There is a complete disconnect in your interpretation of what I’m saying. The metric is not her accomplishments. She did well in college. Good for her.
The metric is her position of affirmative action and the idea that it’s ok to discriminate using Title VII and other such laws. It’s not and I don’t want her in a position to change this.
Is it your opinion that the SCOTUS majority decision in Ricci in any way overturned Title VII? It’s my understanding that they very clearly did not address the constitutionality of Title VII nor did they address the appeals court ruling on the matter. They merely said that the facts of this case did not justify throwing out the test results over fear of litigation.
I also find it highly ironic that you seem to want SCOTUS to invalidate duly-passed laws, thus “legislating from the bench”. I guess Sotomayor was wrong, it’s actually the Supreme Court “where policy is made”.
I don’t see what a term limit has to do with anything. If you want the best person in a position of power and you think SATs are the arbiter of that, it shouldn’t matter how long their terms last.
I’d want my president to be as smart if not smarter than a SCOTUS justice. If anything because there is just one president. One dumb move by a justice can be canceled out by the others.
The value of an SAT score is predicting success in the college, success that is measured by obtaining a degree and doing well academically (i.e.: high GPA). The fact that Judge Sotomayor obtained a degree and had a VERY high GPA at one of the most prestigious and academically rigorous institutions in the nation indicates that she did at least as well as someone with the same high school GPA but a better SAT result. Thus, for her at least, the SAT (assuming that it really was “low” by comparison to her fellow classmates, which I tend to doubt) was not an accurate predictor of her ability in college, and also, she did not take the place of a “better qualified” candidate.
I notice Magiver has totally dropped the legal discussion that he was pursuing with Bricker, which makes me hope that (s)he understands that what Judge Sotomayor did in signing on to the opinion upholding the result at the trial level was not an indication that she believes that minorities should be advantaged at the disadvantage of the majority, but simply an indication that she agreed that the law required that result. Please note that she was not some wild radical in reaching that conclusion. Four Supreme Court Justices reached the same conclusion, and reading the decision in the case, if the City had been able to convince Justice Kennedy of the strength of the potential Title VII lawsuit had the city NOT set aside the results, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Ricci would have gone the opposite way.
Which is not to say that she DOESN’T believe minorities should be advantaged at the disadvantage of the majority, just that the decision in Ricci at the appellate level cannot be taken as an indication on the subject one way or the other.
I did have another point, but I’ve forgotten it… 
Thank you, Bricker, I have been hoping to see your comments on this case but have been too busy too request them (did I miss an earlier thread about this case?). Anyway, from my limited reading of the case, it appears that Judge Sotomayor and the other appeals court justices were being conservative and if they had ruled differently they would have been what many conservatives term judicial activists (i.e. they would have been interpreting the law and not really applying it as written and intended by the legislators the crafted it). Do you agree with this analysis?
Regarding Ms. Sotomayor, after reading more about her, I don’t like her. She is, in my mind, definately qualified for the position, and I find Magiver’s analysis of her qualifications fallacious, but I think President Obama could do better.
First off, I believe she is much more conservative than most people believe. This New Haven case is an example of that, though reading through her past decisions, I find that examples abound. She seems to make very narrow decisions on the finer points of the law and does not seem to have an over-arching understanding of how the law affects society. I believe that this is what President meant when he used the term empathy, and I agree that this is a good quality for a Supreme Court justice. One Justice that I believe had this quality in spades and used it to good effect was Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
Second, I do not believe she has the judicial acumen to balance the brilliance of Justices Roberts and Scalia. Being a liberal leaning centrist, I don’t really like the current swing the Supreme Court is taking. I don’t mind having conservative justices (in fact I believe it is necessary to have them) or even a conservative majority, but I think it is more necessary to have balance on the court. I was pretty happy with the balance of the Rehnquist court, and I think that Justice Roberts was a good addition (though he is very conservative), but now I find that the balance is a bit out of whack. Justices Roberts and Scalia are brilliant and and it seems to me that they are driving the court with their ideology. I find that Justice Thomas is basically a shill and doesn’t really belong on the court (IMHO). You can almost always count on Justice Alito to vote identically to Justice Scalia and I think it is going to be a rare day that he has a differing opinion or methodology for reaching it. The other justices are capable and intelligent, but none of them has the sharpness to really challenge Justices Roberts and Scalia. I would like President Obama to nominate someone with this ability, and I don’t really care if they are liberal or moderate, just as long as they can temper the conservative slant of the court (which to me seems monolithic) and challenge the brilliance of the conservative stalwarts. Obviously, YMMV.
Maybe it was a tangent but I thought the discussion was addressing why we should adjust results because of disparate results based on race. I think almost everyone agrees that the test was appropriate and non-discriminatory (the city seemed to have taken pains to try and level the playing field as much as humanly possible) and yet because the results of the test did not yield proportional results, the results were thrown out.
Its not that none of the black candidates passed the test, its that none of them scored in the top 3. When you have a sample size of a dozen people, does it really make sense to apply the disparate results critieria so rigidly when there is nothing else you can point to that indicates any sort of unfairness or discrimination?
The question is when can a court overturn the city’s decision.
Are you saying that intelligence is not genetically heritable or that we all have identical genes when it comes to intelligence?
I don’t know that the cognitive differences are as large as standardized tests indicate (I think that there is a lot of environmental factors that play a large role in the difference), but the gap in IQ test scores between blacks and whites is so wide that it is hard to attribute entire difference on latent racism (or the legacy of racism), my sense is that it is not oppressive enough to account for the difference between poor whites and poor blacks (or between middle class whites and middle class blacks). Certainly some of it is but if I could show you a statistic that showed that adopted Asian kids raised in white households scored (on average)significantly higher on standardized tests than adopted black kids raised in white households, wouldn’t that count as evidence or are you asking for incontrovertible proof?
No because you’re still left with the role of social programming, which can not be controlled for using normal epidemiological methods. And also, you’d have to assume that the prenatal environment of these kids is no different, which is an unreasonable assumption. A pregnant mother with no access to prenatal care, possibly engaged in drug use and other deliterious habits associated with poverty, whose child was put up for adoption because she got locked up in prison and there was no one else around to raise her child, is creating a different in utero environment than a pregnant mother who adopted out her child only because she wanted a boy and not a girl. Which child is probably going to do better on an aptitude test?
The disparities between blacks and whites with regard to test scores has been shrinking through the years and is continuing to shrink. Just as it would have been incorrect to conclude from 1950’s disparities that blacks are less intelligent than whites, it’s incorrect to do that using 2009 disparities.
I did not realize this was sworn testimony, I thought she was just talking about the added perspective she would have over a white male.
On the contrary, she was following the current state of the law and the Supreme Court is the one breaking new ground.
Sotomayer is one of the most accomplished jurists to be nominated for the Supreme Court in a long time. The only way you can conclude that she is only here because of her race is if you conclude that only only reason any minority can succeed in America is because of tokenism and affirmative action.
The problem with that line of thought is that while it may be reasonable to argue that one race or gender does better than another race or gender ON AVERAGE, it is false to say that the same applies to individuals and it is ridiculous to assert this applies to the tail ends of the distribution (and lets just agree that supreme court nominees are outliers).
Cite please that her SAT scores were waived. Pleaser don’t link to the video again; that isn’t proof that her SAT scores were waived, only that Judge Sotomayar says that perhaps they weren’t as high as some others who were admitted to the same school.
Just a brief note: Sandra Day O’Connor was the master of making “very narrow decisions on the finer points of the law.” It was her hallmark, and one of the reasons she drove me nuts with her opinions. You never knew exactly which infinitismal factoid of the case was going to tip her balance. Sadly, Justice Kennedy has taken her place, as the result in this case so clearly shows.
She didn’t say “added perspective”, she said “a better decision”. In fact, she couldn’t have meant “added”, because what would it be added to? If you believe, as she evidently does, that a white male can only see things from a white male perspective, then a Latina can only see things from a Latina perspective. She can’t have a Latina perspective in addition to some other perspective.
One could argue that her Latina perspective would be added to the other perspectives already represented on the court, but that is clearly not what she meant.
If someone did believe that, whose fault would it be?
Why don’t you answer that question? And then explain why the same reasoning doesn’t apply to rich white people.
The Flynn Effect is winding down, sez the man himself.
People have supposedly gotten a lot smarter over the past one hundred years because scores on a certain subset of tests, most notably Raven’s Progressive Matrices, has increased.
SAT scores have not gone up, yet the SAT is highly correlated with g. It’s hard to imagine that g could increase so much yet have no effect on SAT scores. Thus I conclude that Raven’s Progressive Matrices tests a narrow subset of skills and abilities compared to the SAT, so Raven’s is actually measuring g plus something else, and the something else is what has gone up.
With regards to the existence of the disparities at all, if I wanted to set up an experiment to best study the issue, this is what I would do: I would compare the intelligence of black children adopted by upper-middle-class white families to the intelligence of white children adopted by upper-middle-class white families. This ensures that all children being studied are brought up in the most favorable family environment, and therefore any difference that emerges between the groups is a result of genetics and not environment.
It turns out that the exact situation above has already been studied! I am referring to the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, and there is an excellent page at Wikipediasummarizing the results of the study. It’s rather ironic that the researchers who conducted this study were left-wing types who were hoping to prove that it’s environment, not genes, that causes the black-white intelligence difference.
In interpreting the results, I must note that it’s not clear what IQ test was being used, but I presume that the scoring scale follows the convention in the IQ field that the average score is 100, and the standard deviation is 15, and when such an IQ test is given to both whites and blacks, it’s expected that the average white person will score 100 and the average black person will score 85.
When IQ tests were given to adopted 7-year-olds, the average scores were:
White: 112
Half white, half black: 109
Black: 97
As predicted by the genetic explanation, black children scored 15 points lower than white children. And children of mixed race background scored between the two extremes. Yet strangely, Scarr and Weinberg, the authors of the study, argued that this somehow proves that it’s environment causing the black-white IQ difference. They said, “look, half-white half-black children, who are ‘socially black,’ score higher than the average white child when they have upper-middle-class parents!”
If we assume that this same test would show an average score of 100 for white kids raised by regular blue collar white parents, then the study is indeed showing an effect where being raised by upper-middle-class white parents has a strongly positive impact on IQ tests given to 7-year-olds. But the effect isn’t one where racial IQ differences are eliminated. Rather, the effect is that less-intelligent children get an average score on the test, and average children get an above-average score on the test. (There is similar evidence from many other studies that early childhood test scores are more easily raised by coaching than tests given to teenagers and adults. This is what studies of the Head Start program have showed.)
Heres a link to a 60-page paper by two leading researchers documenting why race differences in intelligence are genetic, and answering many recurring objections: Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability, by Rushton and Jensen. (PDF)
Sorry but I already point out why that you can’t reach that conclusion.
A cursory background in social science and epidemiology would tell you that using these kind of experiments to make statements about genetics is foolish.
We’ve been all through this in another debate. Per the dissenting judge’s comments they could have addressed the case in the broader sense.
This was not a complex case and it was dragged all the way to the Supreme Court at the expense of people who were wronged.
AS I read it, that’s because of a crooked preacher and a spineless city government not Sotomayor
I am personally underwhelmed by the scores I posted at your request, and I suspect most SDMB members are equally unimpressed. Some good. Some crummy…moving on… It was a silly request of yours, unrelated to a rat’s patoot, and I did it to call your silliness.
It is not my personal bio which speaks to genetic differences among races. I present the issues and facts as I see them. Not one of the facts or sources I quote as supportive evidence is in any way related to my personal biography.
As it turns out (and I’d expect you to understand this) attacking me instead of my position is a common tactic known as an ad hominen fallacy. It’s like attacking Al Gore for being a personal bozo instead of finding factual fault with his position on global warming.
As it also turns out, I’ve given you the real data you asked for: my personal scores. That I prefer anonymity as a poster here is not related in any way to any thing other than a personal caution that one never knows which nutcase is on the other end of the Internet. In all my years of perusing the Dope, I must say this is the first time I have seen someone pretend that an unwillingess to be anonymous here discredits a position taken. Absurd. If you can’t do better than to pretend that my desire for anonymity on some entertainment-related message board means a position I take on genetics is less supported, you are substantially more desperate than even grasping at straws. Try applying that criterion to the rest of the posters here… :dubious:
But you know this. Your pretense otherwise diminishes any position you take on the subject in general.
I await any reply you have on whether it’s disingenuous to retain as “personal” one’s standardized test scores while publishing one’s grades and class rank. I call bullshit on that.
I am not, for the record here, disparaging either Judge Sotomayor or her academic record, or criticizing any decisions she made about releasing anything. I have no idea what she decided to do, and no interest in it. For the reasons mentioned above, I support actively enrolling underrepresented minorities in positions of leadership in this country.
(bolding mine for emphasis)
Just to make sure you are actually reading the posts of mine to which you are referring: You are aware I support race-based affirmative action, right? So…um…why would post this nonsense (in bold)?