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> Equality means giving kids who are born in a ghetto the same education opportunities and investment opportunities as someone who is born in a rich white neigh

> Equality means giving kids who are born in a ghetto the same education opportunities and investment opportunities as someone who is born in a rich white neighborhood. It means engineering our society so that success isn't a lottery based on the income level of your school. That won't work. We know from science that the IQ gap appears before school age so it's not caused by school. Also, people have tried special high quality schools for poor blacks and it doesn't solve the problem. The IQ gap also persists despite black kids being adopted into wealthy white families, so it's not an investment or income gap. You can't find effective solutions to problems if you willfully ignore the scientific evidence for the causes of those problems. So far, the only politically correct scientifically based reason I've seen has been that it's mostly due to the behavior of black mothers. There seems to be some unknown thing they do to their preschool children which cripples them for life. If that's really the problem, then that's where the solution needs to be focused, not on whatever fits your personal political ideology. You say there's zero scientific evidence for it being genetic, but you conspicuously fail to even claim that there's any scientific evidence for it not being genetic. I've looked for it, and asked people like yourself who I would expect to be motivated to find it, and it doesn't seem to exist. If there's no evidence either way, then you're not being intellectually honest by rejecting one hypothesis on ideological grounds.

danShumway 5y ago
> That won't work. We know from science that the IQ gap appears before school age so it's not caused by school. Also, people have tried special high quality schools for poor blacks and it doesn't solve the problem. Your research is out of date on these topics. General scientific consensus today is that nurture is as important as nature for IQ, particularly among younger children (the Flynn Effect alone makes this conclusion obvious). You're also placing an over-emphasis on IQ, Black wage gaps exist in industries where IQ is not a strong measure of success. There's also good research indicating that Black wage gaps continue to exist after you correct for experience/education, and that hiring rates are influenced by non-intelligence based factors like how "white" your name sounds on an application resume. This has been the case not just in Black communities, but in many of the "they're just biologically different" debates that spring up, particularly around gender. There's a statistically significant difference in how many women-created pull requests get accepted into Open Source libraries based on whether or not names are obscured/anonymized before the requests are submitted. I think it's pretty clear that IQ is not a sufficient explanation for those results. So we're going to get into the IQ stuff, but to be clear, your view of IQ is skewed. IQ is not as important as you're making it sound for income (there's some correlation, but it's a lot milder than people assume). This is particularly true when you start looking at high-paying management roles where intelligence tends to matter a lot less than social skills. No engineering job has ever given me an IQ test before they hired me or asked me about one. Resumes are based on experience, which is largely determined by opportunity, connections, and free time. So I think it's really problematic to focus on IQ to this degree or to try to reduce success to a pure factor of IQ, but since you brought it up... > The IQ gap also persists despite black kids being adopted into wealthy white families, so it's not an investment or income gap. Check your research on this, it's actually the complete opposite of what you claim. Black kids raised in higher-income white homes have dramatically better pre-adolescent test results. Interestingly enough, test results actually go down as they age and interact more with the broader adult world, indicating that there might be something about the surrounding world that makes those gains recede over time. I wonder what that could be? > You can't find effective solutions to problems if you willfully ignore the scientific evidence for the causes of those problems... Oh come on. I'm not the person here disregarding decades of research that say that socio-economic status is a leading indicator of school performance, influencing everything from teaching resources, to pre-adolescent stress, to nutrition, to exercise, to time spent on homework and extracurricular activities. Cut it out with the "you're just biased" nonsense, very few scientists seriously believe that poverty doesn't affect IQ. > You say there's zero scientific evidence for it being genetic, but you conspicuously fail to even claim that there's any scientific evidence for it not being genetic. First of all, that's not really how science works. You don't get to propose a ridiculous theory and then make it everyone else's job to disprove you. Secondly, there is plenty of evidence that this is not genetic, not the least being that genes for intelligence don't work that way and there is no single gene for intelligence, and also race doesn't work that way and there is no single genetic makeup of everyone who is Black. No one has ever found a set of genes solidly linked to intelligence that is shared across every Black community. And people have tried. Race science was big in America's history. But it turns out, there is no good evidence for it, and there is a ton of evidence that environment is as influential as anything else for education levels. This is generally accepted science, and I don't understand how you're seriously arguing that environment doesn't affect education. It's not intellectually dishonest when looking at a theory that has never produced evidence in its favor and that doesn't really make sense based on our current understanding of genetics, to instead go with the theory that actually does have evidence. But if you believe otherwise, I have a teapot orbiting Mars to sell you. > There seems to be some unknown thing they do to their preschool children which cripples them for life. So you support free preschool, childcare, and increased resources for low-income parents in Black neighborhoods? Would you support enforcing maternity leave to make it easier for low-income parents to spend more time with their kids, since early-childhood parental involvement is a statistically significant indicator of future intelligence? I mean, you seem to be pretty confident that you know what the problem is, so you must have a list of solutions. I get kind of tired when people who are not lifting a finger to help Black communities try to guilt activists and argue that they'd be more successful if they just focused on the "right things." So I'm curious what you're doing to help.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  > continue to exist after you correct for experience/education No doubt there is also discrimination. Especially if there's a real effect, it's easy for people to be aware of that and exacerbate it with discrimination. Same as women can't do X man's job until they could. > dramatically better pre-adolescent test results. Childhood interventions to raise IQ are known to wear off at adolescence. It's not necessarily because of the adult world but perhaps because the interventions are just bringing out latent childhood abilities that normal kids don't get the opportunity to use or something like that. I don't know but you have to look at post-adolescent IQs for the effect on adult-income.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    > No doubt there is also discrimination. Then what are you arguing about? You're calling into question the entire concept of equality activism for job/housing/education opportunities, and you don't disagree that discrimination exists? > but perhaps because the interventions are just bringing out latent childhood abilities that normal kids don't get the opportunity to use That is an extremely worrisome trend if you're trying to argue that IQ tests measure innate intelligence and not training. The whole point of an IQ test is that you shouldn't be able to "cram" for it, you shouldn't be able to "cheat" and temporarily influence the results so that they don't accurately reflect intelligence. So at the very least, this puts your claim that IQ is a permanent number that can be accurately measured before adolescence into question. You're admitting here that you don't believe IQ is a static number. You're suggesting that external interventions can bring out latent abilities that won't be captured or accounted for in a normal IQ test. That's an idea with pretty big implications. Essentially, what you're saying is that given the right environment/early-education/nutrition/etc, that test results can be artificially primed. So given that claim, why are you so certain that IQ is set in stone before preschool? How do you know that there aren't external factors that can lower IQ over time? What makes you sure that an oppressive or high-stress environment couldn't suppress or encourage those latent abilities even later in life? You don't really have any way to know that IQ tests given later in life wouldn't be subject to environmental effects that could dampen or inflate results, do you?

danShumway 5y ago

> That won't work. We know from science that the IQ gap appears before school age so it's not caused by school. Also, people have tried special high quality schools for poor blacks and it doesn't solve the problem. Your research is out of date on these topics. General scientific consensus today is that nurture is as important as nature for IQ, particularly among younger children (the Flynn Effect alone makes this conclusion obvious). You're also placing an over-emphasis on IQ, Black wage gaps exist in industries where IQ is not a strong measure of success. There's also good research indicating that Black wage gaps continue to exist after you correct for experience/education, and that hiring rates are influenced by non-intelligence based factors like how "white" your name sounds on an application resume. This has been the case not just in Black communities, but in many of the "they're just biologically different" debates that spring up, particularly around gender. There's a statistically significant difference in how many women-created pull requests get accepted into Open Source libraries based on whether or not names are obscured/anonymized before the requests are submitted. I think it's pretty clear that IQ is not a sufficient explanation for those results. So we're going to get into the IQ stuff, but to be clear, your view of IQ is skewed. IQ is not as important as you're making it sound for income (there's some correlation, but it's a lot milder than people assume). This is particularly true when you start looking at high-paying management roles where intelligence tends to matter a lot less than social skills. No engineering job has ever given me an IQ test before they hired me or asked me about one. Resumes are based on experience, which is largely determined by opportunity, connections, and free time. So I think it's really problematic to focus on IQ to this degree or to try to reduce success to a pure factor of IQ, but since you brought it up... > The IQ gap also persists despite black kids being adopted into wealthy white families, so it's not an investment or income gap. Check your research on this, it's actually the complete opposite of what you claim. Black kids raised in higher-income white homes have dramatically better pre-adolescent test results. Interestingly enough, test results actually go down as they age and interact more with the broader adult world, indicating that there might be something about the surrounding world that makes those gains recede over time. I wonder what that could be? > You can't find effective solutions to problems if you willfully ignore the scientific evidence for the causes of those problems... Oh come on. I'm not the person here disregarding decades of research that say that socio-economic status is a leading indicator of school performance, influencing everything from teaching resources, to pre-adolescent stress, to nutrition, to exercise, to time spent on homework and extracurricular activities. Cut it out with the "you're just biased" nonsense, very few scientists seriously believe that poverty doesn't affect IQ. > You say there's zero scientific evidence for it being genetic, but you conspicuously fail to even claim that there's any scientific evidence for it not being genetic. First of all, that's not really how science works. You don't get to propose a ridiculous theory and then make it everyone else's job to disprove you. Secondly, there is plenty of evidence that this is not genetic, not the least being that genes for intelligence don't work that way and there is no single gene for intelligence, and also race doesn't work that way and there is no single genetic makeup of everyone who is Black. No one has ever found a set of genes solidly linked to intelligence that is shared across every Black community. And people have tried. Race science was big in America's history. But it turns out, there is no good evidence for it, and there is a ton of evidence that environment is as influential as anything else for education levels. This is generally accepted science, and I don't understand how you're seriously arguing that environment doesn't affect education. It's not intellectually dishonest when looking at a theory that has never produced evidence in its favor and that doesn't really make sense based on our current understanding of genetics, to instead go with the theory that actually does have evidence. But if you believe otherwise, I have a teapot orbiting Mars to sell you. > There seems to be some unknown thing they do to their preschool children which cripples them for life. So you support free preschool, childcare, and increased resources for low-income parents in Black neighborhoods? Would you support enforcing maternity leave to make it easier for low-income parents to spend more time with their kids, since early-childhood parental involvement is a statistically significant indicator of future intelligence? I mean, you seem to be pretty confident that you know what the problem is, so you must have a list of solutions. I get kind of tired when people who are not lifting a finger to help Black communities try to guilt activists and argue that they'd be more successful if they just focused on the "right things." So I'm curious what you're doing to help.

exporectomy 5y ago
> continue to exist after you correct for experience/education No doubt there is also discrimination. Especially if there's a real effect, it's easy for people to be aware of that and exacerbate it with discrimination. Same as women can't do X man's job until they could. > dramatically better pre-adolescent test results. Childhood interventions to raise IQ are known to wear off at adolescence. It's not necessarily because of the adult world but perhaps because the interventions are just bringing out latent childhood abilities that normal kids don't get the opportunity to use or something like that. I don't know but you have to look at post-adolescent IQs for the effect on adult-income.
- danShumway 5y ago
  > No doubt there is also discrimination. Then what are you arguing about? You're calling into question the entire concept of equality activism for job/housing/education opportunities, and you don't disagree that discrimination exists? > but perhaps because the interventions are just bringing out latent childhood abilities that normal kids don't get the opportunity to use That is an extremely worrisome trend if you're trying to argue that IQ tests measure innate intelligence and not training. The whole point of an IQ test is that you shouldn't be able to "cram" for it, you shouldn't be able to "cheat" and temporarily influence the results so that they don't accurately reflect intelligence. So at the very least, this puts your claim that IQ is a permanent number that can be accurately measured before adolescence into question. You're admitting here that you don't believe IQ is a static number. You're suggesting that external interventions can bring out latent abilities that won't be captured or accounted for in a normal IQ test. That's an idea with pretty big implications. Essentially, what you're saying is that given the right environment/early-education/nutrition/etc, that test results can be artificially primed. So given that claim, why are you so certain that IQ is set in stone before preschool? How do you know that there aren't external factors that can lower IQ over time? What makes you sure that an oppressive or high-stress environment couldn't suppress or encourage those latent abilities even later in life? You don't really have any way to know that IQ tests given later in life wouldn't be subject to environmental effects that could dampen or inflate results, do you?