There is no reason to suppose that a group cannot both be the most enthusiastic about sports and have a higher proportion of obesity.
There are a whole number of assumptions you’d have to make that would make those propositions incompatible.
Note also that the figures you cite are based on BMI, which does not distinguish fat from muscle. Most NBA players have at least an “overweight” BMI, and some are technically obese.
Danes are Scandinavians.
Oh. Well, I meant scandinavians in the sense of the ones more greatly removed from the rest of europe- finland, norway, sweden. Misunderstanding on both our parts, I guess.
Thanks for putting words in my mouth
Canadian hockey players growing up playing hockey because they enjoy it, not because they are looking to their future. Black Americans growing up play basketball because they enjoy it, not because they are thinking of their future.
Well; it’s an opinion, anyway. I’m not sure he’s actually “analyzing” any studies, for instance.
And Gladwell is not alone in that opinion of course.
I am sure you are familiar with Claude Steele’s work on the subject. This particular cite is for one of his early articles–1992 Atlantic. I highly recommend it, despite the fact that I do not agree that stubbornly persistent differences in performance (for either sports or academics) are simply the result of stubbornly persistent stereotype threats and/or self-esteem or self-confidence.
A few lines from Steele’s Atlantic article:
*"Standing ready is a familiar set of explanations. First is societal disadvantage…Some analysts point also to black American culture, suggesting that, hampered by disadvantage, it doesn’t sustain the values and expectations critical to education, or that it fosters learning orientations ill suited to school achievement, or that it even “opposes” mainstream achievement. These are the chestnuts, and I had always thought them adequate. Then several facts emerged that just didn’t seem to fit.
For one thing, the achievement deficits occur even when black students suffer no major financial disadvantage…
Neither is the problem fully explained, as one might assume, by deficits in skill or preparation which blacks might suffer because of background disadvantages. I first doubted that such a connection existed when I saw flunk-out rates for black and white students at a large, prestigious university…
Doing well in school requires a belief that school achievement can be a promising basis of self-esteem, and that belief needs constant reaffirmation even for advantaged students. Tragically, I believe, the lives of black Americans are still haunted by a specter that threatens this belief and the identification that derives from it at every level of schooling."*
Yeah, I’m familiar with Steele. What’s curious is that you don’t believe the stereotype threat could explain disparities, in addition to other environmental factors, despite the repeated studies that show it is a real phenomenon. I think this is a classic case of handwaving anything away that doesn’t click with your worldview.
It makes one wonder: what exactly could convince a mind like yours to rethink its position? Anything at all? If every leading authority in anthropology, sociology, developmental psychology, genetic reseach, and sports physiologiy posted a detailed refutation of every single argument you’ve made in this thread, with cites and all, I have little reason to think that you would change your mind. You still would go on proclaiming blacks are natural athletes and whites are natural brainiacs, wouldn’t you?
Umm, I was not citing Kimstu. I was referring to a cite (s)he gave, which I included in my post. The study referred to in that link I believe was conducted by Northeastern’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society referred to here on page 258. Unfortunately my subscription to that journal does not go that far back for the full text. If anyone else has access, I would appreciate it. Either way, you said this would not change your opinion, so I suppose this is settled. If I lose this point to the reader, so be it.
Can you please explain how whites have a greater nurturing advantage for playing basketball? How does one become an elite basketball player?
Assuming were talking the US cohort of about black and white kids who have substantial athletic talent I don’t think you’re fully plugged into the reality of how an urban black kid, who is also a talented athlete, sees the world and his opportunities. If he looks around him a lot of the time he and his black peers will be the products of families with single mothers struggling in an underclass or lower middle class existence, grinding away to keep the family moving forward. If he is a middling student a commonsensical assessment of his aspirational opportunities is not going to include a middle or upper-middle class future for himself. He sees (and his reasoning would not necessarily be inaccurate) a binary choice of underclass or lower middle class struggling as a non-entity or the opportunity to be a star.
The talented white kid, all things considered, is much more likely to see middle path where, if things don’t work out re basketball he could still conceivably be a business owner like uncle Bob, or a salesman like his dad, or a middle manager like his aunt. Unlike the black kid’s perspective falling off the athletic success tightrope doesn’t mean plummeting into the abyss, there’s a safety net.
Again this is strictly an opinion, but I think that if you believe you are working without a net it tends to focus your concentration and improve your determination to succeed.
As a side note, I have to say your notion of athletically talented white kids and their white peers as wide eyed, hard core optimists about their athletic superstar chances PRIOR to being handed their asses by your hypothetically genetically superior black athlete is somewhat starry eyed. Kids are information sponges and fairly sophisticated in their reasoning ability, even at young ages. Your notion that they are fully invested in their chances for superstardom up the point of being whupped a few times is (IMO) is a somewhat naive take on the evolution of their perspective that there might be less risky and fairy acceptable life paths than fully investing (and gambling) your life and soul into the focus necessary to be an athletic superstar.
Maybe the white kids I know are more worldly than the ones you know, but I doubt it.
Chief, it would be helpful if you get could back to me further, and my critique of your emphasis on family rearing practices and regression to the mean.
Like I said, I don’t deny the phenomenon exists- it seems to be a basic phenomenon in genetics. However, even many of the people who push it off don’t seem to fully understand how it works, and it’s application to race differences is not only a poor example, but doesn’t even make sense in reality.
In addition to the social mobility I outlined previously, it would imply the vast majority of upper-class blacks never, ever experience intergenerational inheritance of their wealth. Apparently the bulk of it’s composed of low IQ blacks giving birth to high IQ’s blacks, then they easily climb their ways out of extreme poverty, manage to go to good schools, then easily settle down and have kids, then their kids have lower IQ’s and fall back into poverty, and the cycle repeats itself. This supposedly also happens very similarly to hispanics, and whites in relation to rich east asians.
But as I said, this kind of social mobility seldom exists anywhere in the world, and most certainly not in america. For example, even in Germany it doesn’t exist: http://www.thelocal.de/national/20100624-28075.html
And yet Germany has alot less income inequality than in the US.
I’m reminded of a rather desperate, and ultimately contradictory case of a racialist trying to use this concept- Jared Taylor himself.
The logic in this one is atrocious. I can imagine how this went for Taylor- the downward mobility among blacks and whites looks alot like the IQ overlaps. 50% of whites, according to measurements in the 80’s, score around an IQ of 100, and 16% of the black population has an IQ of atleast 100. And since IQ and SES are so tightly linked and anything else is PC mantra, then this explains EVERYTHING!
But then Taylor tells us about a study of regression to the mean by Jensen himself. My figures were abit off, but close enough- both parents had IQ’s of 120, and the black average was 99 and the white average was 113.
Too bad for Taylor that under his IQ-fetishist parameters, an IQ of 99 should be enough for a general middle class living. So why should blacks who score at around 100 be dropping so severely down into the supposed poverty range of IQ’s?
And under his parameters, an IQ of 120 is more than comfortably middle class- it should be where the rich are found.
So this is some great explanatory factor? Is this why even one of the most clear-cut studies of regression to the mean and race found the black children to regress to well above their national average, yet people like Chief parrot the idea that they do worse than poor whites?
So just why do so many blacks who are the offspring of rich parents do poorly in school? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I doubt parental influence is going to do much to remediate things, but this is an invalid variable that says nothing nowadays of the heritability of IQ.
However, the explanation that this would require if regression to the mean explains so much- the ultra linear social mobility, the near non-existent lack of intergenerational inheritance in wealth, almost the entire black upper-class being composed of this cyclical pattern, etc.- is completely absurd. You can find almost no research to support this kind of pattern beyond casual glances at SAT scores and the kind of banal logic people like Taylor employ.
And if one wants a better explanation of the meager dimensions of parental influence, look up Judith Rich Harris’ work. Her work isn’t that extreme when people like Malcolm Gladwell and the authors of Freakonomics are huge fans of her work. Her first book on the subject was even nominated for a pulitzer.
Oh, I misread Taylor’s Jensen citation- he only looked at siblings, not parents. It still has the same basic point. The outliers respective to their populations don’t fit at all with what the sort of differences we should see going by Chief and Taylor’s ideas.
And I should note, which I think I said previously, that I’m quite convinced SES and IQ are very weakly linked when you really get down to it. Income and SES are such astoundingly complex and unstable variables that it’s hard to pin these things so tightly down to IQ differences. So I don’t think regression to the mean is playing much of a role in alot of these cases.
“Stereotype threat” may be a real phenomenon, but it is inadequate to explain the enormous gaps between black and eurasian scores that are seen in academia, and not even Claude Steele or Joshua Aronson (it’s most recent major promoters) argue that it does explain the gap.
See here for the difference in MCAT scores for 2009 applicants to medical school, for instance. For Physical Sciences, black applicants scored 7.1, whites 9.3 and asians 9.9. These are enormous differences, not accountable for by low self-expectation or stereotype threat.
Elsewhere Kimstu and I have argued over this notion of stereotype threat and dissected a study or two. The studies from Steele and Aronson, for example, do NOT show that the black-white score gap is due to stereotype threat. They show, instead, that adding stereotype threat may increase the baseline gap. See the Wikipedia discussion for further references on this:
***"Furthermore, while Sackett et al. do not dispute the fact that stereotype threat has a real, measurable effect on test scores, they posit that in the part of the experiment where Steele and Aronson removed the stereotype threat, the achievement gap which did remain correlated closely with the existing African American – White achievement gap on large-scale standardized testing such as the SAT. In their own words:
Thus, rather than showing that eliminating threat eliminates the large score gap on standardized tests, the research actually shows something very different. Specifically, absent stereotype threat, the African American-White difference is just what one would expect based on the African American-White difference in SAT scores, whereas in the presence of stereotype threat, the difference is larger than would be expected based on the difference in SAT scores.
In subsequent correspondence between Sackett et al. and Steele and Aronson, Sackett et al. wrote that “They [Steele and Aronson] agree that it is a misinterpretation of the Steele and Aronson (1995) results to conclude that eliminating stereotype threat eliminates the African American-White test-score gap.”[15]
In an editorial article entitled “The Threat in the Air”, which was published on April 18, 2004 in the Wall Street Journal, professor Amy Wax of the University of Pennsylvania Law School was highly critical of what she sees as Steele and Aronson’s presentation of their research. She was also skeptical of what she sees as claims about the real-world effect of stereotype threat on the black-white achievement gap."***
The search goes on (and on and on for those unwilling to include genetic differences) for the explanation for this persistent gap. It is not wealth. It is not opportunity. It is not educated parents. It is not stereotype threat.
And, exasperatedly, to your last sentence: My position is that differences among any two groups, include SIRE cohorts, are genetic when nurture is reasonably accounted for.
Nitpick: actually, you did cite Kimstu, who in turn cited an article which in turn did not reference any cite at all, and as it turns out the article contained in that Kimstu reference probably got it wrong. The reference you give now changes that verbiage to 2/3 of black teenagers think they can earn a living playing professional sports versus 1/3 of white teenagers. While I think both those values are outrageously high–surely they cannot have surveyed a large number of random youth–I’m not surprised at the ratio itself, particularly. I’d love to see the study but thanks for the research to find that much.
I’ve already explained how whites have better nurturing for professional sports. They have better facilities, better coaching, more stable families, are more likely to have fathers, have fewer practical distractions such as finances or transportation to the gym or wondering where dinner is, get sidetracked to jail far less often and have fewer other distractions. They have, for sports, all the putative advantages that their better academic performances are attributed to. A typical young white male who plays basketball gets every chance to nourish and develop that skill.
Do you think the smartest blacks apply to medical school in the same proportion as the smartest whites and Asians? Just wondering if you recognize any selection bias in using the MCAT.
It’s a popular, but unsupported, position that low black performance is a result of low self-esteem. See here for a UNC meta-analysis looking at 261 studies of black-white self-esteem:
Abstract
“Research on racial comparisons of self-esteem was examined. Early research in this area, exemplified by the doll studies of racial preference, was viewed as demonstrating that Blacks have less self-regard than Whites. However, a meta-analytic synthesis of 261 comparisons, based largely on self-esteem scales and involving more than half a million respondents, revealed higher scores for Black than for White children, adolescents, and young adults.”
And a news report listing some key points, in case you don’t have a subscription for the full article.
“Provided that self-esteem scores for both black and white young people are equally variable with normal, or bell-shaped, distributions, our results suggest that the average black young person’s self-esteem is higher than that of about 56 percent of white young people,” she said. "Put another way, the average black young person’s self-esteem falls at about the 56th percentile of self-esteem for white children and adolescents.
I don’t agree stereotype threat explains everything either. However:
How heavily due to IQ differences are these, though? The overall GPAs don’t differ markedly by race, for example.
You have a vague definition of genetic, however. You seem to be conflating “genetic” with something deep-seated.
And please get back to my other points, such as those regarding your allusions to regression to the mean.
You are explaining a nurturing advantage for professional sports, not basketball specifically. I was wondering if you had anything to add from the last time, but as it seems you do not, I will just link my replies and leave it as an exercise for the reader. 
I ignored your earlier post in part because calling me Chief Pendant annoyed me (I actually wish it were my name, but using it here in GD is right on the line of name-calling, and until I’ve had the chance to personally irritate you, it seemed a little forward 
), and also because you went off on a “regression to the mean” sidetrack that I did not start.
I made the point that black/white rich/poor scores are at odds with the notion that differences are explainable because of family income. It’s simply not true that whites do better on SATs and other exams simply because they come from more privileged backgrounds. All wealthier students do better than all poverty-stricken students, but even wealthy blacks underperform whites of substantially lower income.
Why that is so is a separate topic, but I am using the dataset here to argue that, with respect to income, you can normalize for that particular nurturing point and you still do not normalize performance.
The “regression to the mean” point is yours. While I am familiar with the point, I did not make it.
I agree that GPAs don’t correlate perfectly with scores for medical school applicants. Among my biases is that GPAs don’t correlate with much of anything quantitative these days. For that reason I am interested in measurable differences and not something as soft as a grade, and for looking at cohort differences I tend to look at quantitative sciences because…well, because they are quantifiable.
When our kids were in high school and college, I marveled at the machinations around grades. I’m impressed if you can document what you’ve learned. I’m not impressed with grades (and I had very good grades, along with very good scores). But it would be a pretty significant hijack to argue the merits of grades versus scores here, so may I suggest you take that to a new thread if you want to debate it?
Er, what’s wrong with that?
Of course. The idea of SES alone being such a decisive factor into so many outcomes is quite naive. But your emphasis on the idea of rich black children doing worse than poor whites almost invariably leads to the proponent of that alluding to regression to the mean. You could say I was putting words in your mouth, but I have seen that piece of “evidence” to lead to that explanation so often that it gets almost predictable. Not saying you believe that’s why, but still. So sorry, regardless.
On another note, what do you mean be SIRE? What are is its relevance to genetic factors?