Reminds me of a passage from Philip Greenspun's article, How to Become as Rich as Bill Gates, http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/:
When I arrived at MIT as a first-year graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, I asked a professor for help with a research problem. He said "The reason that you've having trouble is that you don't know anything and you're not working very hard." A friend of mine was a surgery resident at Johns Hopkins. He complained to one of his teachers that he was having trouble concentrating because he'd been up all night for several nights in a row. The professor replied "Oh... does your pussy hurt?" According to Business Week, Jack Welch "encouraged near-brutal candor in the meetings he held [at GE]".
The bottom line: self-esteem is great but beware of creating a cozy home for unproductive people with bad ideas.
Perhaps this is a tangent, but the notion of ...creating a cozy home for unproductive people... resonated with something I learned from a kiteboard instructor, of all people:
When I was learning to kiteboard I was out one day for a couple hours, had a good session and decided I was ready to get out of the water. I wasn't exhausted, but I was getting tired.
My instructor came speeding up next to me and asked me what I was doing. I explained I was getting tired and wanted to head in. He tossed his really nice new kiteboard my way, told me to give him the old beat up kiteboard I was riding and to go back out. I was reluctant but he pushed me and I caved in. My session went from good to great, and I think my kiteboarding skills improved more in that extra hour than in many of the days prior.
Later that night I was telling my instructor how well I did on the newer board and how I had been ready to give up for the day. He told me "Sometimes you just have to push yourself that extra 5%, even when you think you can't." That statement has been a guiding principle throughout my life ever since.
Any time I feel like I'm in too much in my comfort zone, not challenging myself to learn new things, or feel I'm incapable of doing something, I remember my kiteboarder's adage and try to push myself just a little bit more. So far it seems to have worked well.
I don't think your two stories are the same thing. The MIT professor was being blunt, but not rude, and providing helpful advice (if not in a pleasant form). The medical professor was being rude to the point of abuse, and was not being helpful so much as an enforcer of the insane culture of medical training that causes residents to have to stay up for several nights in a row in the first place. (IIRC, sleep deprivation has been shown to lead to increased medical errors.)
> (IIRC, sleep deprivation has been shown to lead to increased medical errors.)
It has[1]. However, it's not as cut-and-dried as it might seem at first. Decreased hours for physicians lead to more handoffs between physicians, and each handoff is a potential source of error[2].
Therefore, a proper balance between hours and handoffs, as well as new institutional practices, are required to bring patient safety to an optimal level.
A friend of mine made it to the end of a medical degree then switched to finance and is doing really well (a natural).
When people ask why he "wasted" all those years of a medical degree his response was simple:
"yeh it felt like a waste at first; especially as I knew for a large part of it I wouldnt ever be a doctor. But then I realised how far it was pushing me to my limits. I learnt much more about myself than I did about medicine"
He's in his mid twenties and easily the most successful person amongst his peers.
> The professor replied "Oh... does your pussy hurt?"
The funny thing about this is that I'll bet if that resident socked that professor in the face, the 'tough guy' routine would drop pretty quickly. In any case, I don't think that trying to turn Med School into boot-camp is necessarily the right thing to do. If all those students take after that professor I shudder to think of what their bedside manor would be like:
Patient: The pain is coming back again. Can I have some morphine?
Doctor: Suck it up maggot! Are you crying for your mommy again?
Thomas Sowell told a similar tale about himself as an undergrad at Harvard. He had transferred from Howard, and was on the way to flunking out do to poor work habits. Some quotes from p.118 fo his "A Personal Odyssey" (hardcover):
"My work at Howard was a further handicap, for that experience gave me no inkling of the kind of time and effort required at Harvard, and in fact lulled me into a false sense of security. I thought I was being a conscientious student, so I was shocked one day when Nort [his roommate] suddenly said to me:
"Tom, when are you going to stop goofing off and get some work done?"
"Goofing off! I didn't know what he was talking about. But I learned the hard way when the mid-term grades came out."
This was about 1956. He pulled his shit together and graduated magna cum laude.
That's the exact reason they push interns beyond breaking point. My friend regularly made silly, dangerous mistakes when tired - every time he did a serious dressing down ensued.
Because he was an intern a qualified doctor always double checked him so none of the mistakes were enacted. But he learned his limits and how far it was safe to go.
People put their lives in the hands of doctors; they are under pressure, overworked and often have a tiny margin for error. Knowing your limits is one of the most important aspects.
This is the reason usually only the brightest and hardest workers at school make the grade to become a doctor. Not because of their smarts - but because they can concentrate and focus on a task and achieve highly on it in a consistent way, even under pressure.
What you say is logical, but doesn't quite square with the macho attitude described in the other comment. If you're tired and you realize you're going to do stupid stuff - that you're past your limit, you've learned that lesson, it sounds like.
Providing a safe environment in which to learn how to recognize that you aren't performing at your best is wonderful; it's hard to simulate the other conditions that give suboptimal results, but lack of sleep gives a good cross-section of drowsy, distracted, over-caffeinated, agitated, etc.
FWIW, I've read that the reason for pushing interns beyond their physical limits is simply money, not teaching or building character. It's cheaper to work them ridiculous hours than to hire enough people to do the job well.
Working sleep-deprived for long periods of time doesn't really teach you anything after the first couple weeks. It just lowers your efficiency and increases your error rate. In software development, that causes you to waste time. In medicine, that causes, er, iatrogenic death, or something like that.
I agree that knowing your limit it part of medical school training, but it's also about practicing how to work effectively and safely when you pass that limit. Many doctors will eventually have to perform very long surgeries often over 12 hours of intense concentration with no breaks. Overworking medical students for long shift helps to prepare them for the occasions when they have to perform and have no one to pass the patient off to and no one to closely monitor their work.
No, it can't. I am doing research on medical robotics/robotic analogs for surgical practice. Psychologically you can't create the same feelings when the people know it is fake.
Ok, but when it's real and people tell you that they're beyond their limit, in some fields, pushing further is a bad idea. Piloting, mountaineering and surgery come to mind immediately.
I think the real point is that, when people don't know their limits, they might think that they're somewhere below where they really are, rather than somewhere above. If the person's output is still great and they aren't making any mistakes, don't let them quit; keep pushing until they actually start to falter. After doing that a few times in relatively safe environments, you can be sure they'll actually know when to say stop, rather than trusting an uncalibrated instrument (their opinion of themselves.)
I grew up in Shaker Heights (SHHS '01) and happened to visit Shaker Heights High School for the first time on the afternoon in 1997 that The Shakerite released its article comparing SAT scores across races. It was pretty nuts.
I tend to agree with the conclusion that it's an attitude issue on the part of most (but not all) African-American parents more than any kind of funding or other issue. As I wrote about in my book, the cafeteria self-segregated and so did the classes for the most part. No one told us to--it just happened that way.
That being said, the notion that everyone in Shaker Heights is "rich," whether Black, White, Asian, or otherwise, is extremely misleading. It's a middle-class suburb. There are lower-income sections and $8 million mansions. Hardly anyone is rich though, and if they are, their kids are going to private schools like University School, Hathaway Brown or Hawken.
Have you read about the Schelling model of segregation? It is a model where non-racists can segregate due only to a slight preference to not be completely outnumbered.
I speculate that the phenomenon you observed in the lunchroom could have been caused by a mechanism similar to the one described in Schelling's model.
This is a problem for sure. There is so much in this story I could comment on but I will just say that children definitely get an idea of what they are "supposed" to be from several different sources- parents, television, teachers, peers, etc. When you are young there is a sort of penalty for being different or unusual and children often end up gravitating toward some role at least some of the time. I think certain ethnic groups "over-achieve" and others "under-achieve" because of this pressure- they are just being who they are "supposed" to be. This is my verbose way of blaming the whole thing on peer and societal pressures.
People (adults and children alike) are not really equipped to resist societal pressure. We have a lot of things we are supposed to do- graduate high school/college, get married (maybe even to someone of our own race), have children, get a good job, shower everyday, wear "cool clothes", get good/bad grades, act black, act white and we often suffer societal consequences if we don't "behave"... I think the HN community, being more counter-culturalist/entrepreneurial than average can definitely see where I am coming from on this.
I intuitively like the idea of the "supposed" but atleast in the west there seems to be a way of counteracting these pressures. It seems to me that "white" children can choose from a variety of roles: nerdy, athletic, artistic etc and although there are penalties associated with each role there are rewards as well and each role is deemed valid by society. However, the article seems to suggest a homogeneous "black" identity, which leaves no room for accepted rebellion. Perhaps, some folks living in USA can confirm if my hypothesis is connected to reality.
When I moved from Canada to the U.S., I was surprised how segregated the country still is. It's not legally enforced, of course. It's just that there are black parts of town and white parts of town.
So although I've lived in both Pittsburgh and Boston for a total of 16 years now, including grad school where I was very social, I haven't had much of a chance to have African American friends because I've met almost no African Americans.
For some reason, I've heard the exact same thing from residents of Chicago, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, etc.
So does "average" exclude major (maybe East Coast) U.S. cities? Should I look at cities of smaller scale... say Oxnard, CA? Which criteria should one consider when deciding a city is "normally" segregated? Just want to know how things are different in the average American city with a significant number of ethnic minorities.
I would say that's pretty accurate. The spectrum of acceptable black "social personalities" seems to be smaller than for whites, at least in the high school years.
It is in part do to the fact that whites comprise a much larger portion of the population (70+%) in most areas, but also they don't necessarily (need to) express themselves as "white" as their defining social trait, so they may choose something else as the major one.
This "idea of what they are supposed to be" is at the heart of psychological transaction/script analysis, which takes it to the extreme that people get this "script" describing how they should lead their life from their parents and will do almost anything to follow it, no matter how self-destructive, i.e. someone who gets told by their father "you'll end up in prison" will not only become a criminal, but will also let himself get caught so he can fulfill the script.
The article has enriched me by a new concept: voluntary vs involuntary minorities. Thanks, upvoted.
A disturbing thought: if black racist sentiment says "Plato and hypotenuses are for whites", and white racist sentiment says "crime is for blacks", the performance disparity between the two racist asshole groups isn't all that surprising!
I'd also be very interested in similar in-depth causal studies on the gap between white and Jewish academic achievement, because this makes me, and more importantly my kids in the future, part of the underachieving group.
This is the inherent problem I see in the modern "casual" approach to racism. It's "ok" now to be vaguely anti-white/anti-black in an "im not really racist, honest" way. With just the one attitude in the room your probably ok (just get a bit of awkwardness) but with both the divide is doubled and problems appear.
I get frustrated with some of the big "anti-racism" campaigners; they strike me as making the smaller issues big ones and causing divisions all over again.
On the specific issue I think it's not so much because the students are black they have this attitude - just because they are in a minority and have the anti-majority sentiment. I saw a similar problem at my school when girls where let into the all male establishment for the first time. Even though girls tend to do better academically at that age in our school they did worse and had higher rates of no homework completion/detention (as I recall). Im guessing for very similar reasons.
To be honest though I think parents are the main problem; and not just in minority groups now. Even my Aunt who is in her early 40's has no interest in her kids schooling - and they suffer for it. The current parental generation seems full of similar attitudes - my mother is a teacher and she says getting parents to take an interest, encourage learning out of school and other activities is the biggest challenge she faces at the moment.
My first boss was a black guy who graduated from Yale. It took 7 years before I was making more money than he did. I tried to get him to move to a new company, so I could get a signing bonus, and he could get a 30k raise, but had little interest. My father grew up as a poor white guy and had the same attitude. "I make a lot of money why strive for more?"
The people I work with have this attitude that 300k/year is expected (aka middle class) from a two income family. IMO, DNA has little impact on Black achievement, rather culture is "crushing" black America. When 80% of any population is not playing the game they hold the average hostage.
My personal theory is you tend to measure yourself in comparison the well to do people around you. If you fail to reach that level you are more likely to push your children up a notch. However, everyone needs to balance success vs. personal sacrifices and needs to decide when enough is enough.
Switching jobs introduces a risk of not liking the new job. If you enjoy your current job and it pays you more than enough to make you happy, switching for $30k sounds like it would be a bad idea to me. Money can't buy happiness.
Having a comfortable job long term with this attitude is career suicide. Not only should you be constantly trying to advance financially, you need to be learning new things with different roles and environments. Else you risk putting all your eggs in one basket, with no where to go if your longtime comfortable position vanishes some day.
Financial gain is independent of learning new roles and environments. I wouldn't be comfortable in a job where I wasn't constantly expanding my knowledge and learning new things. However, once I make enough money to cover good food, nice housing, and a few adult toys, I couldn't care less about how much I earn. Making more money is a very small factor in my career decisions.
My father grew up as a poor white guy and had the same attitude. "I make a lot of money why strive for more?"
This attitude is quite logical and reasonable if you consider relative achievement vs. absolute achievement. If you've started out near the back of the pack economically or socially, and make good, there's no shame in enjoying the fruits of your labors and directing your focus onto other things besides competition.
Money is one measure of success, but if you're making what you consider to be enough money, you may find other uses for your time whose utility is less obvious to other people but significant to you. Autonomy is often its own reward.
A family income of $300k is upper class, by the way. No one likes to call themselves rich, but $300k is at least in the top 10%, which is decidedly not middle.
I've seen the claim that black academic test scores are consistently one standard deviation below the norm regardless of the test: sat, gre, lsat, mcat, erb, afqt, whatever. Always one standard deviation. Unfortunately, that lends weight to the genetic argument.
People that are 1/4th black and identify themselves as black, have the same issue on standardized tests as people that are 3/4+% black. If DNA was the cause you would expect a non uniform distribution.
The typical black American is 85%+ genetically "African". A tiny slice of people misreporting race wouldn't impact things much.
And I don't follow your premise that inherent differences wouldn't be quantitatively consistent. That's how it is with all the other measurable differences between races.
People that are 3/4 "European" and 1/4 "African" and people that are 1/4 "European" and 3/4 "African" score the same on standardized tests. But, they don't have the same skin color / shade.
If there was a genetic based IQ difference you would expect the same shift as you see in skin color. But, that's not what happens, thus it's probably not a genetic trait.
The African American adolescents had a lower birth weight, a lower verbal IQ, and a higher number of sexual partners than did White adolescents. For each characteristic, the mixed race mean fell between the means of the two parental populations.
Races are extended families. People in a race are genetically and genealogically closer to each other than to people outside of it. This racial clustering of relatedness is empirically testable. Race is not a social construct.
You're conflating two distinct concepts. By the genetic definition, a 3/4 European 1/4 African would be white. By the social definition, a 3/4 European 1/4 African would be black.
My roommate in college was half-Haitian half-Portugese and identified more as European. My near 100% African-American buddy I played cards with identified himself as fully black. A half-Carib half-French (black skin tone) girl I knew identified as French. In London, a good friend who is half-Arabic half-Indian identifies equally as Arabic and Indian. My three-quarters Chinese one-quarter Japanese friend raised in Beijing identifies as pure Chinese. I think a 1/4th African 3/4ths European blood person raised in a predominantly black community would identify as black, and raised in a non-black community would identify as European.
All my data is from people who live in international coastal cities though, so maybe it's different in various provinces and less affluent middle-of-country areas.
Popular perception of race among Americans. The "one-drop rule" is widely attested, and for the most part is still true.
This can and does vary from country to country--mixed-race Brazilians are considered white in Brazil, but black if they immigrate to the United States.
You're using a fairly prescriptive definition of race. Race, as commonly used, is a social construct. Ancestry functions the way you describe, but as the example given above shows, "race" and ancestry are not directly related.
Ancestry is objective. Race is subjective. There is a many-to-many relationship between the two. If people say you're black, then you're black. Different groups may come to different conclusions on what your race is depending on varying social norms. If you disagree with this, then you're not using "race" in the same way that the rest of country is.
Maybe parents are right in not being that interested in schooling. I think I wouldn't be. School is mostly about rote learning, fitting in and being a good worker drone.
Sure, it worked in the past, but perhaps in the future other skills will matter more.
Maybe parents are right in not being that interested in schooling. I think I wouldn't be.
You'd be doing your kids a great disservice.
School is mostly about rote learning, fitting in and being a good worker drone.
Only if that's what you want it to be about. My parents took a great interest in my schooling and I feel that those years where both educational and formative. First and foremost they where willing to acknowledge that not all schools are equal and that not all schools work for all people. So they made sure I went to good schools that worked for me. They also continuously monitored my progress and where in dialogue with my teachers and where willing to go to bat for me. They made sure I got extra tutoring in subjects I had problems in, and helped me advance in subjects I was doing well in.
So while it is only one data point, I believe that the parents interest in their child's schooling is critical for the child getting anything out of school. You cannot show a complete disinterest in your child's education and then complain when he doesn't get education you think he needs or deserves.
I hope my kids would do reasonably well in school. I wouldn't say "whatever" if they brought home very bad marks. I just would want to avoid making them believe that school is the only thing that matters.
I acknowledge that it is necessary to learn putting up with unloved tasks - I am just not convinced that learning that has to take 13 years (length of school in my country). Maybe a couple of years of boredom could be shaved off without a great loss.
I would certainly be very interested in making my kids become autonomous learners and achievers. Just, as I say, the school metric does not mean very much to me. In the best case scenario I hope to teach them how to cope with school without expending too much energy. I think I would also encourage them to do all sorts of voluntary school projects they can possibly do (like writing for the school magazine, making movies, drama, science projects, whatever). I would not encourage them to spend every waking hour learning arbitrary stuff for school.
"My parents took a great interest in my schooling and I feel that those years where both educational and formative."
So what were the things you took out of it?
There are things to learn - namely, how to learn, I suppose. But again, as I said, I question the time it takes to learn these things.
> I would certainly be very interested in making my kids become autonomous learners and achievers.
You can't really do this by leaving them to their own devices in the school-system and using report cards as a 'checkpoint system' to evaluate how well they are doing. Remember that this study was K-12, not just high school or middle school students. When you're raising your kids you are molding them into what they will become, so you need to have a more hands-on approach early in their life to point them in the right direction for later on (when small deviations/whatever don't matter as much/have less effect).
I hope you don't have kids. Whether you do or don't like school is immaterial. The fact is, schools take up a majority of your kids' time until they graduate and get a life of their own. By default, you should be interested in what your kid is learning. No one is asking you to sit in class 8 hours a day, but at least get to know what it is they are learning. If my kid takes an interest in music, I'm there, wrestling? me too, football/soccer/hockey? I'm game. God forbid I have to get up from the keyboard because junior wants to go to the park.
As for rote learning. Every other nation has stuck to rote learning or some form of it. It's only the US that has taken a method of education that has worked for hundreds of years in many nations and manage to completely fuck it up. And every few years some academic will invent some new form of learning, convince the school board to buy into, and then after 10 years of "experimenting" on kids they might have gained/lost 0.5% on the academic test compared to rote learning.
I'm not sure where the skill of learning will be replaced by another, except maybe unlearning. Rote is just a baseline, if you can't work your way through a basic problem set then you certainly aren't qualified to handle something that might require a bit of brainpower.
I hope your still young because you'll realize, after many years, that in high school no one truly fit in. That is why John Hughes films (RIP) and shows like Freeks and Geeks were so popular. Everyone was awkward and that was the point. High school is a microcosm not a career, there was no skill to learn there.
"I hope you don't have kids" is, as far as I can see, very nearly the worst thing you can say to someone, if you mean it seriously. So far, everyone dies, but at least there's a chance that part of them will live on through their children; saying you'd prefer that they never have any legacy is even worse than flatly wishing they'd die.
Ah, I actually had missed the sense in which yardie might have meant "I hope you don't already have kids", and they've actually said that that's how it was meant (approximately), so I was a bit out of line, above.
That's true, you can. How many adults of 100 years ago have a legacy today without considering their kids? A few million? How many of 1000 years ago? Thousands, at most? Kids are more reliable than making the history books or being involved in building or monument that happens to stand for a while.
It was meant in the sense that if he/she is a parent at the moment than he is a poor one. I would never tell someone not to have kids, it would be hypocritical on my part.
"By default, you should be interested in what your kid is learning."
I hope they would learn interesting stuff, but if they don't, should I really try to make them believe it is interesting? I personally hated school for most of my life, and I have a hard time putting my kids through the same thing. Maybe it would help them more if I told them that I understand why they hate school so much. My goal would be to teach them how to get through school with the minimum possible effort - hopefully with reasonable grades, though, as they do help later in life. But only so much.
"Every other nation has stuck to rote learning or some form of it."
Sure, one probably needs to know how to do it - but is it necessary to practice it for 12+ years to get the hang of it? I rather doubt it.
Obviously it is not all so black and white, but lately I see a tendency of putting way to much importance on school. When can kids be kids?
"My goal would be to teach them how to get through school with the minimum possible effort"
This is commendable. You don't have to agree with what they are teaching, but declaring school as evil sets a bad tone. Instead of learning from your mistakes, your kid(s) just inherit the animosity. Unless you enjoy homeschooling* then schools will always have aspects of it you won't like.
You don't practice the same learning for the 12 years. You reach a level and move onto the next challenge. Just like no one takes 12 years of handwriting or 12 years of algebra. A good school would recognize you've mastered the subject and send you on to the next one. I finished 3rd grade reading 5th grade books. In the 4th and 5th grade I was outside playing basketball while the rest of class had to complete their reading assignments.
I agree that the importance of being a kid seems to be lost on the current generation. Schools are expanding and playgrounds are being paved over. 24-hour news has turned child abductions into a national epidemic instead of what they really are, isolated incidents.
* I don't mind homeschooling, but I don't have the time nor expertise to commit to it.
"Instead of learning from your mistakes, your kid(s) just inherit the animosity."
True, that needs to be avoided. I guess I hope they would have a good time at school - basically, that they would figure out how to make the best out of a miserable situation.
Even most of the stuff that is being taught can be interesting or useful - just not always in the way it is being taught. I guess going away from "I have to learn this to get good grades" to move to "hm, while I have to do this, I might as well have fun and learn as much as I can" is what I really have in mind. I just wouldn't count on schools getting this right. So the kids would have to find a way to learn independently of school.
I finished 3rd grade reading 5th grade books. In the 4th and 5th grade I was outside playing basketball while the rest of class had to complete their reading assignments.
I commend your accomplishments. Still, it seems there was an opportunity lost here. Instead of allowing you to continue to advance, you were held back (in a way) until the rest of the kids caught up to you.
Similar experiences in my own earlier education soured my taste for school, though in my case I remember being given explicit directions to stop working ahead and wait for the class to catch up, on multiple occasions.
I personally hated school for most of my life, and I have a hard time putting my kids through the same thing.
So put them through a different thing. There are several different types of schools offering several different educational philosophies. If you look around a bit you might just find something that is a good match for your kid.
As an addition to dagw's response the other crucial thought that occurs ot me is that, yes, I agree with you schooling probably needs a big refresh. BUT if a parents response to that is "well schooling sucks so there is no point bothering" then their kids will probably inherit that attitude (this is my Aunt's problem - her kids struggle a LOT). If the yhave that view they should be providing alternative options in their own "teaching time" rather than take it out on the child - right?
What I was mostly talking about was this annoyingly prevelant attitude of some modern parents where they believe schools are where their kids learn and non of that responsibility lies with them.
If you know any teachers ask them about this: I bet what they have to say will be a shock.
>I'd also be very interested in similar in-depth causal studies on the gap between white and Jewish academic achievement
I'm not sure what you mean here. There are European White Jews (They are the Jews with elevated IQ, Ashkenazi), African Jews, Oriental Jews, and so on. You can't say that Jews are not white or Jews are not black. You'd be surprised by the number of blond hair, blue eyed Jews in Israel. There are Jews with a Jewish characteristic, but just as many without. There are also non-Jews with Jewish characteristics. In my Jewish circle, they all claim to be white, and that's what you'd call them, you'd never know any difference unless you found out that they go to synagogue.
I'm interested in the academic gap between Ashkenazim and non-Jewish whites. Even if you're bad at distinguishing the two groups by naked eye, it still exists.
Of course it exists, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. This can be seen in the numbers at any top university, Noble prize winners, advancement in science, engineering, and and so on. That part isn't so interesting, what is interesting is how this elevated IQ came about.
There are a few ideas of why this happened. The slower, unable to adapt, were killed off over thousands of years. When finding a mate, it was recommended to marry the child of a scholar. Jews are one of the oldest groups to become fully literate, as it was required to read and study the Torah, which later gave them the name "People of the book". European Jews were regulated in the type of commercial occupations that they could hold, that being money lending. Money lending required higher IQ over other occupations. All of these compounded over hundreds and possibly thousands of years could have possibly affected the IQ of the Jewish population. There is one problem with this idea, in that most of that requires an elevated IQ to begin with.
>Insofar as I am suggesting that the Jews may have had some degree of unusual verbal skills going back to the time of Moses, I am naked before the evolutionary psychologists’ ultimate challenge. Why should one particular tribe at the time of Moses, living in the same environment as other nomadic and agricultural peoples of the Middle East, have already evolved elevated intelligence when the others did not?
All of these compounded over hundreds and possibly thousands of years could have possibly affected the IQ of the Jewish population. There is one problem with this idea, in that most of that requires an elevated IQ to begin with.
I don't understand why this requires an elevated IQ to start with. If we suppose that IQ is partly genetic, and therefore subject to random mutations, and if we further suppose that the smarter offspring have better opportunities to mate, then wouldn't that be enough to end up with a smarter group of people over time?
High IQ among East Asians is fascinating. The fact that they can migrate to the US, and perform as well or better than others, even if they are in the lower socioeconomic tier, tends to make me think that genetics does play a large part in IQ. I do not believe that it is the sole factor though.
This is my take on it. If your child has a really low IQ, then it will be a hard life for your child. If your child has an average or higher IQ, then IQ stops being a factor and attitude, values, and work ethic play a bigger role.
If your child has an average or higher IQ, then IQ stops being a factor and attitude, values, and work ethic play a bigger role.
No. If you're willing to believe IQ is genetic, you must also believe IQ is is a stronger factor than work ethic - otherwise Jews would've been selected for work ethic instead. It certainly sounds like an easier variable for evolution to optimize.
Not sure if you got my point about Koreans. If they have genetically above-average IQ, what selective pressures contributed to it? That's one possible way to test your explanation of Jewish intelligence.
One thing that we all must keep in mind, not all Jews are smart and intelligent, as with any other group. It just happens that of the extremely smart people in the world today making breakthrough advancements, there's a good chance that they are Jewish.
>If you're willing to believe IQ is genetic, you must also believe IQ is is a stronger factor than work ethic (How do you make italics/quotes on HN)
A stronger factor contributing to what?
Doing well, being able to provided for yourself and your family doesn't require a high IQ. One can do that merely with an average IQ, and do well in life, as long as on has a good work ethic.
Having said that, it isn't very likely that a person with a slightly above average IQ will be able to produce the type of works of say a Newton or Einstein. That requires a genius IQ which almost nobody has, of any ethnic group.
Although East Asians have one of the highest average IQ's, they have not dominated intellectually in the same way as Europeans. It's fascinating to me, asking why Europeans and not Asians, dominated the world, especially given the huge population of East Asians. It's a very complicated and touchy subject, but fascinating nonetheless.
It seems to me that a much of the criticism could have been defused with some slightly different methodology. Some statistics that might been good ammunition (each gathered with rates of several different cohorts: white, black-non-immigrant, black-immigrant, non-black-immigrant)
* # of hours spent on homework
* # of hours parents spent with children on school-related activities
* Rate of parental participation in school activities
* Absenteeism rates
* rates of student failure to complete homework
* rates of student participation in school-related activities
* all of the above plotted across grade levels (do any of these statistics vary over time as children become more susceptible to cultural forces from peers?)
I think a more scientific approach is of little help here. The issue is too emotionally charged. Most people have pre-conceived notions about where the problem lies, and they will go to great lengths to cherry pick their evidence.
Ogbu's research is useful today simply because political correctness has reached a point where we can't even consider the role minorities play in their own academic achievement. 50 years ago the opposite was true; the political mainstream was looking for anything they could to justify the status quo.
The bottom line is that if you are trying to explain some phenomenon, you won't reach very good conclusions by taking certain aspects off the table for political reasons.
This is what struck me most about the academics (!) who were criticizing his work in the article.
"I find it useless to argue with people like Ogbu," says Urban League educational fellow Ronald Ross, himself a former school superintendent. "We know what the major problems in this school system are: racism, lack of funding, and unqualified teachers."
This guy's issue isn't with any particular bit of Ogbu's methodology or logic, just the places it takes him.
How this can fly in any academic field is shocking to me.
Presenting data on the elements that aren't subject to self-bias would bolster his case - absenteeism and failure to complete homework (as opposed to completing homework poorly), from the list you gave. I'm not sure that he would have gotten much use out of the rest of them, as they would be self-reported in most cases and difficult to quantify in the others.
I've also read some very interesting ethnographic studies about the effects of poverty, including ones about the parenting styles of different class levels.
The most staggering (to me) finding was that poor African Americans (not just blacks — specifically Americans) ask their small children fewer questions that the parents already know the answer to (e.g. "What's that?? Right! That's a kitty!"), say "No" way more often, and expect unquestioning obedience rather than questions, exploration and creativity.
Lower class whites also trend that way in their parenting styles, but not to the same degree.
And of course, parenting styles tend to transfer from generation to generation. Thus the whole "I'm becoming my mother" and "I want to be a better father than my father was" cliché, heritability of depression and also the legacy of child abuse.
When you think that yeah, really, in terms of the number of generations, it was not long ago at all that these people's ancestors were bought and sold like property.
Combine the slavery aspect with the parenting aspect -- and the fact that parents act like their parents -- and you can see how, as a race in America, those kids could be behind, even if their families are much wealthier now.
Their parents' parents probably were not. To say nothing of their parents' parents' parents.
It was this realization I had, more than anything else (in addition to a visit to London), that made me realize that American society truly was racially biased -- at a much deeper level than most people talk about.
These sociological findings are not new or obscure -- and yet, there are so very few programs to help break the cycle by helping those families improve their parenting.
Soon after he left Ohio and returned to California, a black parent from Shaker Heights went on TV and called him an "academic Clarence Thomas."
Perhaps part of these kids' problem is that they have parents who think that being compared to Clarence Thomas is an insult.
Such theorists often cite the 1994 publication of The Bell Curve, which argued that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, as evidence that negative stereotyping of African Americans still exists.
I don't think any of the critics, nor the author of this article, have actually read The Bell Curve.
He also allegedly sexually harassed a subordinate of his, Anita Hill, though the allegations were never substantiated. This was prior to being appointed to the Supreme Court.
"'I find it useless to argue with people like Ogbu,' says Urban League educational fellow Ronald Ross, himself a former school superintendent. 'We know what the major problems in this school system are: racism, lack of funding, and unqualified teachers.' Although Shaker Heights is in fact an integrated, well-funded, and well-staffed school district, Ross is nonetheless convinced that it suffers from other problems that contribute to the achievement disparities between the races."
Reading this, I was reminded of some of the things that were described in "Common Ground," the book about the Boston school bussing crisis in the 1970s, as well as "All Souls," a book about the struggles of an Irish-American family growing up in South Boston in the 1970s and 1980s. For those families -- black and white -- that had parents who were uninterested or unable to push their kids in school, the kids' peer circles tended to take over, with predictable results.
In the 30+ since the bussing crisis, Boston has spent huge amounts of money and effort to improve the schools and teaching quality, yet some of the high schools still have huge behavioral and crime problems. And guess what? Many parents still aren't invested in their kids' education, or even their extracurricular activities (there was an article in the Globe a few months ago about how few Boston parents show up for games, even when their kids are on the teams).
Peers are almost always a stronger impact on people than their parents are. Read Judith Harris's "The Nurture Assumption". The single strongest influence is genetic, roughly 50%, next is peer group, third is general cultural environment, further down is parental influence (note that this assumes fairly normal family life, abuse or serious neglect increases impact of parents). The best way parents can influence their children for the better is by careful selection of neighborhood for their children's peers.
I think a big impact on a child's ability to move up in the world is whether they have a father. I recall a study out there saying there is a distinct difference in income between a child from single and two parent homes.
A wise man once said, "...By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called 'diversity' actually perpetuate racism. Their obsession with racial group identity is inherently racist..."
I wish I could say that I didn't fall victim to this sort of thinking all through school, but I'd be lying if I say that I hadn't. There is indeed a culture of not pushing to your top potential academically, or at least there was when I was in school.
I seem to have moved on from that, and now work pretty darn hard at learning stuff, but only once I was away from my peers culturally as well as physically. It sucks but it is the truth.
I would like comment on the economic and social aspects[1] of this article.
.. * I) Underacheivement as a group Defense Mechanism ::
Some social-groups actively encourage what I call "Perennial-Underacheivement". This is in my opinion based on a group defense mechanism[2].
This defense mechanism is to ensure the weak and sick and those unable to care for themselves are not left behind. They value support for the less-able and believe that informal community support is far better than State supplied support. The reasons are a topic unto themselves but my take is that this group behiour ensures those with latent talent don't leave the community and thus those who cannot care for themselves. Some talented people may not reach their potential, but they may still lead a happy, fruitful life. Some members may take the lack of excellence to extremes and die in prison as hopeless drug-dealers.
Basically, in these groups, overacheiving and commercial gain is downplayed. Here, to be rich is to "Sell Out" and to move out of the neighbourhood it to betray your "Roots".
.. * II) Acheivement is better for the Acheiver and the Group ::
The opposing view is that each person tries for themselves and their immediate family and this works because everyone "succeeds". People who cannot care for themselves are kept at a distance, cared for by the State which is paid for by tax. Individual families may still take care of their own, but it helps to be a "successful" family.
.. * Evidence of this divide ::
My data point of a divide link here would be to consider Immigrant versus 3rd generation Locals. This is touched on in the Article, where a Black Man (but immigrant) is in conflict with American born African-Americans. I offer an explanation that some of the American born blacks are using race issues to form the defense mechanism which conciously or unconcsiously they know protects their group.
First I will state the obvious. Immigrants by definition cannot belong to the group-care mindset. Why? Because by definition they have left many, many compatriots behind to fend for themselves in a different geographical place. They may not like it, and they may send every penny back to their village. But in their mind the gain overall to themselves and the group behind is clear: immigration is better than remaining.
------------
[1] I am not a black, and I am not American. But I wish to say something on this topic because I am an immigrant (to Oz, then UK) myself and part of an oft-picked upon ethnic group (Jew). This issue is complex and there are many commingled ingredients, economic-social-racial-ethnic-familial-historical
[2] I am not making a comment on the rights , wrongs of this defense mechanism
Your comments about low achievement for group defense/satisfaction are also seen in Elton Mayo's Hawthorne Studies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elton_Mayo) in a contact that's not related to race.
As a Jew you're about as far away from "Underacheivement as a group Defense Mechanism" as it's possible to get. The history of the world is filled with stories of people who have lost their way, their identity and become bland (not least the ten tribes of the north, if you buy into that). Despite all the stuff going against them, people who know that they're Jewish (even when they don't have a particularly strong connection to the group) manage to pull themselves out of difficult situations and rise to become very successful in whatever challenges they set themselves.
Immigrants by definition cannot belong to the group-care mindset.
That's not universally true. There's a subculture in the UK (and probably other places) of Han Chinese gaining access as illegal immigrants with intent to directly benefit their family back home. Sometimes one half of a married couple will do it so they can secure education for their child. See _Chinese Whispers: The True Story Behind Britain's Hidden Army of Labour (Paperback)_, Pai, 2008.
I don't know why you were downmodded... what you said makes perfect sense.
I am firmly in the camp of Achieve and Prosper. Being Jewish helps :) , but the Immigrant bit was the mainstay of my comment. jews have been thrown out of lots of countries (including Egypt/Israel/Iran in Bible) so it may be in our blood to be Immigrants and thus to trust most in the care you can provide to your own family via success. I know lots of 5 generation jews who underperform versus some dynamic Israelis. Different topic, different discussion.
--
I only commented on it because I work extensively with Charities. I now do volunteer work with the IT4Communities[1] and have worked with lots of others in the past too.
I have perceived an active repulsion to Money and Success amongst many Charity Staff. These staff are often recruited from the community which normally does the rest of the caring.
This is where I have developed my idea that the Fear of Money is actually misguided Concern for Community. They love their community as it struggles to help the needy and are petrified of being left as the only broke fuckers who care as the University grads end up in finance.
As far as I can remember, Jews haven't been thrown out of Iran. Expelled from Spain, discriminated against via the pogroms of east Europe, but at least in my family's city of Esfahan, Jews have always been welcome. Many have immigrated to Israel, but not out of a forced migration, rather they moved to be in the "homeland".
Some social-groups actively encourage what I call "Perennial-Underacheivement". This is in my opinion based on a group defense mechanism[2].
But I must really disagree with you wrt to African American youth addressed in the article and its subject research: they came from well off families that didn't need to hold their children back.
What you're speaking of is something widely practiced against women, specially in the Middle East: girls are often talked out of higher education and told they will need to care for their little siblings, elderly, husband and whoever is in need.
Here I would say that you are right and that the article focuses on Rich students. Why do they need to worry about group-care? I cannot offer a complete response. The reasons are too many and different for each person, region.
I only sought to comment on one ingredient of the complex reasons. The Defense Mechanism is a economic-social reason occasionally dressed up in race-division garments. I wantedto disrobe some of the arguments so that they can be addressed properly when they are a factor of underacheivement.
Superficially, it would seem like racial tension would be the concern that needed fixing.
But if that tension is just a defense mechanism, then to spur acheivement the solution is to emphasise that your community will receive excellent care and no-one will be neglected.
Culture is the cause, though of course it's correlated with intelligence and income level, which is what confuses people.
Not all cultures are created equally. What your parents did in the home, and who your friends were matter much more than anything else.
Does a Jewish kid from a family of scientists and scholars have much in common with so-called "white trash"? They're both white, right?
Does the child of a black immigrant who comes from a culture of learning and achievement have much in common with some other random brown-skinned person? They're both brown, right?
The problem here isn't race. It's a loser culture.
It would be interesting to know how well the black students did in fields of study that are typically (on average) normally higher for blacks. Such as music, dancing, and sports. There is a difference in races, why do we assume the difference is bad, and that's only on average, there are always exceptions. So maybe it is the attitudes of the students and the parents, but what would change those attitudes? That's the next question to pursue, I think anyway.
today, and I had occasion there to hear Tom Bouchard, indisputably one of the leading experts on human behavioral genetics research, say that the number-one thing to tell members of the general public who read about this research is "correlation does not imply causation." The simple blunder of assuming that phenomena with some kind of positive correlation are in a cause-effect relationship is one of the most enduring cognitive biases in human thinking, and the bias doesn't appear to be any less frequent in high-IQ persons, nor does it appear to go away even after student receive statistical education.
"On average, black students earned a 1.9 GPA while their white counterparts held down an average of 3.45"
The ratio between black and white GPAs = .55
"Ogbu worked from the 1990 census data, which showed that 32.6 percent of the black households and 58 percent of the white households in Shaker had incomes of $50,000 a year or more"
The ratio between number of blacks/white making above $50k/yr = .56
Yes, the parent post evokes some ridiculous reverence for ".55 is very close to .56". At least compare ratio of average income per race to ratio of GPA, not some bizarre ratio of "% > threshold". I could probably find an income threshold so that the ratios are exactly equal.
I made it pretty well despite having a somewhat challenging childhood. So did many of my friends. Here's two quick stories:
- My most influential mentor was born in the ghettos of London and dropped out of middle school. When he was 12, his home was raided by the police and he had a gun to the back of his head as his brother was arrested for dealing drugs. He can't read or write very well and he's dyslexic. He became a construction worker. Now he's running one of the most profitable construction firms in the Middle East and owns properties in five or six countries. He makes about $20,000 per month in salary and bonuses, not including his investments.
- My best friend had the hell beaten out of him by his father, until he got big enough to fight back and eventually kicked the hell out of his Dad, which then ended in an uneasy truce. He dealt drugs in high school, got into college, and dropped out. He became a self made millionaire at age 24. He's 29 now, lives in Bel Air in a three million dollar home, and in a bad year he makes $200,000.
Me? I dropped out of two high schools and left home at age 16 or 17, just scrapping here and there to get by. I then dropped out of another university. I didn't have what you'd call an easy childhood, but I did okay too.
A lot of my friends and mentors are like this. We're all self-made - we get along sort of okay with old money people, but fit right in with entrepreneurs and self made people. Many of them come up from hard times. An acquaintance of mine is 60ish, Polish, and spent her childhood in a concentration camp. Her family became wealthy black-marketing goods past the Communist lines for sale, and eventually a branch of their family came to America. She's a psychologist, her husband is some sort of businessman.
Everyone successful I know internalizes their problems - that means they blame themselves and take responsibility. This is key - if other people are doing things to you, then you can't change that and you're stuck. But if everything is your fault and responsibility, you can change that and win. So, dyslexic? Up to me to deal with. Racism? Up to me to deal with. Grew up poor? Up to me to deal with. Spent childhood doing forced labor in a Nazi factory? Up to me to deal with. Abused? Up to me to deal with. Speak very lower-class English? Up to me to deal with. No English? Up to me to deal with.
Now, I remember some sort of study that quoted: "People who internalize failure and externalize success are less happy but more successful. People who externalize failure and internalize success are more happy and less successful."
The "it's my fault, and my problem, and I'll deal with it" attitude makes you more successful and less happy. As a bonus, everything good that happens is luck and a blessing and can't be counted on. You'll be less content, much less content, but go much further.
So me? I always blame myself. "Partner stole a lot of money? That's my fault, I should've been paying attention to the finances." Success? "Got an important order? That's good luck, can't count on that in the future."
Most people do the opposite. "Life is hard and unfair, but everything I've achieved despite that is because I'm awesome." Everyone successful I know - "I've been dealt a good set of cards, I'm extraordinary lucky, and every mistake and hardship is on me." Less contentment, less surface happiness, much more accomplishment and triumph. It's the only way to the highest levels of accomplishment in any field.
I've seen precious little research on biological explanations. I'm betting all my money on culture. I'm in eastern Europe, and I feel parts of black culture familiar. And to be honest, I don't like it. We have here too a subculture in which people display gold chains and like songs about money and enemies, and pretty much to everybody's surprise it's socially determined, not ethnically.
I'm not saying there is _no_ genetic component - I would be surprised if it wasn't. Just that compared to culture it's not important. I didn't read The Bell Curve, but as far as I know (and refreshed with a bit of googling) it states that IQ is partly hereditary - I don't think anybody doubts this - and makes it easy to go further and say some groups of people are smarter. This is most likely true, but still not so important.
I just finished reading What Intelligence Tests Miss, by Keith Stanovich. Summary: critical reasoning skills are much much better predictor of academic and social success then IQ, and (that's the shocker) largely _not_ correlated with IQ. And this is just one of the factors which influence success. Even if a group is a few IQ points above or below average, the final effect is very unlikely to affect anything.
edit: Oh, and yes, critical reasoning skills, even if they're not as well studied as IQ is (which is a shame, but it's being corrected) have a much much smaller genetic component and are easier to change during lifetime.
These books come out every so often. 5 years ago "emotional intelligence" sold copy.
IQ has a heritability coefficient of between .5 and .8. The rest seems to be non-shared environment. IQ is a very good predictor of academic success and future income (.7 to .8 correlation). There's a hell of a lot of research out there that has shown this again and again.
I'd like to see Stanovich's definition of "critical reasoning" and the studies that show it to be both uncorrelated with IQ and a good predictor of academic success and future income. There just isn't that much left to predict -- two uncorrelated variables can't both have a correlation coefficient of .8.
I'm going to bet that whatever he has defined as "critical reasoning" actually has a high correlation with IQ when measured.
But you won't find much more in this, unfortunately. For the link (or lack thereof) between IQ and critical reasoning search for Stanovich, it's mostly his own research. For link between (parts of) critical reasoning and academic success look up Mischel's marshmallow experiment. Personally I never saw 0.8 correlations with IQ mentioned anywhere, so I'd be grateful for a pointer.
I'm sorry about the number for income -- everyone has it at a correlation of .3 to .6. I believe that I was thinking of Lynn's numbers for national incomes, which is correlated at .7 or so to average IQ.
IQ is a very good predictor of academic success and future income (.7 to .8 correlation).
I'm joining the call of another participant here for references to back up that statement.
There just isn't that much left to predict
This seems to be mistaking a statement about what is currently observed with a statement about what might be possible under experimental interventions. No one has shown what the maximum possible influence of other independent variables might be.
I'm going to bet that whatever he [Keith Stanovich] has defined as "critical reasoning" actually has a high correlation with IQ when measured.
You will lose the bet. He and other authors on cognitive psychology and behavioral economics have already repeatedly replicated the result that many forms of rationality have meager or no correlation with IQ. He cites the references in his book.
Thanks for doing the math. I appreciate the pursuit of curiosity here on HN. There is a different issue here to be curious about, and that is exactly what a calculation of broad heritability definitely predicts. It predicts a lot less than what many readers unfamiliar with genetics might guess. It happens that some of the leading authors on human behavioral genetics just wrote an article about what heritability does and does not mean
Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220.
is now dead. But I have the full text of the article at hand, as I am currently attending a weekly journal club with some of the authors, and one key paragraph from the article must be read by anyone who draws conclusions from heritablity figures:
"Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)."
This simply reemphasizes a point that is familiar to anyone who has studied genetics carefully, namely that the pre-Mendelian concept of heritability says nothing about malleability, the degree to which a trait can be influenced by environmental variables.
Angoff, W. H. (1988). The nature-nurture debate, aptitudes, and group differences. American Psychologist, 43, 713-720.
Mange, A. & Mange, E. J. (1990). Genetics: Human Aspects.
Kaufman, Alan S. (1990). Assessing Adolescent and Adult Intelligence.
So the statement above that heritability somehow constrains the expression of IQ or of consequences of IQ such as occupational success is actually conceptually incorrect. But I appreciate you going to the effort of doing the math.
Another thought is that relating one correlation coefficient to another with linear algebra probably depends too heavily on applying linear tools to a not fully linear model. Increases of income are plainly linear and are on a ratio scale. (There is a zero point for income, and each dollar increase in income has the same magnitude anywhere along the scale.) But IQ test standard scores are at best ordinal scales, so it is already an abuse of mathematics to treat them as a linear variable, or to treat a figure derived from them as a linear variable.
IQ has a heritability coefficient of between .5 and .8.
Kindly explain why that is at all relevant to the issue at hand. (Since you have been carrying on a conversation with another participant here as the thread has deepened, it might be a good idea to make clear just what point of his you were responding to with that point.)
I can't say with certainty now, but when I was a genetics student in a fairly decent University, I remember we laughed at "The Bell Curve". It wasn't considered classic scientific reading.
There are a million places to start if you want to find a critique, but you can start with Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man".
"Mismeasure of Man" was propaganda written by a Communist paleontologist who knew next to nothing of psychometrics.
EDIT: Yes I'm a bit bitter about it, I read it and believed it for years, before learning better. I don't like wasting my time and I HATE being lied to (and even more being taken in).
There are a million critiques, many of which I've read. Some are better than others. By far the most ill-informed is The Mismeasure of Man. It's the worst of the bunch, written by an idiot. If you want a intelligent critique, I can point you to some.
Now, Murray had problems in The Bell Curve -- he didn't properly understand regression to the mean, for example. But did you students actually read it before laughing? He was pretty solid on most of the genetic topics he covered (a small part of the book).
Not really - blacks from Africa and the Carribean do very well academically. It is only the American blacks that do poorly. They have the same biology and often a better starting line than the immigrants. Why is that?
I believe social factors play the biggest role and not biology. An example would be me. I am the last person in my family from the Caribbean islands. Academically, I am successful, my brother and sister (both US citizens) are wandering in and out of college. Because I was always treated different from them, socially and academically, I grew up with a different mindset.
It was drilled into my head that I should feel lucky to be in the US. My siblings don't have that problem, they are part of the US. I notice that these social changes can happen to any group and is not specific to black/asian/hispanic. One of my high school friends, 2nd-generation India-American, is going to be in jail for a long time. He has fully absorbed the gangster culture even though according to most race-based sociological studies he shouldn't be in jail.
IQ is roughly 50% genetic; school success is probably roughly 50% IQ (personal guesstimate). So my rough guess is about ONE-QUARTER of the DIFFERENCE in school success BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS is genetic. Hard work, and consistent work even more, make a big difference in practical success - in school or business. EDIT: I meant the differences between fairly normal levels of school success above - the difference between low achievers and the very best is probably more than 50% influenced by IQ
It's a selection effect. Only a select population comes to America for college. Tellingly, the average population there doesn't do very well at all at home. And over here, they only do well comparatively. Compare them to say, Eastern Europeans, and it's a different story. Not many Nobel prizes per capita, I'm afraid.
That you are looking at people who "emigrated" to Shaker Heights also suggests a selection effect. There's really no easy answer in this case.
The problem isn't "why are blacks and whites different" but "why do blacks and whites who have similar outcomes still produce children who have different outcomes?" Three possibilities:
1. The premise is flawed; just being in Shaker Heights doesn't suggest significant uniformity.
2. Regression to the mean.
3. Culture, etc. But that begs the question of difference once again, but re: culture rather than achievements. Unless it's all hollywood's fault.
Human beings are still evolving. Much or most of what's been changing in recent evolutionary history have to do with brain development. When you examine things like the HapMap, you find that the gene distribution of these changes is different in different places. Yes, I mean different in that non-PC way.
Are a couple of recent papers from Science good enough?
Stupid and illogical ideas usually do a great job of explaining complex and subtle phenomena - its too bad that they're stupid and illogical.
At least have the courage of your convictions and be brave enough in the truth of your pronouncements to say what you really mean: "White people are smarter than Black people on average, by their very nature".
Perhaps you don't say it because, as is often the case, utterance of foolishness is its own reminder.
In hindsight, your question is far more stupid than his "idea". It's called the principle of insufficient reason; we aren't to suppose an a priori difference amongst type without proof - so the burden of proof is on the supposer. That you would ask me to explain why his idea is illogical, without first establishing that his claim is based in logic is justification enough for labeling your question stupid.
Haven't you simply assumed uniformity? By the way, you called it an "idea" first, not me. And it's a little disappointing for someone who's new here to be resorting to the use of insulting labels so quickly.
Yes, uniformity is assumed. Difference must be proven. Think for a moment - how could logic work the other way? Given a categorical set of entities, if we could assume prima facie that there were differences in an arbitrary subset of said set, our categorical heading would be meaningless! For you have derived a contradiction before you even started; Set of A properties, subset of set have not A property, wtf...
This is basic. I would hope that if someone offers up an explanation for some event, that they would have taken the time to be sure that their explanation is rational. If they haven't, I am well within my bounds to call that explanation what it is - stupid and illogical - regardless of how long I have had an account on this forum. And in that regard, how can you be sure I haven't been an avid reader of this forum since its inception? And what does it matter...?
As to the "" around idea; that was meant to convey the notion that this isn't HIS idea, nor is it a new one. You can google eugenics for an eye-opening history lesson on his "idea".
When I arrived at MIT as a first-year graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, I asked a professor for help with a research problem. He said "The reason that you've having trouble is that you don't know anything and you're not working very hard." A friend of mine was a surgery resident at Johns Hopkins. He complained to one of his teachers that he was having trouble concentrating because he'd been up all night for several nights in a row. The professor replied "Oh... does your pussy hurt?" According to Business Week, Jack Welch "encouraged near-brutal candor in the meetings he held [at GE]".
The bottom line: self-esteem is great but beware of creating a cozy home for unproductive people with bad ideas.