Killbilly

BTW, James Watson is not a "moron". He was one of the most important biologists of the past century.

Killbilly

Why do poor whites score higher than rich blacks?

1253729

Maybe because of the environment in which they are raised? They might live in cities vs. poor whites who live in rural areas with better schools. Nonetheless, doing poorly on the SAT/IQ tests does not make you less intelligent than someone who does better on SAT/IQ tests. There are too many factors to say they score lower because of ______. In scientific experiments, you need to have only one variable. With something like this, there are a million variables you can't control for.

And I'm going to stop responding to you now. Your argument is clearly racist and bigoted. Take a step back and think about what you are saying. Or maybe consider printing this out and going to a counselor if you want.

EDIT: Watson might have done many important things in the past. But he is trying to prove a false point by using false logic as the scientific community has stated. And his views clearly show he is racist/bigoted.

Killbilly

LOL are you serious? Rich city schools are FAR superior to poor white ones. This argument is ridiculous.




Doing worse on an IQ test does.


Give me a concrete example of a variable which invalidates IQ tests


What makes it racist? Objective reality is not racist. People like you are the reason Watson was attacked- they don't want to accept uncomfortable data. Too bad.


The scientific community has not said it is false- many scientists who deal with pyschometrics hold to this position, and the data from the article comes from scientists.

amarkov

James Watson is a molecular biologist. Why are you accepting his opinion on the intelligence of Africans as expert?

Killbilly

^^^ I am not basing my opinion on his, however, he was familiar with the data on this subject so one can call him an expert without being incorrect IMO.

cjgone

Let's just look at the small picture. When you can prove that memorizing vocabulary and grammar rules makes a person more intelligient please call me up.

Good luck finding a counter to that.

112358

When you can prove that all it takes to do well on the SAT is memorize vocabulary and grammar rules please call me up.

cjgone

The vocab alone is equal to 100-150 points. All the memorized writing info is around 250 points, so i'm pretty sure that would make a lot of error if you aske me.

But make 300 points isn't a big deal. 2000 = 2300 obviously...

112358

Yes, the difference between getting every vocab question correct and getting every vocab question incorrect may be that high, but people generally don't make that kind of jump. Usually, good students will go from a strong vocabulary to an excellent one, average students will go from an average vocabulary to a decent one, and poor students will go from a poor vocabulary to a mediocre one. It'd take an insane amount of time to go from knowing none of the vocab to knowing every word. Same goes for writing.

And the fact that you're looking at 300 points improvement max from an immense amount of studying just goes to show that it takes a lot more than hours and hours of prep to do well. In the overall scheme of things, 300 points isn't a huge deal -- much greater improvements can be made on other kinds of tests in much less time.

Jayay90

@killbilly:
Ever heard of a book called 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' by Diamond? You should read it I think.
The concept is basically that Europeans, those on the continent and near mesopotamia, were at a geographical advantage from even before the Neolithic Era due to the type of food available and domesticable animals. (think, as far as nutrition goes (which science shows has a lot to do with 'brain power', how much more a diet of grains like wheat and domesticable cattle would help over the span of thousands of years when compared with being stuck with no staple grains and the elephant?)
It's really complex and I'm not gonna get into it, but Diamond suggests that this is the main reason that Europeans seemed to leap ahead of other civilizations, it was geographical luck of the draw. (also, he mentions the layout of Europe, which is distributed more along the latitude than the longitude. What do Africa, North America, and south america all have in common? A longitudenly distributed continent. This means ideas, goods, civilizations had a much harder time moving because of the vastly different climates.)

I don't really know what your argument is besides "minorities are 'stupid' so HA!', which I believe is not even the topic of this thread and not at all relevant.

Killbilly

I have


Why do races in the United States not display the same scores on tests? Nutrition is no longer a factor.



And his conclusion needs much much more data before it is declared to be correct.


While this may be correct, it has nothing to do with intellectual aptitude tests.


I was responding to another poster who made claim about intelligence. Someone attacked my post and I backed it up.

Jayay90

killbilly:
1) 'nutrition is no longer a factor'. This is something that has built up over thousands of years, and a couple hundred (oh wait...that was slavery...not exactly the best diet then...so maybe only 150 tops) in the US isn't goint to change that. His theory isn't perfect, obviously, but neither is what you are advocating (and please don't get into a rant about Watson, or post more links, ik ik ik, but these tests aren't perfect and neither are the theories they try to test)
2) The movement of ideas and people has A LOT to do with what you might call 'intelligence'. Think about the Maya, Aztecs, many other advance civilization that developed writing, as far as the evidence shows, BEFORE Europeans, but none of them could share that knowledge from one civilization to the other. So when they died out, all of it was effectively gone. Europe on the other hand has a climate and terrain which makes it easy to be like 'oh, I discovered you can grow this grain/ride this horse, let's go move West' and then they encounter other villages and thus 'knowledge' is spread. It is actually very very important.

I think you dismiss this theory because it challenges, idk, maybe your assumption that whites are 'smarter' because they are just naturally better than everyone else and that other races could never be equal to them if the circumstances from the beginning were different? You seem very dismissive of something that would kind of help explain what you are talking about.

Unholy Sigma

There is no evidence of an inherent, genetically determined difference in intelligence among the races. All genetic differences discovered so far have been superficial. Yet on average blacks score lower than whites.

Simple answer: more blacks are in poverty, percentage-wise.

I'm not a racist because I accept the reality.

Killbilly

How are they imperfect? If you are going to make such claim.....support it with actual data.

And my point is that it doesn't make sense that nutrition still plays a factor unless it somehow altered the course of the evolution of these groups, in which case there is definitely a genetic gap in intelligence.


How did it impact the basic mental reasoning ability of the average member of each group?

Well, I do not doubt for a minute that a different beginning could have changed things. After all, if the races had evolved differently then of course things would be different. I'm not dismissing his claims out of hand. Perhaps the things is talking about are correct, but he needs to do a lot more to prove his claim.



Calling me a racist is unfair and unwarranted.