Mike the Mad Biologist has an interesting twist on the race & IQ argument.
NAEP math scores have been used as proxies for IQ. If we look at the NAEP 8th grade math data for 2011, when we compare students with college educated parents who aren’t poor, there is a about a twenty point gap in scores for any given socioeconomic group between black and white students (where a ten point difference roughly corresponds to one grade level). We know conclusively, based on studies in marginal journals edited by racists, that this racial difference is largely genetic (and we have controlled for a deleterious environment by excluding poor students and poorly educated parents). For instance, in Massachusetts, white students (with college educated parents who aren’t poor) have an average score of 312, while black students have a score of 291 (p less than 10-6). Meanwhile, Alabama whites score 293, with no significance difference compared to black students in Massachusetts (p = 0.49). The gap between Massachusetts whites and Massachusetts blacks is the same as the gap between Massachusetts and Alabama whites.
Ergo, Alabama whites are also genetically inferior untermenschen whom we should not waste our time trying to educate. Look, I’m just bravely telling it like it is. If it doesn’t fit for your conservative preconceptions, that’s too bad. We have to heroically follow the data where they lead us. And when you look at other states, it’s clear: ‘heartland’ whites are genetically inferior to Massachusetts (and Maryland) whites, and we need to fundamentally rethink our social policies accordingly.
I live in the heartland, and although I was born in the west, I have to admit that my mother was born here in Minnesota, making me a kind of half-breed Heartlander. I may have superior genetics to the Minnesotans around me, but I graciously deign to acknowledge my inferiority to the pure-bred Coastal race, which means you now have to accept the thesis is truer, because why would I admit to something that affects me?
Look, it’s got math in it. It’s got to be right.
Well I was born in the UK, and as most USAians seem only too happy to admit I’m and überüberubbermensch!
(AND I bounce!!)
“and” ??? I of coarse meen an
But I still Kant type or proof reed.
But do you poof weed?
Pretty sure the evidence says that basically anything that makes your childhood suck lowers your adult IQ. And there’s approximately a billion things about our society that make black childhoods suck more than white childhoods (and white Mississippi childhoods suck more than white Massachusetts childhoods).
I am confused. Conservatives have been telling us that freedom is the greatest thing on earth and that a marker of freedom is how low your taxes are. Thus it is confusing that Mass (higher taxes thus low ‘freedom’) has better whites than Miss (low taxes thus high ‘freedom’). How can this be? Does this mean our racist capitalistic libertarian dream is wrong?
blf @ #3
Not since the sixties*
________________________
* and of course I never [cough! cough!] inhaled
A very long time ago in a place far from here, I took the NMSQT, aka National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. The school counselor called me in a few weeks later to congratulate me on having the highest score in the whole state of Arkansas. As you would imagine, I thought that I was some incandescently hot shit for a day or two. But then I found out that my score would have failed to qualify me in Connecticut. Untermanschen indeed…..
Untermenschen. I did take German once.
prostheticconscience @4
I think you missed the sarcastic tone here…
Nah, Minnesota scores high on these IQ and other supposed markers of intelligence too. It’s almost like what they are actually testing has more to do with the environments, including school funding and support, anti-poverty, and pollution, then intelligence.
This makes no sense. The NAEP was never intended to measure intelligence (whatever that is). Its purpose is in its name: the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It’s meant to measure progress in the aggregate over the years; that is, to see how well, as a whole, US students (and relevant groups of US students) are progressing in performance in certain subjects over the years. There’s no assumption of any underlying trait; in addition, no student takes the whole test, so the results can’t be used to draw conclusions about any individuals (or schools, for that matter). The results can only be used to measure how well US students as a whole, or relatively large aggregates of students, are performing. And any inferences you can draw based on the results can only be about
tl;dr: anyone making inferences about intelligence based on NAEP results is spewing bullshit.
@11 What a Maroon, living up to the ‘nym
Well, IQ itself is bullshit, so making the NAEP a proxy for it for bullshit reasons make a sort of bullshitty sense.
@Mark Jacobson,
Yeah, my problem with that is that people will associate the NAEP with IQ and assume that it’s bullshit as well, without understanding what the NAEP is intended to measure.
(And to be honest, I don’t think that IQ is bullshit, exactly. It seems to be measuring something; it’s just the interpretation that that something is native intelligence that (I think) is bullshit.)
Bah, I’m sure if we do the same tests with the Dutch and the Americans the former will do significantly better. So all education in the USA is a waste of time, energy and money. Better to abandon it.
Oh wait, that’s already happening thanks to those genetically inferior Rethuglians …..
What? There’s a discussion of race and IQ going on?
Andrew Sullivan wants in!!!! Er, I mean… sure, he’ll perhaps weigh in, if everyone insists. He’s not, ya know, eager to quadrupel down on this totally unimportant topic that doesn’t mean anything to him personally. It’s all for the greater good of society, you see:
You see, if we could only reach the reasonable compromise position, that blacks are only slightly inferior, then everyone will be happy! We won’t make the terrible mistake of promising black people social equality, and they’ll totally understand why they don’t get it.
Goddamnit people, Andrew Sullivan has been trying to heal the racial divide since he excerpted The Bell Curve in the New Republic back in the 90s — why do you keep resisting his wisdom?
@ScreechyMonkey:
Andrew Sullivan is less well informed than the average commenter on Pharyngula or Pervert Justice? Color me shocked.
You say “obvious satire”.
The UK Conservative government say “great policy justification”.
Louis
Reminds me of Horace Mann Bond (Julian Bond’s educator father).
Jackson, J. P., Jr. (2004). “Racially stuffed shirts and other enemies of mankind”: Horace Mann Bond’s parody of segregationist psychology in the 1950s. In A. S. Winston (Ed.), Defining difference: Race and racism in the history of psychology (pp. 261-283). Washington, DC, US: American Psychological Association.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/10625-010
Abstract
African American educator Horace Mann Bond, indulging what he called his “propensity for bad jokes” (Bond, 1961), issued a number of stinging critiques of White segregationist racist claims about the intelligence of African Americans in the 1950s. In this chapter I first frame the notion of an Afrocentric psychology to inform an understanding of the nature of Bond’s critique. Then I lay out the arguments that Bond and other African American social scientists made in the 1920s against racial interpretations of IQ tests. I show how racial interpretations of IQ tests returned in the 1950s as part of the White southerner’s attack on the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Finally, I explore Bond’s satire of the segregationist position and how it destabilized segregationist claims. Rather than try to reclaim the “objective science” that was being ferociously defended by segregationists, Bond chose a different attack. He accepted the grounds offered by the segregationists and used their own arguments against them in a clever and effective reductio ad absurdum argument that undercut segregationist claims while accepting their terms of debate. Bond’s writings in this period should be viewed not as idiosyncratic, but as an important rhetorical strategy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Regarding Andrew Sullivan’s comments I suspect Brazil might have an argument against the US being “the most multiracial and multicultural society in human history.” Or maybe even 21st Century Canada, where 20.6 percent of the population is foreign born, versus 13 percent in the United States.
I’m a furriner in Canadialand, and let me tell you, I hardly ever worry about being deported. (Mainly while driving and acutely aware that for me a traffic accident might result in charges, which could see me deported, unlike others who end up in a traffic accident.
Fortunately, I’ve only had 2:
One time I backed very gently into a pole, which wouldn’t have damage the pole or the car except I had a bike rack on the back of the car so the really rather mild bump was transferred from the bike frames to the back window instead of from the bumper to the steel underbody – the glass was a mess, but even the bikes were fine.
The other time I was backing out of a residential garage and the garage door closed on top of the car. Yes, my fault, I know, but you really couldn’t see the garage door closing in any mirror and the kids were loud enough I didn’t hear the mechanism either.
So, not deported yet. Still. I worry.
All this is to say that I can’t imagine how stressful it must be to be a furriner in the USofTrump. Fuck that guy.
Can’t be, uberuberubbermensch is pronounced like it’s spelled.