Per Sweet, recent immigrants of African ancestry don’t show a test score gap. This may be because they haven’t been assimilated into US culture yet. In Britain, African immigrant girls outscore poor white boys. All of this to say, the US pattern is not universal.
Per Nisbett, and cited by Sweet, degree of admixture doesn’t make a difference in the test score gap.
These are settled issues in this field of research, so I don’t have much interest in debating them. I’ve cited the works of both scholars countless times.
Here are some nice rundowns on why the genetic hypothesis has failed thus far, and is not likely to triumph in the future:
Roll eyes all you want, fact is you made completely unfounded claims of correlation between race and physical characteristics that you haven’t even *attempted *to justify.
So I guess it’s just “we all know what one looks like” with you, yes?
“If the claim is is definitely true, then it’s not unreasonable.”
So, I’m still waiting for the genetic evidence that genes are the main cause of the difference in intelligence among “races”. Unless, of course, all the huffing and puffing from the “race realists” is not really true.
I don’t disagree, so lets have it coming from your side. As I looked at, the “counter” evidence mentioned as being a very important one was only related to the inheritance of intelligence, from a study that also pointed out that all humans have those genes and there are environmental factors affecting them.
Point being that that is what I see in this and many discussions in the past, in general the “evidence” the “race realists” look at actually does help the ones that do not think that genes should be looked as being the most likely reason why there is a difference in intelligence among “races”.
And the “race realists” continue to rely on discredited researchers and research from 30 years ago.
Just to be clear, do you think that, absent being told that they’ll have a tough time playing by the rules relative to white kids, black kids wouldn’t figure that out on their lonesome? In other words, do you think that the effects of racism both institutional and personal in modern society are too faint or subtle for children to become aware of them?
Actually, I said IQ tests, not intelligence, so I guess we have one more example of you making up your own version of what has been posted and trying to refute the argument not made.
You already noted in your first post in this exchange that you had no idea what you were talking about and then claimed that I meant something I did not say. Pretty standard stuff from you.
Of course, now your interpretation of the links I provided is also completely wrong, so you are certainly maintaining your record of error.
We’re not talking about “facts”. The assertion was about “proof”.
No. They would know anyway.
But it wouldn’t be as big a part of their consciousness.
And in addition, even people who suffer from real discrimination aren’t always able to accurately judge what’s discrimination and what’s not.
This is partially because they don’t always have an accurate sense of how easy or hard other people have it by comparison. (I believe this is being lampooned by Eddie Murphy in the classic White Like Me skit.) But it’s also part of human nature.
I know when my kids get in trouble in school it’s generally because the teacher doesn’t like them and is picking on them. Even if they agree they’re somewhat at fault, there are always other kids who did even worse and didn’t get punished as much, which proves it’s really the teacher having it in for them, and so on.
People are sometimes discriminated against but sometimes people attribute their own failings to other people discriminating against them, and sometimes people attribute bad breaks or other people just being jerks and so on to discrimination. Which is significant, because having a bad break and the like is not as much of a deterrent to forging ahead as the sense the entire system is stacked against you.
In sum, while racism and discrimination definitely exist, constant harping about them have the impact of exaggerating their significance in people’s minds and consciousness, which makes hard work and deferred gratification seem less worthwhile than they otherwise would, which is a deterrent to black achievement and advancement as compared to whites of the same socio-economic class.
Coupla comments, beginning with an apology for being mostly too busy to play on the Dope.
Regarding the correlation of wealth and the skillset for taking SATs:
The data is remarkable. Essentially, the uncontested data point is that children from black families where the parents are highly educated (college and above) perform more poorly than do children of white families where the parents have less than high school education and under 10K/yr of income. In a word, (and in practice for Universities looking for well-qualified black applicants), high SES does NOT get rid of a huge score gap.
Cultural? Peer Pressure? Rap music? Crappy bookshelves? Teacher expectation? Stereotype threat? Sure…whatever. If you find all those to be persuasive and me to be naive, have at it. Please, just one favor here on the Dope. Let me never again have to defend the point that these poor scores are NOT because the parents are poor or the parents are uneducated. If we give a HUGE economic and educational advantage to black families, their kids still turn in pretty crappy scores.
And it matters. It matters because it is precisely this issue that is at the heart of Fisher v UTexas. UTexas needs to protect its “black is a disadvantage” policy because if it only uses SES and class ranks, then the black students it gets are the top ten percent of their mostly black schools, and those students are academically weak. It wants to get the best black students possible, and these come from high SES backgrounds and go to school with the rich white kids. So just let me never have to hear the knee-jerk response again that black scores are weak because of poor economic opportunity, and I’ll be all kinds of happy.
Regarding the “what about the immigrants doing so well” question raised above:
I thought I made my comments on this earlier. First, any sub-group from a larger group might well score higher. For all I know the Kalenjin are massively better at the SAT than is the average “white” student in the US. We’re talking overall averages here, and average gene pools; not an individual subgroup. Mbuti immigrants might suck at basketball, but that doesn’t mean the average gene pool difference between the SIRE group of white and black in the US doesn’t drive an average performance difference for a given skillset at the SIRE group average level. Beyond that, I doubt immigrants are a typical cross section of the source population they left behind, but I have no data to support that.
Out of curiosity, could you present a bit of background regarding Mr Sweet’s qualifications as a researcher, and would you mind presenting any of his cites beyond the newspaper story level?
I don’t disagree with some of the stories he cites (from the British press; I think), but I haven’t seen any formal studies actually looking at some of the data he coughs up rather breathlessly, and I haven’t seen much beyond sort of newspaper-level reporting on the issues.
Having said that, it makes good sense to me that a bright and motivated sub-group of female african immigrants might outscore some lower-class white males in the British school system, particularly on subjects where scores have shifted from quantitative exams to grade-based evaluations. I’d be curious what happens when students are followed into the STEM fields where more formal quantifiable exams are undertaken.
Interestingly, in the British system (if I recall those reports correctly and the research I’ve done in the past around them) the same rank order of asians on top holds true, even where the asians are in similarly disadavantaged new-immigrant groups. Why would that be? Culture, again?
I encourage reading on all sides of the issue, and it’s not actually clear to me what you mean by “discredited.” There certainly are hostile opinions opposed to their conclusions in this paper. But I don’t the American Psychological Association (which publishes Psychology) is quite as dismissive as are you. It usually brings a :dubious: from me when I see broad strokes like “discredited” or “debunked” for reseach that peer-reviewed and respected journals still feel worthy of publication. That doesn’t mean there’s no controversy. It does mean it may be worth reading the other side.
Unless, of course, it’s a racist side, I guess. Apparently we can slap that label on and it carries a weight independent of the science involved.
For what it’s worth, I myself don’t bother to cite Rushton and Jensen, etc. There is way too much other data that show that genes evolve, genes are highly penetrated enough to cluster within SIRE groups, gene clustering drives all sorts of differences, there’s no reason mother nature would exempt genes for “significant” things, and no amount of nurturing to date has been shown to erase stubbornly persistent patterns across all socioeconomic groups, all political systems, and all cultural histories.
You might try “Strange Fruit” if you are still confused about whether or not “race” is important as a concept for me. (It’s not.)
This demonstrates that you really have no idea how science progresses, peer review is not enough, there is also confirmations and new research that should come from those conclusions if it was so valid as you think.
Discredited works are usually not removed from the publications, what counts is the new talent that is expanding on the previous research, the point that I made was that if after more than 30 years the new talent has not made much from the previous research and you need to continue to rely on the same old, it only shows that you are even wrong on how “supportive” the American Psychological Association is of people like Rushton and others.
:rolleyes: backing up an assertion with “facts” (you know, the entirety of what I said) is what we, in the non-misdirect-and-obfuscate community, call “proof”.
Oh, for fuck’s sake, Pedant. Rushton? Seriously, you think the APA still endorses him? So they didn’t publish Nisbett’s rebuttal paper right after in the same publication, I take it? Their conclusion:
Indeed MrDibble, and when I look at recent research there are many examples of how most researchers see people like Rushton and Jensen, many now investigate why many “Racial Determinists” are getting wrong. Like in this article, pointed at before, that comes **also **from the American Psychological Association:
Fair point. It depends on how robust the tests being discussed are, i.e. did they test one specific sub-group of black immigrants or a broader group.
Yeah, but they’re being compared to other groups of immigrants, which should be equally non-typical.
I’m not sure what community you claim to be from, but what you’re doing seems a lot like “misdirect-and-obfuscate” to me.
Your assertion (post #284) was that “speculation needs backing up with facts”. I pointed out that facts and proof are not the same so you respond that backing up with facts is proof. So you’re effectively saying that speculation needs proof, which is obvious nonsense, because something which is proven is not speculation - the whole point of speculation is that it’s not proven.
So I think you’re playing a game. You’re trying to raise the bar as high as possible on the admissibility of evidence of racial differences and to do that you’re switching terms as needed. You use the term “facts” when discussing speculation because you couldn’t get “proof” in at that point, but then convert “facts” into “proof” in a separate step when it’s no longer as obvious that you’re talking about speculation, and you’re where you want to be. Which is solidly in middle of the “misdirect-and-obfuscate community”, apparently.
My point exactly - unproven speculation (i.e. that which isn’t backed up) is just that - idle speculation, and as such, worse than useless in a scientific debate. Which the “race realist” debate claims to be.
I’m not raising the bar, the bar is already set where it is by, you know, the scientific community, and its gosh-darn fiddly methodologies and practices.