/lit/ - Literature

i've always been curious about it. it's supposed to be like the meanest type of literature there is, right?

The majority of the book is not about race. It is about how the cognitively gifted form the social classes in America, and why it is better to be born with a high IQ than it is to be born rich. It also pleads for education reform which is designed to educate the gifted (because the future depends on them, for better or worse) rather than spending billions on fruitlessly trying to make every single student an Einstein.

But of course, the most controversial part is the chapter on race and intelligence. It puts forth evidence that the differences in race and intelligence are genetic and not remediable by practical improvements in environment.

read the mismeasure of man op

>>2116574

You mean, the book most recently in the news for having been found to be full of fabrications?

A vicious attack on modern notions of liberalism and equality.

>herrnstein

jews being racist what else is new

>>2116579
It never attacks liberalism one bit. Try reading the book.

>>2116557
>>2116557
> why it is better to be born with a high IQ than it is to be born rich.
I haven't read the book, but do you care to discuss why/how exactly this is? I always assumed the being born with an average IQ, even disregarding wealth, would be better than being born with a high IQ, because most of society is catered to those in the middle of the bell curve (like, wouldn't it be great to derive endless hours of entertainment from reality tv and be able to put up with the mundane chatter of the majority of attractive females), as well as the high depression rates and just general problems associated with high intelligence.

>>2116584
>Over 1/3 of Americans descended from German immigrants
>Assume anyone with a Germanic surname is Jewish

>>2116578
source

>>2116589
The premise itself is an attack on liberalism, whether you like it or not, whether the authors intended it or not. To assert that different people are inherently more intelligent than others and always will be goes against modern liberalism.

>>2116592
>berrnstein being a germanic name

alright pal

>>2116595
Not liking or disliking it, because not one sentence from the book attacks liberalism. Again, come back once you've actually read the book.

>>2116607
Yeah, and not one sentence from "The World is Flat" attacks postcolonial theory.

Imagine this: one person has twice the (g) intellect of another. Do you teach these people in the same class, knowing one is literally twice as intelligent by most measures? Whether or not you do can mean large policy changes if implemented on a national scale. Asserting that intelligence is a tangible, measurable thing allows for government organizations to scrutinize it to determine outcomes for citizens.

>>2116607
> not one sentence from the book attacks liberalism.

I will say right away that I haven't read the book, but your statement here just comes off as so fucking transparent (like, liberal knee jerk reaction desperately trying to hold his would view together). You could take almost any book on the subject of intelligence and class and find quite a few sentences that could be reasonably perceived as somehow going against or being counter intuitive to modern mainstream American liberalism, simply because there are certain tenets of liberalism which are clearly out of touch with reality (e.g. everyone is equal). That's not to say we ought to throw out liberalism and all start watching Glenn Beck--any political doctrine as general as liberalism is going to have huge flaws in it--but I really think we should discuss these things rather than jumping so quickly to absurd generalizations like the above.

>>2116557
Samethread is same

>>2116638
I've read the book. I'm very aware of intelligence and race, but it never mentions anything about political agendas.

>>2116659

>Undermines the assumptions behind most modern politics.
>Doesn't make political statements.

Both of these can be true… but then claiming it doesn't affect politics is LOL.

>>2116638
Well when I think of liberalism as having more to do with political egalitarianism rather than having anything specific to say about niggers being dumb or not. Actually, I'd venture that equity, ie matching state resources with a person's needs, is probably THE central tenet of modern social liberalism.

>>2116665
>implying i ever said it can't have an influence

it's clear what side of the curve you're on, nigger

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvljvnvBuFU

didnt gould basically write a whole book on why this book was retarded

>>2116679

>>2116673
I see where you're coming from, but you're framing it in a status quo kind of way.

Instead of retarded people getting additional resources, why not give those additional resources to high achievers? I'm not an advocate of this idea, but that would be an argument presented if intellect were truly quantifiable. Limited resources are wasted on underachievers when they could be going to people who would use those resources more effectively. It's a very elitist way of thinking, but it's logical from a resource allocation point of view.

>>2116679
It's hard to look at the people involved, the methodology employed and the arguments made, without coming to the conclusion that the bell curve was at least at some level motivated

Personally I'm of the opinion that scientific racists don't actually think of themselves as being motivated by emotion. I think they take the perspective that science cannot take considerations for political correctness (which is certainly true) and don't actually recognize why they're disposed to believe in scientific theories of racism.

Then again, its hard to believe that people trained in the scientific method could come to believe such specious arguments.

>>2116719
>It's hard to look at the people involved, the methodology employed and the arguments made, without coming to the conclusion that the bell curve was at least at some level motivated
...by personal racial beliefs, sorry.

>>2116691
Intelligent people usually will find a way to cheat the system, without having it altered to suit their needs. Just a thought.

>>2116719
>scientific racists

This term is new to me. What's so racist about the studies?

>>2116731
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

>>2116736
doesn't answer my question. Yeah, there might be more intelligent races than others, but how exactly is that racist?

>>2116719
I don't know if you've ever seen Breaking Bad but the lead character on that show is such a great depiction of a certain personality type among scientists, the "my scientific training means that I have perfect, completely rational judgment in all matters" kind of guy

>>2116739
>Yeah, there might be more intelligent races than others, but how exactly is that racist?

what

"yeah, it may be a political system that uses free and unbiased popular elections to determine who holds power, but how is it a democracy?"

>>2116746
It's best to answer with a straight statement than using a poor analogy (don't bother to ask how).

Maybe to clarify: Is it racist if it's(studies) true?

>>2116753
I don't think there's a consensus on whether it's true, though. That's the problem. There are too many outside factors involved.

>>2116746
It's not truly a democracy unless the citizens are fully aware of who they are voting for. This includes being well educated on the issues at hand, as well as the government itself, which most are not.

>>2116736
in other words, you made up and wrote it yourself since its on wiki

>>2116691
Well yes, that makes sense as far as the premise of the nation having truly 'limited resources' goes. The actual situation is far more complex. In short, America as a whole puts little premium on the idea of effective education at all. That's almost entirely the fault of conservatism really: funding is mainly decentralized to local governments, meaning rich districts have far more money to spend on everything than poor ones, and the very idea of state sponsored education is attacked on ideological grounds and eroded through policy. Nonetheless, society has an interest in assuring all of us find our place in it. Arguably the best education systems are the ones found in the likes of South Korea - ie highly centralized, highly streamed and well funded throughout.

>and why it is better to be born with a high IQ than it is to be born rich

and it's actually better to be born great looking than anything else...author was too stupid or a coward to admit it

>>2116766
i agree: ironically american education is obsessed that everyone get an 'equal' education, to the point of losing sight of the actual education.

>>2116731
You'd be hard-pressed to find a respected living evolutionary scientist who believes in racial differentiation regarding intelligence. Scientific racists (or "racialists" or "race realists" like men like Herrnstein like to be called) attribute this to intellectual cowardice, or to put it another way, academic conspiracy- but that's also what creationists and climate change deniers believe.

The Bell Curve was based on faulty premises, cherry picked and outright incorrect data and explicit ideological biases. Virtually everyone involved in the research had already gained reputation as being academic racists before the book was published. They had an agenda going in, and in the book, they pretty clearly advocated it. The text doesn't even acknowledge possible contradictions.

This thread would actually make more sense in /sci/ though, maybe you should start it over there?

>>2116768
>in other words, you made up and wrote it yourself since its on wiki

what?

seriously what does this mean?

>>2116768
You asked about scientific racism, I linked an article about it. What's your fucking problem?

>>2116753
>Maybe to clarify: Is it racist if it's(studies) true?

Yes. In that case, racism is correct.

The term "racism" is not inherently negative - it's a descriptor of a certain position. It's only viewed as a pejorative because a massive majority of right-thinking people have a serious antipathy towards it.

Oh look, another of these threads. Time for some copypasta education.
-----

A quick review of the psychometric literature:

EXHIBIT A: Scarr, S., & Weinberg, R. A. (1976). IQ test performance of black children adopted by White families. American Psychologist, 31, 726-739.

Summary: At age 7, blacks adopted by white parents score higher on IQ exams than blacks in the ghetto, but still trail behind mulatto and white adoptees. Race deniers announce victory.

EXHIBIT B: Weinberg, R. A., Scarr, S., & Waldman, I. D. (1992). The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study: A follow-up of IQ test performance at adolescence. Intelligence, 16, 117-135.

Summary: The blacks from the previous study are retested at age 17. They score exactly the same as the blacks in the ghetto. They also receive poor marks in school and tend to graduate, if at all, within the bottom 30% of their class. White adoptees score around average for their ethnic group. Mulatto adoptees score exactly between whites and blacks.

Deniers are flabbergasted, but they suspiciously fail to mention the results of this follow-up study in their literature. If the Minnesota Transracial Adoption study is mentioned at all in a psychology course, it is offered as proof that the black-white IQ gap is caused entirely by the environment. Yes, I'm serious about this.

EXHIBIT C: Clark, E. A., & Hanisee, J. (1982). Intellectual and adaptive performance of Asian children in adoptive American settings. Developmental Psychology, 18, 595–599.

Summary: Oriental babies raised by white suburbanites score higher than both white adoptees AND whites as a whole on IQ exams. Uh-oh, our social constructionist paradigm is falling apart at the seams!

>>2116753
>Is it racist if it's(studies) true?

Yes, but not inherently negative. But lets be clear here: after hundreds of years of study, racialists have still been unable to provide persuasive evidence of a significant causal link between race and intelligence. It is not a "repressed truth" in academic circles. Racialists are allowed to argue their position as much as anyone else, but they haven't managed to be very persuasive thusfar.

EXHIBIT D: Frydman, M., & Lynn, R. (1989). The intelligence of Korean children adopted in Belgium. Personality and Individual Differences, 12, 1323–1325.

Summary: Badly malnourished asian children from a war-ravaged, fourth world backwater are brought to Belgium, some as late as the age of 7. Once again, they score higher on average than whites on IQ exams. Even more troubling for egalitarian dogma.


EXHIBIT E: Winick, M., Meyer, K. K., & Harris, R. C. (1975). Malnutrition and environmental enrichment by early adoption. Science, 190, 1173–1175.

Summary: Once again, asians end up scoring higher than white adoptees. This despite subsisting on a diet of coarse millet, bark, and grass throughout early childhood.

EXHIBIT F: Tizard, B., Cooperman, O., Joseph, A., & Tizard, J. (1972). Environmental effects on language development: A study of young children in long-stay residential nurseries. Child Development, 43, 337-358.

Summary: A dishonest Marxist husband and wife team publish a study suggesting that blacks in British orphanages score higher than whites on Weschler's Intelligence Scales for Children. For some inexplicable reason, mulattos score higher than both whites and pure blacks, suggesting that the scores are a mere statistical artifact. Pains are made to treat children of all racial groups equally. The samples sizes involve 8, 7, and 10 children, respectively, and all children were under the age of 5 when tested. Deniers crow victory. Dick Lewontin trumpets the findings in Human Variation.

There is no follow-up study done, and the Tizards are strangely unable to replicate their findings elsewhere. Moreoever, the study is not longitudinal, and due to the tiny sample sizes involved and lack of controls for genetic background (by the admission of the authors themselves), there is no point in extrapolating the findings to racial groups in general.

Why, then, do egalitarians emphasize this study over the others with far more rigorous scientific standards?


EXHIBIT G: Lindblad, F., Dalen, M., et al. School performance of international adoptees better than expected from cognitive test results. EUROPEAN CHILD & ADOLESCENT PSYCHIATRY Volume 18, Number 5, 301-308.

Summary: asians adopted by Swedes perform far better than the white majority at school. Incidentally, asian adoptees also have a far higher suicide rate, suggesting that they are neither accepted by Swedish society nor given any preferential treatment due to their minority status.

There are hundreds of more studies, but only a handful of them deal overtly with psychometric testing. (It's hard to find grant money these days for any experiment involving IQ testing, and prominent lefty psychologists like Steven Rose have even demanded that such research be made illegal by governmental decree. I shit you not.) Nearly all of them point to the conclusion that blacks are less intelligent than the rest of humanity, and that no amount of social conditioning can make them as intelligent as the melanin-deprived branches of the human family. It seems you can take a negro out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of a negro.

Deniers can crow all they want about the lack of perfect experimental controls, less than ideal sample sizes, and other potential sources of error in the studies cited above. (Tim Wise is famous for suggesting that twin studies are intrinsically flawed because all twins share the same prenatal environment, while other siblings don't. Ahahahahah!) Cordelia Fine, a feminist psychologist, demonstrates the same fallacious line of reasoning when she declares that men and women must be fundamentally equal in mathematical ability unless we can find a perfect study demonstrating otherwise.

But they fail to understand that all research in the social sciences is plagued by the exact same problems. There are very few peer-reviewed psychology papers that examine a purely random sample of human subjects exceeding one hundred people. And the fact that these patterns repeat themselves over and over again under a wide range of social environments is pretty compelling evidence that blacks suffer from an innate cognitive deficit.

>>2116816
>>2116821
>>2116822
hmmmm this copypasta seems unbiased and legitimate

Once again, deniers, there is no such thing as a perfect scientific experiment, and the burden of proof is now on you to establish equality, not the other way around. Do the ordinary rules of evolutionary change simply fail to apply to our species? Why assume that all human races (or "demes", whichever taxonomic construct you prefer) are equal in genetic endowment, when they have faced reproductive isolation for longer periods of time than it takes to generate subspecies in any other mammal?

>>2116835
race is not a particularly meaningful construct bb

unless you think that 19th century french mediocrities hold the secret keys to human existence

>>2116837
It's more useful than whatever construct progressives would have us replace it with. Just think of race as someone's very extended (partially inbred) family. It's far from perfect, but nevertheless can be useful when thinking about demographics on a macro level.

>>2116835
race is an arbitrary social construct not based on organizing genetic principle

genetic variation between different racial groups is not significant in any meaningful way

you are an idiot who has invested a great deal of time and effort into justifying a racist belief, I hope someday you will grow up and realize how foolish you've been but somehow I doubt it

>>2116844
>It's more useful than whatever construct progressives would have us replace it with.

Jesus, just admit it's about politics and not science already.

>>2116847
Calm down, and don't think badly of people because they're interested in weighing all sides of a debate, even the ones which don't get much air time. There's at least as much genetic variation between race as there is between most breeds of dog. While intragroup differences are greater, the intergroup differences are still definitely significant if you have more than five or so people in your sample. While race isn't an ideal way to think about these differences, it's the most practical.

>>2116850
Not science or politics. It's truth versus fiction.

can one of you faggots just make a thread in /sci/ already and stop shitting up the LITERATURE board? just because something is written down does not mean it's fucking literature you retards.

Is it based on measuring IQ?

Because IQ isn't a very good measure of intelligence.

>>2116864
Apologies. I've been trying to sage for this reason.

>>2116875
No kidding. One time a bunch of "intelligence" scholars were asked to give a definition of intelligence. 14 different researchers, 14 different answers.

>>2116864
Done:
>>sci/3846922

>>2116888
>>>/sci/3846922

>>2116884
Loki's Wager. You have proven nothing.

just leaving this here...

>>2116590
>high depression rates and just general problems associated with high intelligence
Except that's wrong.

>>2116898
Wtf is this supposed to mean?

>>2117074
East Asians have abnormal intelligence on average.

>2117073
>2117074
>2117080
hey guys you missed the part where we moved this thread over to /sci/ where it actually makes sense to discuss this shit
>>>/sci/3846922