Heh, I hate to say it but this makes me want to avoid black Doctors. That’s an unfortunate side-effect, the ones who actually do well will now be perceived ‘by me anyway’ as being not qualified to actually be Doctors.
‘by me anyway’?
Why did you put that in single quotes? And who says they are not qualified to be doctors?
I have no problem attributing the differences in test scores among various races to culture or education. That is a problem that can be fixed.
But to attribute it to genetics? When literally the only genetic differences among different races are trivial and physical, like skin color or eye folds? That I have a serious problem with. The only reason that blacks dominate the NBA is that the NBA dominates black culture. In the 30s and 40s, Jews dominated professional basketball; was the competition so fierce that blacks evolved genetically to become better basketball players over the course of a generation, even though only a relative handful will ever play the game professionally?
It is the same with “aptitude” testing. There is no gene for scoring well on a test, just as there is no gene for playing basketball well. It is culture and only culture that causes the difference. I can’t comment on the legal issues in play in this thread, I just wanted to respond to allegations that blacks and hispanics are genetically predisposed to be worse test-takers.
If they have lower standards on the MCATs for black Doctors then why should I trust black doctors?
Why not just try to look at the individual doctor instead of the guy’s skin color? Surely you base your decisions about doctors on something more than that.
I guess if your life depended on it in an emergency situation, with no opportunity to do any research at all, you could use that as a tiebreaker if nothing else was available. But that’s hardly a likely scenario.
Why do believe that MCAT scores somehow correlate strongly with healthcare outcomes, or even, for that matter, performance in medical school?
My knowledge of this subject is shallow, but a quick search turns up a few interesting things.
Well, why have tests at all if they can’t predict anything? Are minorities similarly condescended to in Medical School? but also your quotation mentions minorities, not specifically black people. Maybe Indians and Chinese are skewing the average on ‘minorities’? I don’t know, how does one judge if there is no useful standard to apply?
I live in New York City and have probably 100,000 Doctors to choose from. Why not just avoid the population that has lower standards for admittance to medical school in the first place?
Well if I were in an emergency room I wouldn’t get to choose my Doctor and I’d hope the black Doctor was one of the ones who performed well on his tests and in school. But if I am going out to choose a GP, which I am about to do, then this seems like a criteria that will factor into my decision. Of course I have never been presented with the possibility of going to a black doctor so the point isn’t terribly relevant overall.
That’s a good question. IQ tests, SAT tests, and a host of other psychometric tests have dubious predictive value. The value breaks down even further on the margins of acceptance into any kind of professional training program. Suppose the cutoff for entrance into some college is 1450 on the SAT. How much of a difference in performance do you think will between two candidates (all things being equal), one of whom got a 1450 and the other got a 1500?
The fact that some easily interpretable standard exists does not make it particularly useful. The MCAT sometimes correlates with performance in med school, but that is obviously a very different thing than performance as a doctor.
Because there’s a tremendous variation within the populations that share skin color, and if you’re doing research on your doctors anyway you may as well not limit yourself.
As it happens, I happen to know that this guy is one of the best high-risk ob-gyns in NYC if not the best, and his skin is as black as the next guy’s. I have no idea what his MCAT was nor do I care, but if I needed some serious high-risk ob-gyn doctoring in NYC, that’s the guy I would go to. But that decision would be based on his reputation among people who know about these things, and not on the color of his skin. If you passed up on him because of his skin color you would be missing out on a good thing, in a serious matter.
My knowledge of these things may well be even shallower than yours, but at the outset I would ask how “performance in medical school” is being defined for purposes of this study. For example, it may well be that this performance is defined by criteria that are themselves influenced by affirmative action in med school.
Also, it’s unclear what failed to predict means, i.e. whether it means that the difference between majority and minority entrants that was reflected in the initial scores was not reflected in subsequent performance, or if it means that the performance among minority students themselves was not predicted by the initial scores (I would guess the latter).
I think you would need to see the entire article rather than the abstract to understand what is being done.
I am not judging the Doctors based on skin color, I am judging the institutional biases that choose to evaluate them by a lower standard, as the lower standards skew the perception of all people who are subjected to that lower standard.
Well, then it’s too bad that the lower standards affect the perception of ALL black Doctors and not just the ones who couldn’t score highly on the MCATs right? And if he came highly recommended that would trump other considerations.
Your example of 1450 and 1500 is flawed. To correlate it to the MCAT you would say that white people need a 1450 to get in and black people need a 1300. So we aren’t talking about differences in two qualified candidates, but that a score that would disqualify you if you were white would qualify you if you are black.
I’m having a hard time understanding this.
How do you chose doctors? Do you pick them out of a phone book based on their picture in their ad?
Every time I’ve ever chosen a doctor it’s been based on the recomendation of other people - both patients and fellow doctors - who actually were familiar with the guy. Once you’re at that point, perceptions of lower standards he might have benefited from in med school are no longer relevant.
I can only see these perceptions as being relevant if the decision was being based on the most superficial criteria imaginable, which is no way to pick a doctor in any event.
I have a certain amount of general sympathy for this type of argument, but I don’t see how it impacts your choice of doctors, as above.
Yes fair enough. I am thinking if I am in a situation where I don’t have access to a referral. Say I just moved to a new town or something.
It wouldn’t in the scenario you’ve outlined, but of all the Doctors I’ve seen, of all the Doctors I’ve met with friends and family, I have never met a black Doctor.
You somehow inferred that I was trying to draw a parallel when I was not. I commented on issues related to psychometric testing and their dubious predictive value. I am not using an example to express an argument, I am stating a fact.
A given MCAT score does not disqualify one from being a doctor. It may make admission at a particularly desirable medical school impossible, but there is no magic number that a student needs to achieve to enter the hallowed halls of doctordom. The only thing that disqualifies one from practicing medicine is not having an MD.
Funny you should mention that. I doubt you remember it, but the urologist who saved my wife’s life is black. I am almost certain that you met him in your many travels to the hospital to see her.
Do you have any genetic proof of this, or is it just what you wish was the case? The HapMap project and others are unearthing large numbers of genes that have undergone differential and recent selection between different populations (ie after ancestral humans left Africa), including, tentatively, in putatively intelligence-related genes
At least nobody here is digging out the old canard that “race is socially constructed” and has no genetic basis. In fact it is possible to recreate a map of Europe based on genetic variation just within a European population.
Again, the evidence shows that humans have undergone accelerated genetic selection since our species left Africa. We happen to know some of the more easily observed differences, such as mutations in skin pigmentation genes in Europeans and Asians (who have, in fact, mutations in different genes causing the same phenotype), increase fast-twitch muscle in West Africans (hence their domination of sprinting in the Olympics) vs. East African dominance of endurance running. We also know of different immune responses in aboriginal peoples, hence Cortez’s conquest of the huge Aztec empire with a few hundred men. We also know that Ashkenazi Jews suffer from a number of genetic diseases that probably provide some form of heterozygote advantage selecting for intelligence. So to argue that there is no genetic difference in intelligence between races is to argue that sure, people have been evolving to adapt to their environment at an unprecedented pace for tens of thousands of years - but this selection magically stopped from the neck up.
To those of you who say testing is irrelevant: If it is irrelevant, then why do people put so much effort into developing those tests? If the tests are not predictive, why does the military require a highly g-loaded intelligence test of all recruits? And, taking the MCAT example, do you think that scoring low on the MCAT is a definite indication of being a better doctor, in non-knowledge ways? If not, then all things being equal, a doctor that scores low on the MCAT will usually be a worse doctor, if only because he’s not as good as memorizing diseases. In which case a group that has a lower MCAT will certainly (because of sample size) be a worse group of doctors than ones who are admitted with higher criteria.
Irrelevant is your word, not mine. Testing is a dubious predictor of post-education outcomes, but it is trivially obvious that testing is not irrelevant. Testing is also by no means entirely useless. These two facts are not causally connected.
People put a lot of effort into developing tests for largely the same reason they put so much effort into developing so many other things. There is a lot of money to be made in the educational testing industry.
Arguments from inherency, especially involving the military, are pretty funny. The military does quite a few minimally justifiable and dubiously rational things. How the hell should I know why they do it? I don’t run the Pentagon.
This illogic is quite unattractive. All things being equal, a doctor that scores lower on the MCAT may have no observable difference in performance whatsoever, since the MCAT is not a good predictor of post-educational outcomes.