LOL.
At least you are catching on to why I think his line of analysis smells like horseshit. Not to mention that while all these IQs were going up, SATs were going down…
But the good news is that by 2050 we’ll all be geniuses and can figger out how much genes are involved with intelligence.
I have not seen that study. Would you mind citing it?
I have seen a few papers on Claude Steele’s “stereotype threat” which is a similar idea in the obverse, I guess.
In my opinion anyone who does think you could raise an IQ test or academic test by a standard deviation with the correct motivation needs “stupid” tattooed on their forehead. If such were the case, we would be either beating or coaxing our children into Harvard, on full scholarships. And I’d be buying more Mars stock.
Sheesh.
Try here for you m&m story. I’ll go look into it after my nap.
Ahhh…can’t hold out on you.
Here’s what happens if you read on:
“In recent years, the Harvard economist Roland Fryer has essentially tried to extend the M&M experiment to the scale of a metropolitan school system. He tested several different incentive programs in public schools—offering bonuses to teachers if they improved their classes’ test results; offering incentives like cellphone minutes to students if they improved their own test results; offering families financial incentives if their children did better. The experiments were painstaking and carefully run—and the results have been almost uniformly disappointing. There are a couple of bright spots in the data—in Dallas, a program that paid young kids for each book they read seems to have contributed to better reading scores for English-speaking students. But for the most part, the programs were a bust. The biggest experiment, which offered incentives to teachers in New York City, cost $75 million and took three years to conduct. And in the spring of 2011, Fryer reported that it had produced no positive results at all.”
The problem with educating the public is that they will believe anything they read that reinforces some idiotic notion and retain that, but won’t research it enough to get the rest of the story…what the heck; it was only $75 million dollars spent to track down something I would have told him for free. Or, at least, less than $75M. What a dumbass. Maybe it was gubmint money.
Sorry; missed edit window…
It’s ridiculous to pretend that the gap in IQ and academic scores is a motivation problem.
Sure; you could find motivation issues for all sorts of lame tests. But not ones that really count in the testee’s minds.
Black kids might not score as well, but I don’t think there’s much evidence they are just too foolish to get motivated.
Here, for example:
“A recent study out of UCLA says that minority students as young as second grade are aware of stigmas against their ethnic groups and have increased academic anxiety as a result. But in a compelling twist, researchers also found that minority kids are more motivated about school than their white classmates.
To assess motivation, kids were asked to rate four factors, including their levels of interest in school and if they chose to do their homework because they like learning new things. Based on those responses, black students’ average motivation level on a scale of one to five was 4.37, compared with 3.82 for white students.”
While I’m killing pet theories:
From here.
*“The Acting White Theory originated in the 1980s with Dr. John Ogbu’s ethnographic research and is commonly used to explain present-day “achievement gaps” between black and white students…
The problem with the Acting White Theory is that it promotes the misconception that black students underachieve because of their corrupted attitudes.”
*
I can’t make that link work, and apparently I am too mentally handicapped to figure out why. I’m sorry. May need to copy and paste the text to have google bring up the original article…
There’s also a legacy of discrimination against dark skinned people in Mauritius that continued long after slavery ended.
You’re not just ignorant, you’re proud of your ignorance.
And CP, I’ve made this point a thousand times before, and I’ll make it now.
You can’t tell what anyone’s genetics are just by looking at them. In Brazil, a person who looks black can have preponderance of European ancestry. The same could easily be true of Mauritius.
Now, since Mauritius draws its population from a completely different part of Africa than the US did, we’re not talking about the same genetics. If you really had any grasp of the science behind this, then you wouldn’t make these ridiculous claims.
Yes, how dare those scientists do research, when **Chief Pedant **can just tell them the answer beforehand. After all, he knows better than those pesky experts. And, when the results are different than what **Chief Pedant **believes to be true, why then, he can just ignore those results.
Here, I’ll help those pesky researchers with other fundamental questions: QM? Caused by invisible monkeys. Done!
You can’t tell their sex either. Which doesn’t affect the fact that there are measurable gaps between and among various groups and those gaps may or may not be in large part the result of genetic differences.
And if you had any grasp of the actual issues under discussion, you would cease your relentless attack against strawmen.
Perhaps you can’t, but most of us don’t have this problem.
Out of ever 500 naked adults that most of us saw, how many would we really not be able to tell what “sex” they were.
Considerably more than looking at 500 naked, randomly selected adults and being told ok “White, Hispanic, East African, West African, North African, East Asian, South Asian, and Australian Aboriginal” say which is which.
This is thread shitting.
This thread is long enough and hostile enough among people who are arguing their points in good faith. The sort of semantic bullshit you are spewing as one-liners does nothing to move the discussion forward.
Stop it.
[ /Moderating ]
EVERYONE,
The whole “inferior” discussion has gotten too personal and too far off track.
Unless a poster decides to submit that he or she considers one group inferior to another, drop it.
No more accusing other posters of holding one group or another to be “inferior.”
[ /Moderating ]
Actually, I think this post has a point.
OP, if you think that race is is non-existent, then isn’t that like saying that racism doesn’t exist as well? The definition of racism is, “The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, esp. so as to distinguish it as…” So if race doesn’t exist, then how can “beliefs that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race” exist?
You make no points, here, when attempting to use sophistry to defend threadshitting.
Regardless whether the belief in races is accurate, it is the belief that races exist that drives racism. Until you can demonstrate that there is no belief that races exist, you have no point in this discussion.
If you want to take up the subject of whether racism can exist, with or without the reality of race, then open a new thread to do so.
Do not further hijack this thread.
[ /Moderating ]
Any proof/reasoning/evidence for that?
How do you claim that?
Why can’t I?
Why?
You’re not disproving the existence of race here.
I’m tired of seeing how your OP is filled with assumptions and claims with very little evidence and reasoning to back any of them up.
Sweden, too?
Well…it could be true of black Creoles in Mauritius. But do you think this is likely? I sort of have sympathy for the argument of not judging any given individual’s ancestral heritage by appearance if they are sensitive about it. I nevertheless think it’s likely that the black Creoles of Mauritius are mostly of sub-saharan African genetic stock (in mtDNA lineages, pre L3 split into eurasian populations). The essay I cited was referring to the “black” Creoles.
Lots, but do you have an hour?
By the way, PBS like Rational Wiki and Skeptical Dictionary, just did something that seems too hard by many here, they went and asked the experts and educators to tell them what the science is finding.
If you do not have an hour, check the companion site for that program: Race, The Power of an illusion:
Fair enough. But $75M on just one program to prove you can’t improve test scores by bribing people seems a little excessive to me, particularly if it’s a followup study trying to prove M&Ms erase IQ gaps.