this definitely caught my attention and figured it's worthy of some discussion but fear it could get ugly fast. hopefully the mods can keep that in check.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1220343/Channel-4-controversy-documentary-claims-race-linked-intelligence.html

Quote :

"the top rate' are North-East Asians who have an average IQ of 105, followed by North and Central Europeans with a score of 100. He claims American Indians have an IQ of 87, and that sub-Saharan Africans 'pretty well on either side of the equator' have IQs of around 70. He says Aborigines have the lowest scores of around 65."

my concerns...
1) any point in even gathering information like this? since not all biological advantages stem from the brain alone?

2) can you also ignore it and 'will' it as false information because you are politically motivated?

10/14/2009 9:21:38 PM

you missed the biggest point; how are they determining IQ? is it culturally biased?

10/14/2009 9:24:15 PM

^no yeh i was just thinking about that. good point

10/14/2009 9:24:50 PM

Is this what black leaders want when they talk about the need for an "open and honest discussion about race"?

Probably not.

They'd rather dwell on real and perceived prejudice from the media and in the workplace. A topic that a lot of white people are tired of hearing about.

Which is why we're probably never gonna have that "long overdue" discussion.

10/14/2009 9:46:39 PM

10/14/2009 9:52:46 PM

I believe in inherent differences in IQ in different races.

So I guess that makes me a racist by the dictionary definition of racism.

10/14/2009 9:53:17 PM

Well, this just begs the bigger question... what is a true definition of intelligence?

10/14/2009 9:56:58 PM

are you guys really this far off the deepend?

10/14/2009 10:17:12 PM

oh yeah...

I forgot for a second why I don't post in the soap box...
my bad

10/14/2009 10:25:01 PM

Here are some fascinating reads:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_Global_Inequality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence

http://lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft.htm
http://lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft2.htm
http://lagriffedulion.f2s.com/fuzzy.htm
http://lagriffedulion.f2s.com/dialogue.htm
http://lagriffedulion.f2s.com/retard.htm
http://lagriffedulion.f2s.com/iq.htm

http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/NationalIQs.aspx
http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Locations.aspx
http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Nobels.aspx

10/14/2009 10:25:16 PM

There are some pretty substantial (and obvious) physical differences between races. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that brain matter also varies between races, and possibly as a result, intelligence. Of course, it would also depend on how you evaluate intelligence, and the individuals involved. The fact is, there are super geniuses of all races, so it's not like one race is truly inferior to another. It'd be interesting to see more studies on it, though, rather than avoiding it for fear of being labeled racist.

10/14/2009 10:26:44 PM

Quote :

"It'd be interesting to see more studies on it, though, r"

click on my links, at least the wiki links. (they are articles on books with those names)

10/14/2009 10:30:32 PM

There are a couple of things that are always dangerous with this:

1) Intelligence can go up and down based on environmental factors. Nutrition, culture, exposure to educational materials, etc. can have just as much, perhaps even greater impact than genetics alone. I don't believe that race plays such a big difference, but I think that an ethnicity's culture has a larger influence (value of learning, how education is conducted, etc.).

2) Even if race has an impact on intelligence, people forget that this is an AVERAGE. In other words, yes, the average person may not be as sharp, but there are still plenty of people in that race that are really smart, probably smarter than you. Also, there are plenty of stupid people in your own ethnic group even if the average is higher.

Just some starters, and this is even assuming there's a direct link, and intelligence can be defined. My two cents.

10/14/2009 10:38:24 PM

Quote :

"hopefully the mods can keep that in check."

Let's hope so bro.
Let's hope so.

10/14/2009 10:48:00 PM

Allow me to stress this, which no one has exactly hit on:

Nothing here, in the very slightest, indicates that a study was done on race versus IQ score. Ok, none. What you're seeing is a study of IQ scores by location, and then ordered by the race of the people in those locations.

On the planet Earth, race and location and correlated so strongly that 98% of the time they are inseparable. There is no such thing as a controlled variable in these experiments so far.

Proposal for true experiment:

Adopt 1000 children from Africa at random. Do not let the availability for adoption or unavailability for adoption affect your picking.
Adopt 1000 white children at random. This will be more difficult.
repeat for other races

Place all these children with families assigned randomly. Enroll all in upper-middle class schools. 30 years later, measure IQ scores. Compare.

---
Currently, even if you did the study for a more uniform and controlled environment like the USA or the UK, those who were brought there in the first place were self selected, and have a mess of social circumstances leading to their situation that affect the quality of your 'random' selection.

So far, no one has successfully compared innate intelligence to race.

10/15/2009 9:26:52 AM

Quote :

"What you're seeing is a study of IQ scores by location"

Sadly, most people will miss this fact, and immediately feel justified about their own prejudices.

10/15/2009 9:30:36 AM

^ and ^^

both of those assumptions that a completely worthless study has been done on this is partially incorrect. while the study is indeed imperfect, we are all willing to admit that, the conclusions of the existing studies have come to show certain obvious patterns, and are certainly not to be taken as statistical 'noise'

i am personally under the impression that malnutrition is the greatest cause for differences in measured IQ levels based on regions/races worldwide and will probably prescribe to that theory until proved otherwise.

[Edited on October 15, 2009 at 10:20 AM. Reason : a]

10/15/2009 10:19:23 AM

Do you idiots honestly believe this horse-shit analysis?

[Edited on October 15, 2009 at 10:29 AM. Reason : Obviously they left a lot of you out of calculating the IQ mean of "whites"]

10/15/2009 10:29:22 AM

Anything that gets rid of their White guilt....

10/15/2009 10:29:50 AM

The problem is you can't have an honest discussion about this. To even study it will bring out the "RACIST RACIST RACIST" crowd and drown out any chance to analyze the data as evidenced by the microcosm of this thread.

Let's all just be happy and think happy thoughts and deny the socio-economic factors that may correlate loosely with race have an impact on intelligence.

And obviously the test is racist and bigoted. Damned Asians win it every time.

10/15/2009 10:34:27 AM

^^
^^^
absolutely uncalled for and purely aimed at causing disruption and chaos


[Edited on October 15, 2009 at 10:37 AM. Reason : ^]

10/15/2009 10:35:23 AM

You're confusing intelligence with education.

10/15/2009 10:35:24 AM

Quote :

"you missed the biggest point; how are they determining IQ? is it culturally biased?"

if you take things far enough, everything is 'culturally biased'

what i find fucking HILARIOUS is folks claiming that the SAT and IQ tests are racist.... i mean what the hell in them is racist? the fact that they aren't written in ebonics?

things are only racist to the extent that the parents are either uneducated and can't actually supplement (potentially inadequate) education from schools, or that as a whole a group does not value learning beyond a very narrow scope.

if anything that's more of a reverse racism to the point of fucking themselves over.

10/15/2009 10:38:09 AM

Quote :

"I believe in inherent differences in IQ in different races. So I guess that makes me a racist by the dictionary definition of racism."

It makes you both a racist and an idiot.

10/15/2009 10:39:15 AM

Quote :

"i mean what the hell in them is racist? the fact that they aren't written in ebonics?"

Zing.............

Next time try not to defend something not being racist by injecting a racist jab into your argument.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#Cultural_Bias

[Edited on October 15, 2009 at 10:41 AM. Reason : ]

10/15/2009 10:39:37 AM

Quote :

"It makes you both a racist and an idiot."

Because you know for a fact that there are no differences in brains between different races?

In fact, the differences in brain size (and shape?) are clearly documented.

My belief has no proof, and neither does the other side's (yours).

So I don't see how one side can go about calling the other side idiots.

10/15/2009 10:43:47 AM

oh for the love of god I DON'T CARE. the point is nothing in them refers to race or indicates race or is racially influenced, they are written neutrally.

i'm not gonna debate club with you over the appropriateness of my statements

Quote :

"Cultural Bias For decades many critics have accused designers of the verbal SAT of cultural bias toward the white and wealthy. A famous example of this bias in the SAT I was the oarsman-regatta analogy question.[28] The object of the question was to find the pair of terms that have the relationship most similar to the relationship between "runner" and "marathon." The correct answer was "oarsman" and "regatta." Choice of the correct answer presupposed students' familiarity with a sport popular with the wealthy, and so upon their knowledge of its structure and terminology. Fifty-three percent (53%) of white students correctly answered the question, while only 22% of black students also scored correctly.[29] Analogy questions have since been replaced by short reading passages."

this example is a reach, if you have had these words come up in your school based vocabulary lessons i see no reason why anyone couldn't make that jump. it's not like at the homes of these students the parents even mention oarsmen or regatta's. shit you can devolve this further and said it's biased towards greeks and Mediterranean ethnicity as their long history of oarsmen and such would predispose them towards knowing the answer as well...

you can't pick at something like this without having to keep going and essentially negate your original argument when you run out of words to use for anything. why? because every word is used at different rates in different cultures in different parts of the world sometimes with different meanings as well. it's ridiculous

10/15/2009 10:43:57 AM

Quote :

"both of those assumptions that a completely worthless study has been done on this is partially incorrect. while the study is indeed imperfect, we are all willing to admit that, the conclusions of the existing studies have come to show certain obvious patterns, and are certainly not to be taken as statistical 'noise'"

The burden of proof is on the study. You'll probably be surprised with just how little rigor some of these were done with. And after all, we're not even talking about studies, we're talking about news stories about studies. The studies themselves are the bad, popular media vaguely referencing them deserves the facepalm pictures.

If you look at scholarly stuff, ie...

http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic185351.files/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf
(blindly picked top Google scholar result - I'm not an expert in this topic)

What do you find?

Quote :

"Abstract: The culture-only (0% genetic–100% environmental) and the hereditarian (50% genetic–50% environmental) models of the causes of mean Black–White differences in cognitive ability are compared and contrasted across 10 categories of evidence: the worldwide distribution of test scores, g factor of mental ability, heritability, brain size and cognitive ability, transracial adoption, racial admixture, regression, related life-history traits, human origins research, and hypothesized environmental variables. The new evidence reviewed here points to some genetic component in Black–White differences in mean IQ. The implication for public policy is that the discrimination model (i.e., Black–White differences in socially valued outcomes will be equal barring discrimination) must be tempered by a distributional model (i.e., Black–White outcomes reflect underlying group characteristics)."

"Some genetic component", but no one disagreed on that to begin with. These reports are filled with caution about how to handle the results.

10/15/2009 10:48:48 AM

I just posted something that indicates that they aren't written neutrally.

10/15/2009 10:49:39 AM

^^ agree

^ just how neutral do you want them to be? are you going to write it in binary? would that be neutral enough? because someone somewhere is gonna have a problem with the word choices.

quick example: blizzards, what does that mean to someone that lives in key west? (keeping it in the US) or in hawaii? compared to say, Alaska, or Maine?

OH NOES YOU MEAN THEY HAVE DIFFERENT LEVELS OF EXPOSURE TO WORDS? ....

[Edited on October 15, 2009 at 11:04 AM. Reason : i'm saying they are written as neutrally as possible]

10/15/2009 10:49:49 AM

I have an image in my head of a comedian talking about how IQ is a measure of how good someone is at being white. Apparently Asians rock at it.

10/15/2009 10:54:21 AM

^that would be funny

10/15/2009 11:03:27 AM

^ Imagine taking a test that was written for people of an entirely different culture.

Now imagine answering analogy questions on that test. Especially when you're not going to be familiar with words used in that culture. Or how about writing an essay that will be graded by people who speak entirely different from the way you were raised, the way everyone in your school and neighborhood speaks.

And then imagine being called stupid for not scoring well on such a test.

[Edited on October 15, 2009 at 11:04 AM. Reason : ]

10/15/2009 11:04:40 AM

^^^^ you are trying to mock it, but that is a valid example of something that would create a bias.

You are perfectly illustrating, I guess without realizing it, that tests can and do have biases that affect the outcome.

Which is one of the reasons that tests like the SAT and other standardized test are less important to students nowadays.

I bet an "intelligence" test could be designed where blacks or Hispanics perform better than other groups.

[Edited on October 15, 2009 at 11:05 AM. Reason : ]

10/15/2009 11:05:12 AM

The SAT is not a test of intelligence. Its a test of the grasp the student has on the english language. Part of which is vocabulary. If you dont know what regatta means its not because you've been opressed by the white man, its because you dont know what the fucking word means. This indicates a lack of knowledge which is the purpose of the test.

Instead of whining about the test, we should be upset at the shitty education these kids are getting. You would also have a legitimate complaint against any college that might use the SAT as a test of intellegence, instead of as a test of knowledge.

Fighting the test is an excuse to ignore fixing the real problem.

10/15/2009 11:15:31 AM

1. E-mail : Instant Message ::

a. Letter : Phone Call
b. Postage : Stamp
c. Smoke Signal : Conversation


2. Which group is most likely to get this question correct?
a. White Middle Class Americans
b. Black Americans in poverty
c. Mongolians

3. If your choice from question 2 gets the question correct, does this mean they are the most intelligent?
a. Yes
b. No
c. Not enough information to decide

10/15/2009 11:17:21 AM

If they get it wrong its because they dont know what email or instant messages are. This is a lack of knowledge, not a lack of intelligence.

10/15/2009 11:21:09 AM

Exactly my point.

10/15/2009 11:21:53 AM

^^ the point of analogies is not to test knowledge, it's to test intelligence. IF you wanted to test someone's knowledge of words, they wouldn't use an analogy.

10/15/2009 11:23:29 AM

They don't do analogies on the SAT any more anyway. Probably because assholes argued that they're racist.

10/15/2009 11:24:04 AM

^^^what? No its not. Your point is that its culturally biased. My point is its biased on knowledge which is the fucking point of the test. There is no cultural bias. There is only a lack of knowledge due to crappy education.


Your solution is to continue to let them have shitty educations, and change the test to make them pass.

My solution is to fix their education so they can pass the test.

[Edited on October 15, 2009 at 11:25 AM. Reason : a]

10/15/2009 11:24:46 AM

^ so your solution is to teach to the test? nice...

10/15/2009 11:27:43 AM

The problem i have with people whining about this bullshit, is that the VAST MAJORITY of times its used to fight the fact that the test has pointed out how our education system is failing poor kids.

What ends up happening is the test gets re-written so that these kids who haven't learned anything can still pass. This covers up the problem and keeps the kids in the dark.

Yes, teaching to the test at the expense of teaching concepts is bad, but we have to have some way to find failures in our education system. Otherwise they'll never get fixed.

10/15/2009 11:34:21 AM

answers:

c

a

b


but for those who do know what all those things are it does test intelligence.

i mean, poor kids use IM so this is a test that would be reasonable

[Edited on October 15, 2009 at 11:40 AM. Reason : just sayin]

10/15/2009 11:40:03 AM

The point is that measuring knowledge about computers is not a measure of intelligence, only a measure of the wealth of you and your surrounding area.

There are plenty of intelligent children in the Democratic Republic of Congo, they just grow up in an area where they'll never learn to read and either be killed by AIDS or rebels by the time they're 30.

10/15/2009 11:55:19 AM

i was just bored

but to what VV said.

thats exactly the case. SAT does not measure IQ, at all. the merely indicate what education level you have attained and as such for which next level of academia your best suited.



[Edited on October 15, 2009 at 12:09 PM. Reason : not chit chat]

10/15/2009 12:05:52 PM

What?

10/15/2009 12:06:32 PM

And the SAT should not be used as a measure of intelligence. Most colleges dont use it as such or they only use it in combination with other tests.

On the other hand, its not the job of higher education to teach basic english. If someone doesn't have a good grasp on the language they aren't going to do well if the classes are taught in english.

10/15/2009 12:07:56 PM

^^^ it doesn't even do that. It indicates how good the quality of your education was, and not much more.

[Edited on October 15, 2009 at 12:14 PM. Reason : ]

10/15/2009 12:13:40 PM

Of course the SAT tests knowledge and intelligence on varying levels. Not knowing what e-Mail is might not make you dumb, but it's going to put a pretty strong hindrance on your ability to succeed in college. Schools have to take current education/knowledge into consideration.

I seriously doubt the IQ test that these doctors administered would be affected by the faults you are discussing on the SAT; so why is the SAT even being discussed here?

[Edited on October 15, 2009 at 12:13 PM. Reason : l]

10/15/2009 12:13:50 PM