’s not the sum of my experience).
Look; it’s true white kids have more alternatives. The point you seem unable to grasp is that they choose those alternatives only when #1 alternative–the NBA–becomes unavailable because they are outperformed.
Why don’t you check out an NBA game some time, in person or on TV. Who’s the crowd? Mostly white. Why don’t you check out the thousands of high schools across the country. Who are the players? Mostly representative of the demographic proportion of the school (with the exception of asians, perhaps). And except that where a school is mixed or has a reasonable percent of black kids, the black kids will be over-represented because of superior skills. But generally speaking, basketball is a widely played sports in both black and white childhoods, and kids with the right skillsets begin playing and dreaming in approximate ratios.
But basically, YWTF–and this is key–basically there is a much larger starting pool of white kids who desire dearly to have the NBA as their FIRST choice. If you told them they could be a doctor of medicine or Dr J, Dr J is their choice.
Now maybe the white kid ends up playing high school lacrosse and the black kid ends up playing pickup at the local park. Irrelevant. Both of those are the next tiers down.
If you want to pretend that white kids somehow just drift away from their NBA dreams because they lose interest, have at it. Look inside their homes for the NBA posters; look at where they want Dad to get tickets; look at them practice and practice when they find they have a knack for it; look around you and make a more calculated and honest decision. It’s a very rare athlete who performs at a competitive level who gives up the professional NBA chance electively for some other career.
What happens is that they get drummed out–white or black–because they are not good enough, and only THEN do they pursue those other choices. It’s not as if they choose those first from a menu of all choices.
f)Because, unlike the situation with basketball, more poor people play the lotto than rich people. In short, people who win the lotto approximately represent the proportion of people who play the lotto.
In basketball, on the other hand, a great many more white kids play than blacks, since whites outnumber blacks about 3:1 or so, and basketball is such a universal sport. Yet blacks vastly outrepresent US whites at success in basketball as measured by the NBA (and also college).
Almost no grade school, for instance, gives children no exposure; almost no middle school or high school is without a basketball team. And as a look-see of the crowds at any grade-school, high-school, college, church, league or professional game will show you, basketball is highly, highly popular among whites, and the attraction to the fame and fortune of the stars is very obvious in the rigor with which top white athletes pursue the game, and white children hero-worship the stars.
It’s as specious as saying poor people play the lotto more than rich folks, even though rich people have 1) more disposable income that could be used to buy lotto tickets and 2) just as much incentive to become multi-millionaires.
Where’s your science for this extraordinary claim? How about a cite that shows white kids are even playing against black ones, proportionately speaking? Because from what I’ve seen in my various travels and life experiences, whites kids are playing mostly against other white kids on the court.
This is another one of those oft-repeated gems of yours that make me chuckle. Just because someone is a spectator doesn’t mean they want to be a wannabe athlete. My dad likes to watch football but has never tried playing the game in his life. Plenty of people enjoy ballet performances but are not motivated to become a dancer. Tourists travel to Spain every year to watch grown men run away from bulls, but would never do that themselves.
Spectators and the objects of spectators are two different populations. Kind of like how voyeurs are distinct from exhibitionists. Whites may very well like watching basketball more than blacks, but that is about as profound as saying men like going to strip clubs more than women do.
And what would their parents be most likely to encourage them to pursue? If little Timmy announces he wants to be the next Kobe (let’s face it, Dr. J is about as old and played out as 19th century scientific racism…time to talk like you’re in the 21st century, dude), do you really expect white parents to give him the same level of encouragement as he would if his parents were black?
So where are the white American equivalents of Gasol, Nowitzki, Nash? Do the Euros and the Canucks have something in their genetic makeup that white Americans don’t?
Why are the best white players foreigners?
The “Dr J” was a play on words (Doctor v. Doctor J) but was apparently lost on you, honey.
Yes, to your question about Timmy. There are advantages to success at every level, so a kid with interest is going to be allowed to show talent and a kid with talent is going to be groomed for success until he is unsuccessful. He’s also more likely to come from a nuclear family, have a father, and get maximum support. He’s more likely to get absolutely maximum nurturing up until such point as it’s obvious he does not have the talent for the NBA. He’s significantly less likely to be distracted by practical realities such as keeping out of trouble and financial barriers.
All along the way, he’ll get the best shot at it, by far–again, on average. It’s much more likely the black kid is going to have to make it on his own.
For a talented white kid, sports stardom starts in grade school on the local playing field, and the best kids are advanced vigorously all along the way. They are enthusiastically supported and nurtured in middle school and high school, often with an eye toward a college scholarship, local fame, grooming for success in life by using the work ethic of sport, and so on. It’s not as if it’s the NBA or nothing and it’s not as if they somehow don’t want to perform to their maximum because they are white.
They do not drop out until they can no longer perform at par with their peer group of fellow players; arrival at high school or college can be a bit of a wakeup call if they have been confined to groups of white players only.
This notion of yours that white kids and their families just give up and drop out, conceding defeat without even trying to figure out if they could be good, is tenuous at best, and completely unsupported by even the most casual observation of thousands upon thousands of predominately white schools all across the country which have robust and popular basketball programs. The idea that all those kids in all those schools are just giving basketball some sort of peripheral nonchalance attitude is rather silly.
Well, Gasol and Nowitzki have 7’ genes in their makeup.
Looking across the NBA it would seem obvious that white players of ordinary height are substantially under-represented for playing time compared with black players of ordinary height…in general, anyone performing at the level of the NBA has something in their genetic makeup. This does not mean there are no outliers. At issue is prevalence of genetically-determined differences; not complete absence of them.
I can only speak anecdotally, but I have a pair of white kids myself, and having participated in high school basketball as a parent, I think you are vastly overstating the degree to which white kids playing primary and secondary school basketball look at the NBA as a real world aspirational goal PRIOR to being hammered and humiliated by your genetically superior black athlete.
Trying to say that young primary and secondary school blacks and whites have a real world equivalence in looking at the NBA as an aspirational goal they are willing to laser focus and bet their lives and futures on is just silly. The reasons for this are complex and rooted both in the respective options and expectations of back and white culture, but the effect (IMO) is quite real in terms of how the actors within those respective cohorts view basketball as a golden ticket.
White kids enjoy basketball and white people enjoy being basketball spectators, but there is marked difference (from my observation) in the level of real striving between black and white players. Talented black players see this as a life or death struggle, talented white players not so much.
'prior " is the operative word here.
Your only mistake is assuming that black kids look to the NBA moreso than white kids as an aspirational goal before the black kids start hammering on the white kids.
The fact is that you can pretty well tell who the future athletes are once the enter the little leagues.
I recognized that my daughter had a particular ability to excel in shot put when she blew away all the competition in a citywide elementary school competion when she was 11 years old. I put her in a track club, and at 16 she garnered medals in shotput and discus at the British Columbia Summer Games. Two years later her cousin got on that podium as well for shotput and never even joined a track club.
And for all these young boys, the prime motivating factor to excel is status. It is the only thing that matters. Whether you are poor or rich, good looking or ugly, stupid or smart, if they want you on the team because you’re good at basketball, you’ve got respect and status. Only when you realize you aren’t satisfied with your place in the local heirarchy will you look elsewhere to spend your time.
And as all these young athletes mature, only a few, based on their records, will do more than dream to be in the NBA. And that goes for blacks and whites alike.
Why wouldn’t black kids look to the NBA moreso than whites, well in advance of middle and high school? Almost all basketball players look like them, have names that sound like theirs, maybe even grew up in their same neighborhoods. A league that is predominately black is going to appeal to black kids differently than it will white kids. It screams “black”. That is going affect their aspirations in different ways.
It makes no sense for white men in this thread to assert how obvious it is that their demographic group is genetically disadvantaged when it comes to basketball, and then turn and around act like these attitudes don’t somehow trickle down to their children, influencing their ambitions and the sports they gravitate to.
Your emphasis on innate certainly makes it abit harder to answer than the existence of group differences at all. However, pointing out the existence of a group difference that’s evidenced by domination says markedly little about it being “innate”. It’s an entirely different leap in general to posit how heritable/malleable or deep-seated a difference is based purely on how it’s seemingly not 100% environmental in origin. It’s a piss poor way of framing that kind of question.
Since so much of this thread focuses on physical differences, it’s not like those are deep-seated either. In the modern first world, height is one of the most heritable physical traits around. (excepting extreme traits like skin color, crano-facial structure, hair structure etc. which are known to take thousands of years to change on their own) Yet that very high heritability certainly doesn’t imply it’s immutable. Look at the danes- they tower over all other european countries, and they continue to grow, and the finns are also experiencing similar developments. Yet denmark is a very developed country and the heritability of height isn’t bound to be much different than other similar countries due to things like disease, malnutrition etc. playing almost no role. What sets them apart is their lifestyle and particular dietary practices.
Body weight’s average heritability is also strongly genetic in the modern first world, but I don’t know of anyone arguing that can’t be significantly altered.
Many of the below-the-neck physical differences that show differences between ethnic groups follow similar patterns. I mean, try working out for awhile and see what happens. Yes, that’s probably not going to bring you to olympic medal level even if you start out as a young child, but you’ll definitely be unbelievably closer than if you did nothing. And just why should the issue of group differences be about closing the gaps within just one generation?
Then again, I’m reminded of that Richard Sandrak freak or a CNN report I saw on boys who basically work at slaves in Ghana, who work many hours on fishing boats and have hyper-developed muscles for their age. Obviously not health or practical cases, but something to think about.
And alot of people are citing Jon Entine’s work. I haven’t read his book, but I get a poor impression when he seems to be exploiting “if it’s not entirely environmental, then it’s mostly genetic” logic, along with this: Resurrecting Racism: The attack on black people using phony science
I should note that this critique of Entine is flawed in alot of ways. It’s terribly written, accuses Entine of not being jewish and wanting to basically bring about another Reich, along with it arguing that IQ tests are still biased etc. but it has some very illuminating critiques, not just on the sports data Entine musters, but also much of his underlying philosophy and the insane media treatment of it.
Especially this: Resurrecting Racism: The attack on black people using phony science
Check out the maps on african medalists, especially the ones in Kenya. It’s pretty damning.
But moreso on topic, the question itself is something that can’t be easily answered in a typical co-worker context, and even if my response could be condensed, there’s no way of knowing where the discussion would lead. The person who even poses the question, by arguing the differences are innate simply based on dominance can easily be faulted.
Just to benefit my laziness, could you post the cite you use to talk about normalization? I think you have before but I am unsure how to find it. I am curious about this normalization idea and would like to follow the map of citations and references of this work to get a sense of the state-of-the-art. I am most curious about one that I vaguely remember concerning wealth, race and IQ.
He’s bringing up a false dichotomy common to many of his lot. If the differences aren’t so easily pinned down to being entirely environmental in origin, then they’re deep-seated, like he does with his spurious comparison of whites having “better facilities and coaching”, whatever that exactly refers to how and relevant it is to the development of physical prowess.
[QUOTE=Chief Pendant]
On the academic side, I find it hard to believe that poor whites from uneducated families have superior nurturing to wealthy blacks from educated parents. Yet SAT score differences are actually a little higher for those white cohorts. Superior opportunity? I don’t think so. And if you compare wealthy blacks or black kids from educated parents with whites of equal income or whites of educated parents, the differences are profound. Where, exactly, is the limited nurturing?
[/QUOTE]
I’m well aware of what you’re talking about. The fact that in measures like the SAT, the children of rich blacks do worse than the children of poor whites, and this could probably be so easily due to the phenomenon of genetic regression to the mean, wherein offspring that deviate significantly from their parents in a quantitative trait will have their genetic contribution in their offspring approximate their parents.
And this is where it becomes so poorly applied to race differences. The basic subtext is this- “see, those black kids are doing so poorly academically on things like the SAT because of regression to the mean. Their parents are outliers and their offspring are going to resemble their own parents more.”
The problem with this is how it implies an absurd degree of social mobility. The subtext is that IQ is so tightly linked to SES (it’s not) and somehow, high IQ blacks born to low IQ blacks manage to climb their way out of extreme poverty, manage to get very good educations and the like, and are able to settle down in a stable enough matter that they’ll even be able to have kids in a rich neighborhood.
That kind of social mobility seldom exists in the real world. It doesn’t exist even in the US. Not even close. I do not dispute the phenomenon of regression to the mean, but it’s so poorly applied to the issue of race differences. The whole undercurrent is an almost magical form of social mobility that markedly few people anywhere experience.
Of course, since people almost invariable focus on the differences between blacks and whites, it apparently also exists between all groups- hispanics compared to whites then whites compared to asians- where the children of rich parents do worse than the children of other rich parents among groups that do better academically. (i don’t have a chart onhand, but I’ve seen it, and it related specifically to SAT scores.)
You may think this is even more confirmation for your thesis, but it actually makes it even harder to believe if this kind of social mobility so strictly follows IQ lines and regression lines so linearly, when the only thing really suggesting this is SAT data. Virtually nothing else supports this kind of social mobility.
I don’t know the answer to what’s going on, but I find the idea of IQ and regression being the prime explanatory factors to be odious.
Nevermind how one of the few cases of tests for regression to the mean regarding B-W differences, conducted by Jensen himself, doesn’t bare out what you’re talking about. I think Jensen looked at the offspring of black and white parents with IQ’s of 120, and the white children had average IQ’s of 110 while the black children had average IQ’s of 100. Shouldn’t they be averaging around 85?
Nevermind all of this is also heavily tied to the idea of SES being so dependent on IQ- it’s not, but I digress.
Finally, you focus so heavily on the issue of how the home environment doesn’t seem to do much. It’s true. The home environment and parental influence seem to exhibit markedly little permanent effects, if any, on IQ and academic ability, atleast in a direct fashion. I’m not exactly sure of the dynamics of this, but Judith Rich Harris’ work lays out why the same seems to hold true quite clearly for personality, and somehow not lending much credence to hereditarian thinking.
But somehow, you treat this as a huge victory for your side. Yet: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~socant/How%20Jews%20Became%20Smart%20(2008).pdf
Whatever influences the home environment don’t have are shifted to the non-shared environment, which are influences outside the home and common family environment. Certainly many people today find it hard to give up the influence of home environment, but what should really matter are fundamentals- the fact a typical credo of environmental influence on psychological makeup is invalid doesn’t validate you hereditarians, and merely shifts the principle influence to a somewhat different area.
I don’t think Plomin is a hereditarian either, what with him seeming to push for relatively lower heritabilities than the general figures. (for him, it’s .65 instead of .7-.9, meaning a little over 8 points are due to environmental differences.)
My point was that in early development, the glamour and desire for riches in the NBA is not a motivating factor. The only driving factor outside of a desire to have fun is to seek status and that is universal and equally imperative amongst all peoples.
Think about those days after the colour barrier was broken in the NBA and MLB. There was an enormous pool of black talent to subsequently fill the rosters that had no reason to believe the could get there. They didn’t heven have heros until Jackie Robinson of baseball.
Well I grew up with those attitudes and still gave basketball my all. My peers and I never saw that as a reason to give up. There are still a lot of white guys in the NBA, especially with the additional franchises and the dream is still attainable for a white guy. Steve Nash, a fellow Canadian will tell you that.
Chief Pedant’s arguments have convinced me - convinced me that Canadians are genetically superior at hockey.
And curling, eh.
Well here’s an assertion that we can all disagree with including the author. As such, it does nothing to advance this debate.