Blacks are stupid...discuss

[eots]

Fury at DNA pioneer's theory: Africans are less intelligent than Westerners
Celebrated scientist attacked for race comments: "All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really"
By Cahal Milmo

Anger at scientist's 'whites more intelligent than blacks' comment ...James Watson. Photo / Bloomberg. One of the world's most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black ...
www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/story.cfm?c_id=314&objectid=10470596&pnum=0 - 8 hours ago

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Fury at DNA pioneer's theory: Africans are less intelligent than ...James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now ... that black people have higher libidos, and argued in favour of genetic ...
news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3067222.ece - Similar pages

 

[Kagom]

Racism sometimes can't be hidden real well.

 

[RetiredGySgt]

If these Scientists and Doctors are so sure, where is the base line proof? Other then opinion and claims that "in the future" we will see evidence, where the hell is the proof.

I suggest that culture not IQ causes some of the supposed "reasoning" on why it is so. This is going to have our local homegrown racists out in force.

But at the end of the day the simplest question is " Show me the evidence". No one has managed to provide any compelling evidence that this claim is true.

 

[midcan5]

Allow me to follow in Jonathan Swift's footsteps and put forth a different version of this assumption. I will use a Conservative Australian philosopher as my guide in this bit of satire. See link below.

'Women are Stupid'

What do I base this on? Example one: The past several days I have been instructing my wife, a woman, on how to change the environment settings on a PC. She teaches math by the way. So yesterday in the door comes another woman's PC, she is an English teacher, neither could figure it out. Example two: I get in our car and it is making this horrendous noise when the brakes are applied. I ask her, did you not notice this? She claims, yes, but wasn't sure it mattered. Obviously we needed rotors as well as brakes after that. Need I go on? Ask a woman to do anything except cook and have babies and you quickly find the male gender of our human species will be doing it. Even the best cooks are male, so you see what a great task in education we have ahead of us.

So according to all the assumptions I have seen, woman are the dumb ones; and until we are able to bring woman up to a standard closer to man we need to concentrate and focus on them. Thank you for your understanding and patience in this task which has taken man thousands of years so far and may take thousands more.

PS And if they should ever create children through test tubes, I hope that women still exist, dumb or not, Scarlett Johansson drives me wild or some such phrase that describes this sensation. Thank you for listening.



http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/women.html

 

[Doug]

There is no dispute about the substantial racial differential in the scores obtained on those tests which can be reasonably thought to measure intelligence.

The difference is great -- about a standard deviation -- and is replicated on not just various sorts of IQ tests, but on all of the other sorts of academic tests which have an intellgence-based component.

The real controversy is: what is the cause of this persistent difference?

But first two points to get out of the way:

===========================1==============================
One point that must be understood before we can argue about this issue: we are talking about the average score. The average score says NOTHING about any particular individual.

Suppose I take five Blues and five Purples and give them an IQ test, whose top score is 10, with the following results:

Blues: 1, 1, 3, 10, 10. Average: 5
Purples: 6, 6, 6, 6, 6. Average 6

On average, Purples score higher than Blues. But if you had to hire a couple of people to do a job requiring high intelligence, you would hire exclusively Blues.

So, we are talking about averages (arithmetic means, to be precise -- there are other kinds of averages).

Concretely: in the United States, there are hundreds of thousands of Blacks who are more intelligent than most of us who post on this board.

===========================2==============================

There are other issues which can be raised. Are the IQ, or other, tests which lead to these results, "biased"? People who raise this usually don't know quite what they mean, but they can mean something like this: perhaps the tests use concepts, or vocabulary, taken from a 'white' or a middle-class environment. And sometimes they mean, perhaps 'intelligence' is a culturally-determined idea ... maybe African intelligence is just different to European or Oriental intelligence. Both of these are related, because both question the "objectivity" of IQ tests

Both of these ideas are wrong, in different ways. The first is factually wrong. Th second is wrong in a more subtle way. They have been extensively discussed elsewhere and I won't take up time refuting them here, unless someone really wants to go into the subject.

======================================================


So the only interesting issue is: what causes this difference?

Two possible causes have been proposed: Nature, and Nurture

Your dog, no matter how you train him and no matter what kind of environment you raise him in, will never learn to factorize quadratic equations.

Nature has not given him a brain which is capable of this sort of thinking.

On the other hand, we can imagine raising two identical twins, who have very similar "natures" -- they share the same DNA -- in very different environments: one in a middle-class professionals' home where both parents hold advanced degrees and read a lot of books and put a big emphasis on education -- the other in a slum with a single-mother who spends her free time watching soap operas.

If nurture is all, they should be very different in IQ. If nature is all, identical. In fact, they are somewhere in between, and most cognitive psychologists agree that the genetic -- or heriditarian -- effect contributes about 50 to 70% to IQ.

But it's a complicated subject -- if you have access to the latest New York Review of Books you can read an interesting exchange on this subject, which gets off into the question of monozygotic twins who share, or don't, the same "chorion", and the effect this might have on the similarity of their personalities later.

I personally hope that the revealed differences in mean intelligence among the races is due to heredity.

If it is due to culture -- "nurture" -- we have a problem, because we don't know how to change cultures very well.

There is a huge element of self-destructive behavior among lower-class Blacks. Google "acting white" for an example.

But how to change it? Hooray for Bill Cosby and others who are trying to turn things around. And we should always carefully consider proposals for state intervention that might help improve things ... but these have generally been disappointing.

Of course, cultures can have enormous influences on whole peoples: just look at how different tribal groups, with mostly the same genes as their ancestors, have changed their group behavior over time:

---- the Greeks were just another collection of related Mediterranean tribes, until suddenly, about 2500 years ago, fire from heaven fell on them, and they sat down and invented Western civilization. You cannot now have a conversation with another literate person without speaking Greek.

---- the Danes are the nicest people in the world. A milleneum ago they were the fearsome Vikings.

---- the Jews were timid scholars and merchants, not warriors. A "Jewish army" would have been, for our ancestors a century ago, material for a joke. No longer.

---- Ireland was a sleepy, priest-ridden backwater for decades: check out its income level and growth rates now.

---- the Indians of MesoAmerica (Aztecs and Mayans and others) were building great civilizations, with written languages and mathematics and monumntal public buildings. Now their descedants are inert.

All due to "culture" for sure. But what made the changes?

We will understand our genes long before we understand our cultures.

And we will be able to control them before we can control our cultures.

Right now, we are the prisoners of our genes. The one you have are the ones randomly chosen (half each) from your two parents, plus whatever mutations might have occurred. And your biochemical environment while in the womb is still largely beyond our control.

This will change.

We shall not remain bound by those arbitrary sequences of deoxyribonucleic acid forever. Your descendants will have had their genes chosen for them by their parents. The parental DNA they inherit will be just that wanted from each parent, with unwanted bits taken out and desirable bits spliced in. The old "but what if we had my looks and your brains" joke will no longer make sense.

But in the meantime, I have a couple of nominations for the firing squad:

(1) anyone who tells Black kids -- "Hey, don't even bother to try to make it by society's rules, because you're too stupid. Don't pay attention during class -- you won't be able to understand anyway. You're just a talking ape."

And tied up blindfolded to the next stake is

(2) anyone who tells Black kids -- "Hey, don't even bother to try to make it by society's rules, because they're fixed --- the capitalists/White Man is always going to rig the game against you. Don't pay attention during class -- you don't want to understand, because they are teaching you bourgeois conformity, in order to get you to take your place as a robotic worker/consumer."

Ready ........ aim .........

 

[Big_D]

blacks and whites are equals!

 

[BaronVonBigmeat]

But how to change it? Hooray for Bill Cosby and others who are trying to turn things around. And we should always carefully consider proposals for state intervention that might help improve things ... but these have generally been disappointing.

In fact, most measures of social ills started skyrocketing when we started the government's war on poverty, as Thomas Sowell has pointed out. Blacks used to get married at the same rates as whites, or even at slightly higher rates. Quite often when the government has a war on something (literal or figurative), it makes the problem worse.

 

[Gunny]

blacks and whites are equals!

Did you spend all of 3 seconds coming up with that knee-jerk response?

Blacks and whites are legally equal. Blacks and whites, IMO, are intellectually equal given the same playing field. Blacks and whites do NOT however, have that level playing field.

Problem is, it's glossed over by apologists and people who live in fear of being called racists, and the root of the problem addressed with handouts instead of education/empowerment.

Blacks are raised in a subculture in which they believe they are entitled, a belief that goes all the way back to slavery. Do-gooder, apologist enabler whites who cringe when AL Sharpton, Jesse Jackson or Loius Farrakham speak have allowed this mindset to be perpetuated.

In contrast, whites, at least in my generation, were taught you get what you go out and earn and nobody owes you a thing.

When society as a whole starts demanding the same personal accountability of one group that they do the other, THEN the playing field will level.

 

[Diuretic]

A bit of open discussion would go a long way. Unfortunately I heard some news reports which indicate that even Watson has now backed down, no doubt confused by the assault on him.

Oh well, let's perpetuate ignorance lest we find out things we don't want to know about.

Now, repeat after me - the Sun revolves around the Earth.

There, feel better?

 

[Gunny]

A bit of open discussion would go a long way. Unfortunately I heard some news reports which indicate that even Watson has now backed down, no doubt confused by the assault on him.

Oh well, let's perpetuate ignorance lest we find out things we don't want to know about.

Now, repeat after me - the Sun revolves around the Earth.

There, feel better?

Why give up a tried-n-true tactic? If I call you a racist, argument ends there. I don't have to prove shit. The term alone dismisses you and your argument.

 

[Doug]

Baron: you are absolutely right. The history of government attempts to change culture in a positive way is a depressing one.

There seems to be a kind of law of social entropy: it is easier to degrade an established structure, than it is to build up an organized structure from a disorganized one.

And yet, we know that cultures can change, radically.

Even individuals can be changed, radically.

I suspect one problem is akin to what is called "the observer effect": a government program is seldom effected by some impersonal mechanism, but rather is carried out by real people. These people have their own interests and prejudices, which pehaps get transmitted to the people they are supposd to help. And these interests and prejudices may actually work against the interests of the people they are supposed to be helping.

An example: we know that a young man who looks like he is on the path to a criminal future can -- just "can", not "will" -- get turned around by a term of service in the military. The Marines have straightened out many a piece of young timber that was beginning to become crooked.

Another example: we know that a few -- not many, but not none either -- older criminals can have their lives transformed by religious faith. (Dare I say it, Malcolm X is the most famous example.)

On the other hand, social workers and probation officers and prison psychologists are not known to have spectacular successes in transforming lives.

And yet they are trained and financed for it and work at it full time. How is it that a Drill Sergeant or an evangelist can succeed, where the kindly and well-intentioned social worker, so sympathetic to the problems of her or his client, cannot?

Could it be that the whole ethos of the-government-is-here-to-help you runs counter to the kind of inner transformation that is key to turning a life around?

One approach --- the helping, caring, not-too-judgemental one, says: "Poor you. No father ... your mother had to work for crap wages... the teachers assumed you were born to clean toilets because you were not white ... terrible .. how can we help you raise your self-esteem?" (Okay, I know I caricacature here. But that's the underlying ethos. It's why they're called "clients".)

Another approach: "You are a sinner ... evil... you were steeped in Original Sin when you were born, as we all were ... but God loves you anyway ... and wants you to follow the example of His only Son ... pick up that cross ... do good to them that do evil to you.. renounce many of your worldly pleasures, which are sinful ... honor thy father and mother ... We have a higher purpose than simply having fun: marry, have children, be a man and live through your family... and the church will help you".

Or the military approach, exemplified best by the Marines, who, I understand, greet new recruits with something like this: "YOU F***ING PIECE OF S**T! HOW DARE YOU DIRTY THE UNIFORM OF MY MARINE CORPS! ..." (I read that a few years ago the neurologists discovered that area of the pre-frontal lobes of the brain in which empathy, kindness and compassion are centered. Apparently the Corps did some preliminary studies to see if, by the application of focussed radiation (the same technique used against tumors), they could burn this area out of their DIs. But when they did the MRI scans of a selected group of DIs, they found that it had atrophied naturally, so no operation was necessary.) And what do you win at the end of Boot Camp, if you make it? The chance to be blown into bloody rags on the other side of the world.

The last two approaches don't infallibly work on everyone who is subjected to them. What is remarkable is that they work at all. And on some pretty unlikely human material.

Why? It seems counter-intuitive. How can making someone feel guilty about their sin, and offering a straight and narrow path to salvation, or destroying their egos while pushing them to their physical limits with the prospect of death or major injury as the reward.

I personally think that at least three things are involved, and they are related:

(1) Self-denial. You deny yourself immediate gratification, in order to gain a much better prize in the long run. No more sleeping until noon, no more downing a six pack when you feel like it. The very quality that people at the bottom of society often need to learn.

(2) Membership of an elite: Stick it out, and you can call yourself something: a Christian, a Marine, a paratrooper. You can have real self-esteem, not the phoney California-touchy-feely stuff handed out free, and worth what you paid for it. Self-pride is important, but it has to be based on something real. There are no "social promotions" in Boot Camp. And once you are in that elite, you want to keep the esteem of your comrades.

(3) Serving a higher purpose. Both religious conversion, and the military experience, necessarily put you in touch with the idea that you are not the center of the universe -- there is something higher, to which you may have to subordinate your immediate wants. God, or Country. (Of course, sophisticated intellectuals laugh both ideas to scorn. We have no examples of societies in the past which were run by sophisticated intellectuals, although they have existed for millenia, perhaps because if there were any such societies briefly in existence, their members ended up in lions' bellies or chained to the oars of someone else's galleys.)

So far, this has been a pretty conservative post, which makes sense because I am one. But I believe in equal opportunity, including the opportunity to be offended. So ...

I can think of one other institution which combined self-discipline and denial of immediate gratification, close comradeship, and sacrifice for a higher cause: the Communist Parties of the Twentieth Centuries. And I believe it is the case that a significant number of young Black people in various American big cities had their lives transformed by the Young Communist League in the 1930s. Make of that what you will.

 

[Diuretic]

Why give up a tried-n-true tactic? If I call you a racist, argument ends there. I don't have to prove shit. The term alone dismisses you and your argument.

Exactly. The idea has dirt shovelled over it.

 

[midcan5]

Anyone who lives in the real world knows there is no level playing field in which one can make a judgement on this topic. The poor in remote areas of this country, Appalachia, for instance, or in the world all suffer under the same situation. Should we blame their culture too or welfare? Actually most would appreciate welfare.

To Doug's 'after the fact conversions' to wasp values through military or faith, could be added aging, as once past 35 most change and stay out of trouble. Welfare and government are the bogeyman for those who refuse to think. Give inner city youth opportunity, and you end this in a decade. Live in poverty and you perpetuate it.

Granted other values, such as education are important but once a person can get a hold of a piece of the pie they generally do Ok.

I remember in the early 70's a woman from the EEO asking me why I thought so few Blacks had decent jobs in the largest corporation on earth.

I looked her in the eye and said ma'am, just like in Alice's restaurant, ma'am its dat bad welfare and government!

She looked back straight in my eyes and says, boy, you know damn well that sort rhetoric didn't appear till the 80's under Reagan....we aint had time to live up to those myths yet.

Damn did I blush, she were a cute government agent too.

Truth story except for the dialog -


I do want to read "The Persistence of Poverty."

 

[AllieBaba]

You yahoos, do you know who James WAtson is???? I find it laughable that you insist that your own innate understanding of things trumps his findings.

The man discovered the double helix, for crying out loud. He isn't stating this because he thinks it's probably true, he's stating it based upon testing done upon populations, which show south african blacks are consistently less intelligent than the whites.

Which isn't surprising, given their backgrounds. They've been oppressed and riddled by disease. Instead of whining about it, perhaps the best tactic is to address it.

He also stated that it's ridiculous to think that populations of humans growing in different geographic locations, with different factors affecting them, can be across the board equal in all things. It's just not good science to believe so.

Someone who is just citing facts can't be called a racist, unless he has a desire to use those facts to oppress a population. I don't see that with Watson. He's way politically incorrect, but eggheads often are. It's the nose-picking Mensa retard thing.

Watson does believe in genetic engineering. Now that could be racist. But his comment, provided it's based upon fact, I don't see it as a racist comment. I see it as evidence that people who are treated as animals long enough will devolve. Which anyone who has ever raised animals knows is true, anyway. You put a population of chickens in a pen, underfeed them, give them diseases, you end up with deformed, stupid chickens in a really short time. Why should it be any different for humans? And how would that be a racist comment to acknowledge it?

I prefer the truth to burying your head in the sand.

 

[Big_D]

Did you spend all of 3 seconds coming up with that knee-jerk response?

Blacks and whites are legally equal. Blacks and whites, IMO, are intellectually equal given the same playing field. Blacks and whites do NOT however, have that level playing field.

Problem is, it's glossed over by apologists and people who live in fear of being called racists, and the root of the problem addressed with handouts instead of education/empowerment.

Blacks are raised in a subculture in which they believe they are entitled, a belief that goes all the way back to slavery. Do-gooder, apologist enabler whites who cringe when AL Sharpton, Jesse Jackson or Loius Farrakham speak have allowed this mindset to be perpetuated.

In contrast, whites, at least in my generation, were taught you get what you go out and earn and nobody owes you a thing.

When society as a whole starts demanding the same personal accountability of one group that they do the other, THEN the playing field will level.

First of all, it did not take me three seconds to come up with that response. It was closer to five. All I meant was blacks and whites are born with an equal mindset.

 

[doniston]

Fury at DNA pioneer's theory: Africans are less intelligent than Westerners
Celebrated scientist attacked for race comments: "All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really"
By Cahal Milmo

Anger at scientist's 'whites more intelligent than blacks' comment ...James Watson. Photo / Bloomberg. One of the world's most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black ...
www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/story.cfm?c_id=314&objectid=10470596&pnum=0 - 8 hours ago



-


Fury at DNA pioneer's theory: Africans are less intelligent than ...James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now ... that black people have higher libidos, and argued in favour of genetic ...
news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3067222.ece - Similar pages

I, for one, will not discuss this.

 

[William Joyce]

I, for one, will not discuss this.

Probably because 1) it's true and 2) the consequences frighten you.

The complaint about "lack of proof" for the lower intelligence of blacks is not valid: there are piles and piles of data on this. It's also not strongly disputed that inheritence has much to do with it. Even the NYT today confirmed that much. There are a half-dozen sophisticated and intriguing theories as to why this is.

But so what? People who want to kill a truth will, if determined enough. You could be, shit, I don't know... the co-discoverer of the fucking double-helix and they'd fire you from your job for saying the truth.

 

[trobinett]

Probably because 1) it's true and 2) the consequences frighten you.

The complaint about "lack of proof" for the lower intelligence of blacks is not valid: there are piles and piles of data on this. It's also not strongly disputed that inheritence has much to do with it. Even the NYT today confirmed that much. There are a half-dozen sophisticated and intriguing theories as to why this is.

But so what? People who want to kill a truth will, if determined enough. You could be, shit, I don't know... the co-discoverer of the fucking double-helix and they'd fire you from your job for saying the truth.

Now, THAT is funny...............

 

[Diuretic]

You yahoos, do you know who James WAtson is???? I find it laughable that you insist that your own innate understanding of things trumps his findings.

The man discovered the double helix, for crying out loud. He isn't stating this because he thinks it's probably true, he's stating it based upon testing done upon populations, which show south african blacks are consistently less intelligent than the whites.

Which isn't surprising, given their backgrounds. They've been oppressed and riddled by disease. Instead of whining about it, perhaps the best tactic is to address it.

He also stated that it's ridiculous to think that populations of humans growing in different geographic locations, with different factors affecting them, can be across the board equal in all things. It's just not good science to believe so.

Someone who is just citing facts can't be called a racist, unless he has a desire to use those facts to oppress a population. I don't see that with Watson. He's way politically incorrect, but eggheads often are. It's the nose-picking Mensa retard thing.

Watson does believe in genetic engineering. Now that could be racist. But his comment, provided it's based upon fact, I don't see it as a racist comment. I see it as evidence that people who are treated as animals long enough will devolve. Which anyone who has ever raised animals knows is true, anyway. You put a population of chickens in a pen, underfeed them, give them diseases, you end up with deformed, stupid chickens in a really short time. Why should it be any different for humans? And how would that be a racist comment to acknowledge it?

I prefer the truth to burying your head in the sand.

I believe he and Crick were in an English pub half whacked out when they thought of it. But as brilliant as Watson is, he may well be naieve or simply mischievous. Anyway the sad thing is that he has now been pilloried instead of being asked to present evidence for his claim.

 

[midcan5]

Chris Columbo discovered America, doesn't mean he wasn't a racist. Watson's science doesn't mean he ain't a fool in other areas. His example is Africa or that is/was his so called testing ground. Tribal, closed groups are going to be tribal and enclosed. Look at our own Indians, old Chris didn't discover sky scrapers when he arrived. Even today many Indians are having a hard go of it. Someone tell us what makes a good, sound, fair, progressive society? Answers welcome.