5 ms·

What I.Q. doesn't tell you about race

47 points by papersmith 19y ago

amichail 19y ago
If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn't make a difference whether it's a mixed-race child's mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black mother and a white father. What is the logic behind this argument?
- mynameishere 19y ago
  Assume men and women select for different characteristics--for instance, women select for intelligent men, while men select for XYZ women (with XYZ being anything other than intelligence.) Assume that the average white IQ is 100 and the average black IQ is 85, and assume that there is a genetic component to these numbers. The average black woman (IQ: 85) will select a white male of >85 IQ. Her average offspring will probably have >85 IQ. The average white woman (IQ: 100) will select a black male of >100 IQ. Her average offspring will probably have >100 IQ. Therefore, the differences in sexual selection between men and women can result in genetically distinct offspring given bm/wf, wm/bf pairings. So the logic is...there is no logic.
  - deleted 19y ago
    [deleted]
  - pius 19y ago
    You're assuming a whole lot more than that, most notably that the researchers used incredibly poor methodology, forgetting to control for the IQ of the parents.
    - mynameishere 19y ago
      I would be utterly shocked if they controlled for anything--most social experiments like this use what data they can get, and are, as you say "incredibly poor". The closest thing to a reasonable experiment in this regard are studies of separated twins--studies Gladwell obviously doesn't mention, as they show exactly what everyone knows, that intelligence is largely inherited. The German study that he brings up at the end has been dredged up over and over and over for many years and is apparently not easily repeatable. Again, most readers can't tell the difference between a data point and a proof. Anyway, he's the one making a claim, and he's the one who needs to show that the methodology is sound, not me.
      - pius 19y ago
        " . . . studies Gladwell obviously doesn't mention, as they show exactly what everyone knows, that intelligence is largely inherited. You're misconstruing Gladwell's position. He's not arguing against inheritance of intelligence; he's arguing against a biologically innate and immutable race-based component to intelligence. "Anyway, he's the one making a claim, and he's the one who needs to show that the methodology is sound, not me." Actually, you made the latest claim. You set up a somewhat absurd strawman for what Gladwell argued and then tried to lampoon it and make his position look illogical when, in fact, the interpretation you constructed relies on the researchers literally ignoring the most basic of statistics. That needed to be pointed out, lest people buy the strawman and actually get swayed to believe that black people are biologically less intelligent than whites.
        mynameishere 19y ago
        I hardly made a "strawman", which would require a construction of the form, "Gladwell said XYZ", which I did not do. Rather, I showed a single example of how different kinds of pairings could result in different kinds of results. Here is an example of a strawman argument, for your reference: There are a lot of pseudo-scientists out there who claim that IQ tests are perfectly accurate, not at all culturally biased, and are in fact objective, innate measures of intelligence. Anyway, as for researchers literally ignoring basic statistics Their statistics may be pure as a mountain spring. It doesn't matter. What I suspect is that there are factors they completely didn't account for--something that happens to every scientist. It tends to happen more to scientists trying to prove political points. he's arguing against a consistent, innate, statistically significant, race-based component to intelligence He needs to quit picking-and-choosing studies then. I've seen the German study, and I'm glad to take it into account, and if there are repeated examples, I'll take them into account also. Well, here's something most of us have probably seen already: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations ...the thing to reflect upon here isn't that innaccuracies exist (because they do). Rather, the gross consistency of the results--why do poor countries like Thailand and Malaysia have passable scores compared to Africa? Do Africans suffer from a particularly racist sort of poverty? Why does a country like Iraq--living under a dictator, facing decades of war and mass starvation and international isolation have a higher average IQ than every African country? More racism? Why would China, a country that still has hundreds of millions of peasants score much better than every African country? Compare China to Hong Kong--areas with racial similitude, but vastly--diametrically--different histories and circumstances, with every advantage going to Hong Kong. Should not the difference be greater than 7 points? Eventually, the question is, "How much evidence does it take?" and the answer is obviously, "No amount of evidence is enough". It's an idealogical question. Let me present the inevitable extremes. The list of Jewish scientists (which wikipedia warns is "incomplete") is broken down into numerous sections: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_scientists_and_philosophers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_scientists_and_p... The list of African Americans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_African_Americans http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_African_Americans ...contains no scientists at all. Yes, I know some exist, but no one thought well enough to add any. Blame the community, I guess. Not to belabour the point, but Jews are numerically inferior to African-Americans, and have suffered a fair amount of uncomfortable circumstances. So, how to explain the wild differences? Again, when does the evidence become overwhelming..?
- pius 19y ago
  I can see how the argument may be confusing . . . Gladwell's mincing words a bit, trying hard not to explicitly call out the racism inherent in the arguments put forth by some in this tired IQ debate. Allow me to paraphrase the statement, kid-gloves off: There are a lot of pseudo-scientists out there who claim that IQ tests are perfectly accurate, not at all culturally biased, and are in fact objective, innate measures of intelligence. According to these folks, black people are just fundamentally less intelligent than white people, that's why IQ scores are so correlated to race. This theory would predict that "tainting" pure white blood with "intellectually inferior" black blood should yield children who are stupider than their white counterparts, without regard to cultural factors. In practice, though, the evidence appears to point to a more nuanced explanation, as there is a statistically significant difference between IQ scores when cultural factors (such as race and gender combinations of the parents) differ. In other words, IQ may not be statistically independent of the non-genetic factors surrounding the test-taker. That might clear it up. If not, the remainder of the paragraph that you quoted may elucidate it further: "And it shouldn't make much of a difference where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does: the children fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white American G.I.s and German mothers. The difference, in that case, was not the fact of the children's blackness, as a fundamentalist would say. It was the fact of their Germanness--of their being brought up in a different culture, under different circumstances."
  - eru 19y ago
    Morale: Germanness makes intelligent. ;)
tarkin2 19y ago
Malcolm Gladwell is probably my favourite non-fiction author of late. I wonder if you can subscribe to the New Yorker in the UK. I'm starting to appreciate that magazine more and more.
- mdemare 19y ago
  Yeah, the other article (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_...) was fantastic as well.
politrix 19y ago
If you consider the historical genetic variation in humans through our expansion from Africa and then spreading throughout the continents. Differences in the development of intelligence due to the different environmental factors makes little sense. Likewise the overall genetic of variation in humans is extraordinarily small and interbreeding extraordinarily high compared to other mammalian species further reducing any likelihood of significant variation between the continental populations.
- earthboundkid 19y ago
  If anything, the Chinese should be the dumbest, the Europeans second dumbest, the Africans smartest. Think about it: For centuries, what did you do if you were a bright kid in China? Get your balls loped off and become a eunuch. Who needs children when you have the Imperial household to run? Even if you didn't become a eunuch, you at least became a Buddhist monk or something if you were smart. Europe was pretty much the same thing. Smart people became priests and monks, who, while not completely celibate in the real world, still had much lower rates of reproduction. On the other hand, in Africa, you gotta be smart, or your ass is lion fodder. Are you a lazy daydreamer with no head for thinking? Too bad, because when the drought comes, only smart dudes will be able to provide for their families through alliances and phony witch doctor magic tricks. ---- That a story like this can be so easily constructed is why I never put too much stock in things like evolutionary psychology per se. It's easy to come up with a fable that "explains" why the world is the way it is. Real history and real facts are much harder to piece together.
  - papersmith 19y ago
    Actually in China if you were smart, the standard route was to take an imperial exam to become a bureaucrat. Traditionally, each man could have multiple wives, but usually only the upper class could afford a large family. Bureaucrats, along with merchants, made up most of the upper class, and it was common for a single man to have a dozen children in these families.
  - politrix 19y ago
    Africa had some of the world's first high culture societies which are probably older than Europe's or China's due to the tremendous history of that continent. I mean it is the cradle of the civilization after all. But you wouldn't think that way today with a lot of that history having been nearly eradicated and not taught.
mhartl 19y ago
This reminds me of the article in Harvard Magazine a couple of years ago about "applying science to gun control". As soon as I saw the title, I had a sense of foreboding. Regardless of the merits, based solely on the publication you know which way the argument has to go. To his credit, the author of the Harvard Magazine article waited until the second paragraph to note that the scientist in question considered himself lucky to live in a safe state like Massachusetts, with its "strong gun-control laws". You can guess the conclusion of his "scientific analysis" of gun control... And so it goes with The New Yorker: when you are deeply emotionally committed to a position, it's virtually impossible to trust anything you say. I admire Malcolm Gladwell, and enjoy The New Yorker, but really, could this article have gone any other way?
- pius 19y ago
  You raise a good point . . . articles on either side of the issue almost always have passionate activists as authors rather than dispassionate scientists. People who believe in the equality of human beings typically believe in it strongly enough that they find it difficult to objectively analyze putative evidence to the contrary -- they're damn stubborn. Meanwhile, people who are racial supremacists of any kind in this day and age have self-selected themselves as pretty headstrong, stubborn individuals themselves.
  - politrix 19y ago
    It is often the racists who portray themselves as "dispassionate scientists", as if they have no agenda. And it is also the same people who know very little about the subject. To know anything, you have to by minimum have a passion for that knowledge. Anyone trying to hide that is putting up a facade.
- neilk 19y ago
  So this is the argument from bias: I perceive the author to have been favorable to one side, therefore I discard all his evidence and argumentation. Bias itself is not a flaw in an argument. Bias may tell us where to look for flaws in the argument.
amichail 19y ago
If you want to avoid discrimination, just start your own company and avoid the whole mess!
- pius 19y ago
  Exactly what I'm doing! :D
- DaniFong 19y ago
  That was a primary motive of mine.
- earthboundkid 19y ago
  Until you go to the bank for a loan. "What's that? Your parents aren't rich? Nor are your friends? All you have in collateral is an old Buick? Next please."
  - DaniFong 19y ago
    Apparently, Bill Gates and Paul Allen (and Paul Gilbert) started a company before Microsoft, called Traf-O-Data. (wow.) They did data analysis from traffic controllers. Despite the name, they actually made a fairly decent revenue for high school kids (some tens of thousands annually). Once Bill's age was discovered they had a much harder time selling anything. Even Steve Jobs had to stop being a shaggy hippie. But luckily for founders, unless you're in the consulting business, the market really doesn't care who you are. There are far too many layers of abstraction for your identity to have any meaning, beyond of course, that which is deliberately constructed. (Mac People, Japanese Cars, German Engineering, Scandinavian design, etc) ^.^
    - earthboundkid 19y ago
      Gates' father was a lawyer. It takes seed capital to found Traf-O-Data. Thankfully, the seed capital needed for a startup is dropping dramatically thanks to the web, but it's still a serious problem for people from poor families.
bootload 19y ago
"... There should be no great mystery about Asian achievement. It has to do with hard work and dedication to higher education, and belonging to a culture that stresses professional success. But Flynn makes one more observation. The children of that first successful wave of Asian-Americans really did have I.Q.s that were higher than everyone else's--coming in somewhere around 103. ..." Only at the summary do you get a hint why this might be. My guess is access to improved nutrition could be one factor.
- vitaminj 19y ago
  I'd say the self-selection bias would be a big factor. Most of the dumbass and lazy Asians probably stayed at home. Those first generation asian-american kids would likely have had the value of hard work forcefully instilled in them as well.
  - earthboundkid 19y ago
    I have taught in Japan. Their dumbasses say, "hi." (Seriously, "the Asians = smart" myth doesn't last long if you actually meet normal people in Asia. Normal Asian people are... of normal intelligence! What a shock!)
nailer 19y ago
There's absolutely no point discussing this. Race has bearing on: - skin color - whether you're likely to get sickle cell anaemia - the age your children develop teeth - the age your children walk - the size of your penis (if you have a Y chromosome) - the amount of fast twitch fibres in your muscles It has no bearing whatsoever the brain. Why? Because of magic. While all of the aforementioned effects of race on physiology links are well known and freely discussed, race cannot have any bearing on anything inside the skull, because the brain is magic. Anybody that suggests otherwise, or suggests investigating or discussing the effects of race on the brain is a racist and we need to moderate them down. The only people who would discuss such things are racists with an agenda like James Watson, not scientists like the people that understand how the brain has magical properties. Brain=magic. You don't even need to read the article. Now lets moderate the racists down!
- neilk 19y ago
  1) Race, genetically, doesn't exist. People who are black basically have one trait in common: black skin. Just think of how "White" covers a range from the Sami people of Scandinavia all the way to the Portuguese or the Persians. And "black" covers everything from Zulus to Pygmies. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1998-10/WUiS-GSRD-071098.php http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1998-10/WUiS-GSRD-071... This isn't to say that heredity plays no part, or that certain groups of people won't be more likely to have certain traits. Maybe you could say that some tribes in West Africa are such-and-such. But we can't expect our eyes to reveal genetic truths. 2) I think you're missing Gladwell's point. It is not that heredity doesn't affect the brain. It's that IQ testing is far too flawed to yield meaningful results, especially when comparing groups of people tested in different places and at different times. In the story, they mention how properly normalized IQ tests find that Asians have a lower average IQ than whites. They speculate that Asians' success in academics is due to cultural values and individual efforts -- and if you know any super-achiever Asian students, that was in plain sight all along!
  - nailer 19y ago
    "1) Race, genetically, doesn't exist." You are talking about race as if 'black' or 'white' were a race. This is confusing race with skin color. I have not done this and neither should you. "2. Gladwell's point ..is that IQ testing is far too flawed to yield meaningful results" I completely agree with Gladwell's point. My post above is satirising this thread and the discussion therein.
downer 19y ago
> If what I.Q. tests measure is immutable and innate The entire premise is wrong. IQ scores typically rise 5-15 points on a second test, now that the taker knows what kind of questions to expect. IQ tests can be studied and practiced for. Just like if you hear enough logic puzzles, you can work out solutions to similar problems without needing the "AHA!" moment of insight that you needed the first time.
bayareaguy 19y ago
My favorite part: "An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are."

47 points by papersmith 19y ago

If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn't make a difference whether it's a mixed-race child's mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black mother and a white father. What is the logic behind this argument?

mynameishere 19y ago
Assume men and women select for different characteristics--for instance, women select for intelligent men, while men select for XYZ women (with XYZ being anything other than intelligence.) Assume that the average white IQ is 100 and the average black IQ is 85, and assume that there is a genetic component to these numbers. The average black woman (IQ: 85) will select a white male of >85 IQ. Her average offspring will probably have >85 IQ. The average white woman (IQ: 100) will select a black male of >100 IQ. Her average offspring will probably have >100 IQ. Therefore, the differences in sexual selection between men and women can result in genetically distinct offspring given bm/wf, wm/bf pairings. So the logic is...there is no logic.
- deleted 19y ago
  [deleted]
- pius 19y ago
  You're assuming a whole lot more than that, most notably that the researchers used incredibly poor methodology, forgetting to control for the IQ of the parents.
  - mynameishere 19y ago
    I would be utterly shocked if they controlled for anything--most social experiments like this use what data they can get, and are, as you say "incredibly poor". The closest thing to a reasonable experiment in this regard are studies of separated twins--studies Gladwell obviously doesn't mention, as they show exactly what everyone knows, that intelligence is largely inherited. The German study that he brings up at the end has been dredged up over and over and over for many years and is apparently not easily repeatable. Again, most readers can't tell the difference between a data point and a proof. Anyway, he's the one making a claim, and he's the one who needs to show that the methodology is sound, not me.
    - pius 19y ago
      " . . . studies Gladwell obviously doesn't mention, as they show exactly what everyone knows, that intelligence is largely inherited. You're misconstruing Gladwell's position. He's not arguing against inheritance of intelligence; he's arguing against a biologically innate and immutable race-based component to intelligence. "Anyway, he's the one making a claim, and he's the one who needs to show that the methodology is sound, not me." Actually, you made the latest claim. You set up a somewhat absurd strawman for what Gladwell argued and then tried to lampoon it and make his position look illogical when, in fact, the interpretation you constructed relies on the researchers literally ignoring the most basic of statistics. That needed to be pointed out, lest people buy the strawman and actually get swayed to believe that black people are biologically less intelligent than whites.
      - mynameishere 19y ago
        I hardly made a "strawman", which would require a construction of the form, "Gladwell said XYZ", which I did not do. Rather, I showed a single example of how different kinds of pairings could result in different kinds of results. Here is an example of a strawman argument, for your reference: There are a lot of pseudo-scientists out there who claim that IQ tests are perfectly accurate, not at all culturally biased, and are in fact objective, innate measures of intelligence. Anyway, as for researchers literally ignoring basic statistics Their statistics may be pure as a mountain spring. It doesn't matter. What I suspect is that there are factors they completely didn't account for--something that happens to every scientist. It tends to happen more to scientists trying to prove political points. he's arguing against a consistent, innate, statistically significant, race-based component to intelligence He needs to quit picking-and-choosing studies then. I've seen the German study, and I'm glad to take it into account, and if there are repeated examples, I'll take them into account also. Well, here's something most of us have probably seen already: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations ...the thing to reflect upon here isn't that innaccuracies exist (because they do). Rather, the gross consistency of the results--why do poor countries like Thailand and Malaysia have passable scores compared to Africa? Do Africans suffer from a particularly racist sort of poverty? Why does a country like Iraq--living under a dictator, facing decades of war and mass starvation and international isolation have a higher average IQ than every African country? More racism? Why would China, a country that still has hundreds of millions of peasants score much better than every African country? Compare China to Hong Kong--areas with racial similitude, but vastly--diametrically--different histories and circumstances, with every advantage going to Hong Kong. Should not the difference be greater than 7 points? Eventually, the question is, "How much evidence does it take?" and the answer is obviously, "No amount of evidence is enough". It's an idealogical question. Let me present the inevitable extremes. The list of Jewish scientists (which wikipedia warns is "incomplete") is broken down into numerous sections: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_scientists_and_philosophers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_scientists_and_p... The list of African Americans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_African_Americans http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_African_Americans ...contains no scientists at all. Yes, I know some exist, but no one thought well enough to add any. Blame the community, I guess. Not to belabour the point, but Jews are numerically inferior to African-Americans, and have suffered a fair amount of uncomfortable circumstances. So, how to explain the wild differences? Again, when does the evidence become overwhelming..?
pius 19y ago
I can see how the argument may be confusing . . . Gladwell's mincing words a bit, trying hard not to explicitly call out the racism inherent in the arguments put forth by some in this tired IQ debate. Allow me to paraphrase the statement, kid-gloves off: There are a lot of pseudo-scientists out there who claim that IQ tests are perfectly accurate, not at all culturally biased, and are in fact objective, innate measures of intelligence. According to these folks, black people are just fundamentally less intelligent than white people, that's why IQ scores are so correlated to race. This theory would predict that "tainting" pure white blood with "intellectually inferior" black blood should yield children who are stupider than their white counterparts, without regard to cultural factors. In practice, though, the evidence appears to point to a more nuanced explanation, as there is a statistically significant difference between IQ scores when cultural factors (such as race and gender combinations of the parents) differ. In other words, IQ may not be statistically independent of the non-genetic factors surrounding the test-taker. That might clear it up. If not, the remainder of the paragraph that you quoted may elucidate it further: "And it shouldn't make much of a difference where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does: the children fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white American G.I.s and German mothers. The difference, in that case, was not the fact of the children's blackness, as a fundamentalist would say. It was the fact of their Germanness--of their being brought up in a different culture, under different circumstances."
- eru 19y ago
  Morale: Germanness makes intelligent. ;)

tarkin2 19y ago

Malcolm Gladwell is probably my favourite non-fiction author of late. I wonder if you can subscribe to the New Yorker in the UK. I'm starting to appreciate that magazine more and more.

mdemare 19y ago
Yeah, the other article (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_...) was fantastic as well.

politrix 19y ago

If you consider the historical genetic variation in humans through our expansion from Africa and then spreading throughout the continents. Differences in the development of intelligence due to the different environmental factors makes little sense. Likewise the overall genetic of variation in humans is extraordinarily small and interbreeding extraordinarily high compared to other mammalian species further reducing any likelihood of significant variation between the continental populations.

earthboundkid 19y ago
If anything, the Chinese should be the dumbest, the Europeans second dumbest, the Africans smartest. Think about it: For centuries, what did you do if you were a bright kid in China? Get your balls loped off and become a eunuch. Who needs children when you have the Imperial household to run? Even if you didn't become a eunuch, you at least became a Buddhist monk or something if you were smart. Europe was pretty much the same thing. Smart people became priests and monks, who, while not completely celibate in the real world, still had much lower rates of reproduction. On the other hand, in Africa, you gotta be smart, or your ass is lion fodder. Are you a lazy daydreamer with no head for thinking? Too bad, because when the drought comes, only smart dudes will be able to provide for their families through alliances and phony witch doctor magic tricks. ---- That a story like this can be so easily constructed is why I never put too much stock in things like evolutionary psychology per se. It's easy to come up with a fable that "explains" why the world is the way it is. Real history and real facts are much harder to piece together.
- papersmith 19y ago
  Actually in China if you were smart, the standard route was to take an imperial exam to become a bureaucrat. Traditionally, each man could have multiple wives, but usually only the upper class could afford a large family. Bureaucrats, along with merchants, made up most of the upper class, and it was common for a single man to have a dozen children in these families.
- politrix 19y ago
  Africa had some of the world's first high culture societies which are probably older than Europe's or China's due to the tremendous history of that continent. I mean it is the cradle of the civilization after all. But you wouldn't think that way today with a lot of that history having been nearly eradicated and not taught.

mhartl 19y ago

This reminds me of the article in Harvard Magazine a couple of years ago about "applying science to gun control". As soon as I saw the title, I had a sense of foreboding. Regardless of the merits, based solely on the publication you know which way the argument has to go. To his credit, the author of the Harvard Magazine article waited until the second paragraph to note that the scientist in question considered himself lucky to live in a safe state like Massachusetts, with its "strong gun-control laws". You can guess the conclusion of his "scientific analysis" of gun control... And so it goes with The New Yorker: when you are deeply emotionally committed to a position, it's virtually impossible to trust anything you say. I admire Malcolm Gladwell, and enjoy The New Yorker, but really, could this article have gone any other way?

pius 19y ago
You raise a good point . . . articles on either side of the issue almost always have passionate activists as authors rather than dispassionate scientists. People who believe in the equality of human beings typically believe in it strongly enough that they find it difficult to objectively analyze putative evidence to the contrary -- they're damn stubborn. Meanwhile, people who are racial supremacists of any kind in this day and age have self-selected themselves as pretty headstrong, stubborn individuals themselves.
- politrix 19y ago
  It is often the racists who portray themselves as "dispassionate scientists", as if they have no agenda. And it is also the same people who know very little about the subject. To know anything, you have to by minimum have a passion for that knowledge. Anyone trying to hide that is putting up a facade.
neilk 19y ago
So this is the argument from bias: I perceive the author to have been favorable to one side, therefore I discard all his evidence and argumentation. Bias itself is not a flaw in an argument. Bias may tell us where to look for flaws in the argument.

amichail 19y ago

If you want to avoid discrimination, just start your own company and avoid the whole mess!

pius 19y ago
Exactly what I'm doing! :D
DaniFong 19y ago
That was a primary motive of mine.
earthboundkid 19y ago
Until you go to the bank for a loan. "What's that? Your parents aren't rich? Nor are your friends? All you have in collateral is an old Buick? Next please."
- DaniFong 19y ago
  Apparently, Bill Gates and Paul Allen (and Paul Gilbert) started a company before Microsoft, called Traf-O-Data. (wow.) They did data analysis from traffic controllers. Despite the name, they actually made a fairly decent revenue for high school kids (some tens of thousands annually). Once Bill's age was discovered they had a much harder time selling anything. Even Steve Jobs had to stop being a shaggy hippie. But luckily for founders, unless you're in the consulting business, the market really doesn't care who you are. There are far too many layers of abstraction for your identity to have any meaning, beyond of course, that which is deliberately constructed. (Mac People, Japanese Cars, German Engineering, Scandinavian design, etc) ^.^
  - earthboundkid 19y ago
    Gates' father was a lawyer. It takes seed capital to found Traf-O-Data. Thankfully, the seed capital needed for a startup is dropping dramatically thanks to the web, but it's still a serious problem for people from poor families.

bootload 19y ago

"... There should be no great mystery about Asian achievement. It has to do with hard work and dedication to higher education, and belonging to a culture that stresses professional success. But Flynn makes one more observation. The children of that first successful wave of Asian-Americans really did have I.Q.s that were higher than everyone else's--coming in somewhere around 103. ..." Only at the summary do you get a hint why this might be. My guess is access to improved nutrition could be one factor.

vitaminj 19y ago
I'd say the self-selection bias would be a big factor. Most of the dumbass and lazy Asians probably stayed at home. Those first generation asian-american kids would likely have had the value of hard work forcefully instilled in them as well.
- earthboundkid 19y ago
  I have taught in Japan. Their dumbasses say, "hi." (Seriously, "the Asians = smart" myth doesn't last long if you actually meet normal people in Asia. Normal Asian people are... of normal intelligence! What a shock!)

nailer 19y ago

There's absolutely no point discussing this. Race has bearing on: - skin color - whether you're likely to get sickle cell anaemia - the age your children develop teeth - the age your children walk - the size of your penis (if you have a Y chromosome) - the amount of fast twitch fibres in your muscles It has no bearing whatsoever the brain. Why? Because of magic. While all of the aforementioned effects of race on physiology links are well known and freely discussed, race cannot have any bearing on anything inside the skull, because the brain is magic. Anybody that suggests otherwise, or suggests investigating or discussing the effects of race on the brain is a racist and we need to moderate them down. The only people who would discuss such things are racists with an agenda like James Watson, not scientists like the people that understand how the brain has magical properties. Brain=magic. You don't even need to read the article. Now lets moderate the racists down!

neilk 19y ago
1) Race, genetically, doesn't exist. People who are black basically have one trait in common: black skin. Just think of how "White" covers a range from the Sami people of Scandinavia all the way to the Portuguese or the Persians. And "black" covers everything from Zulus to Pygmies. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1998-10/WUiS-GSRD-071098.php http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1998-10/WUiS-GSRD-071... This isn't to say that heredity plays no part, or that certain groups of people won't be more likely to have certain traits. Maybe you could say that some tribes in West Africa are such-and-such. But we can't expect our eyes to reveal genetic truths. 2) I think you're missing Gladwell's point. It is not that heredity doesn't affect the brain. It's that IQ testing is far too flawed to yield meaningful results, especially when comparing groups of people tested in different places and at different times. In the story, they mention how properly normalized IQ tests find that Asians have a lower average IQ than whites. They speculate that Asians' success in academics is due to cultural values and individual efforts -- and if you know any super-achiever Asian students, that was in plain sight all along!
- nailer 19y ago
  "1) Race, genetically, doesn't exist." You are talking about race as if 'black' or 'white' were a race. This is confusing race with skin color. I have not done this and neither should you. "2. Gladwell's point ..is that IQ testing is far too flawed to yield meaningful results" I completely agree with Gladwell's point. My post above is satirising this thread and the discussion therein.

downer 19y ago

> If what I.Q. tests measure is immutable and innate The entire premise is wrong. IQ scores typically rise 5-15 points on a second test, now that the taker knows what kind of questions to expect. IQ tests can be studied and practiced for. Just like if you hear enough logic puzzles, you can work out solutions to similar problems without needing the "AHA!" moment of insight that you needed the first time.

bayareaguy 19y ago

My favorite part: "An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are."