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Science is. Science is often not what you want it to be, because the facts don't care.
I strive, desperately, to not be a bigot in my behavior and thinking.
I tend to reject the bigot's answers for things because their answers are trite and made to fit preconceived notions.
But there's a kernel of doubt.
The OG racists in America were southern slave owners.
The people most familiar with American blacks, over and over, described "childlike" behavior and attitudes.
I always chalked that down to a culture imposed upon them because: How much culture does a slave need to be a good slave?
They were not inculcated with Western Civ's values because those didn't help them be good property.
Because I think in science, I read stuff that has conclusions I dislike.
Like this. It's published by a thoroughly white supremacist group. Take it with a carton of salt. Remember what I said about trite answers fitting preconceived conclusions.
Just because I don't want the problems with American Blacks to be inborn and uncorrectable, doesn't mean I shouldn't consider it.
Science will not care if I don't want it any more than it doesn't care if a bigot does.
We're not going to do the research for real because it asks hard questions and the best solution could ultimately be extremely racist because, if that paper is correct, we'd have to, structurally, treat black people differently from white people.
That doesn't align well with "All men are created equal" in a document we just celebrated.
The article says all I want to know about blacks.
ReplyDeleteIf you stop looking for answers because one article agrees with you...
DeleteRemember what I said about preconceived conclusions?
The problem is you need relatively unbiased data collection. I don't think we are currently willing or sby, as a society, of collecting data without introducing a huge amount of bias. That goes in both directions, btw.
ReplyDeleteDaosus
I am informed that a lot of big-city fire and police departments, particularly in the Northeast, have stopped doing merit-based testing for promotion---because not enough blacks were passing, no matter how they changed the tests. And I notice that the hobbies I follow (all of them appealing to high-IQ types) have very, very few black enthusiasts. The two times I went to the Pennsic War, I was there for two weeks at a time, and out of over 10,000 people, there were maybe three or four blacks I ran across.
ReplyDeleteI also like true-crime TV shows and have noticed that on The First 48, a lot of the murders they get are done by blacks for incredibly stupid or petty reasons. One I particularly remember was a black guy who ran another black down on the highway and shot him---because the other black had accidentally jostled him in line at Denny's! What a stupid reason to get yourself sent to prison for life!
I grew up in a very integrated part of Miami/Dade county - Carol City, if that means anything to you. There were few blacks in the advanced classes (level 4). I don't remember one in 12th grade calculus but being from over 50 years ago makes that lack of memory didn't mean much. We tended to talk with friends in class, not everyone.
ReplyDeleteWorking as an electrical engineer for 40 years, I worked with some very good black engineers, a couple of the best engineers I've known. That was before DEI when people were hired for diversity. These guys were hired for the same reasons I was. They may have had a higher bar for all I know.
What I don't and can't really know is if the "genetic characteristics" that sources like the one you linked to were present and the motivation to excel overrode those or if there were "cross breeding" with other races and that's what made them so good. One of those excellent engineers was a former Marine - was the discipline of the USMC part of what made him a great engineer?
What does this mean? How about that those tendencies the Amrem site talks about don't mean every person is going to be that. The important word is "individuals" - people are individuals. A sum of experiences and genetics, teachings offered and lessons they actually learned that aren't necessarily what was intended.
The author of that is disappointed that his paper has been latched onto by the white supremacists when he explicitly rejected the southern "they like chillins" philosophy. AmRem is just where I found it and they posted it because it fits their preconceived conclusion.
DeleteHe's really kinda tapped into the same stuff that The Bell Curve found, just more anecdotally.
Nothing about an average IQ of 85 means there are no 140 IQ members. Nothing about a 140 IQ member precludes a 50 IQ member.
My worry is if we make a society for the 100 average people that the 85 average group won't have a productive place. Worse, if we make it for the 85 group, will that destroy it for the 100's?
I think the powers that be are aiming for having 80 IQ subjects.
A thought about making a society for the 85 average folks: The 100 average people will still be better at abstract reasoning and will simple be naturally better at doing what needs done and eventually shut out the 85 average people if merit is the only metric.
DeleteAnd we're right back where we started, but we were "fair" this time...
But if we're going to even try fixing things, we have to force ANYONE who lives here to adopt our norms and hold them to our standards and explicitly reject cultural relativity. The results might have disproportionate effects on those who cannot abide the standards by nature or refuse to adopt them.
We have to stop accepting sub-cultures to live among us without constraint.
Good luck getting the "sub culture" to abide to our culture.
DeleteThe Irish and Italians figured it out. As did the Chinese. As did the American Indians who eschewed the Rez.
DeleteIt's not a matter of luck, it's a matter of will.
And ass raping the bigots who think they're helping with assimilation by being bigots about it.
It's culture and IQ. And IQ is mostly genetic but it can be influenced by environment. Also, environment impacts abstract thinking in that some areas of the world exact a harsher penalty for insufficient planning than other areas. I read somewhere (one of the local bloggers) that a study linked all this to elevation. In that mountainous terrain demanded more that tropical environments. I forget exactly what it was, but the takeaway for me was that cold mountainous terrain would filter the genetic material more harshly through natural selection.
ReplyDeleteAnd without delving too deeply into the spiritual, natural selection is the self cleaning mode of the gene pool. God knew what he was doing when he built our planet.