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To: coloradan; BenLurkin
If there were no racial differences, the black fraction of people with Fields Medals would be the same as the black fraction of people with sub-10-second 100 m dashes, which both would be the same as the overall fraction of black people in the world.

This assumes that folks with the "innate mathematical ability" have access to the education, means to make good on it, visibility to the Fields judges and no bias on the part of those judges. Based on the same thinking, 50% of the men with the best innate ability to skate in the world are from Canada.

In fact, despite the fact that east Asians and Jews score highest on IQ tests, they have a tiny minority of Fields awards even over the last 40 years. Once you correct for population sizes, France blows the world away ... who knew? USSR/Russia is well represented, despite Communism, in part perhaps because some smart guy who would have rather played teh balalaika was picked out early as being a math wiz and pretty much forced to follow that path in the USSR days.

Are there average differences between races on an aggregate level? Sure. Some of them will come from living in hot regions, at high altitudes, or even having a slave master pick spouses based on desired physical characteristics, having a diet rich in certain things or deficient in others for generations, etc. etc.

But not only do most of those differences have so much overlap between races (there are black pygmies as well as very tall black men, sme as white), in most measurable areas there is plenty of overlap. Cultural/religious/philosophical differences will also determine what gets emphasized.

Intelligence, to the degree that it is inherited, tends to towards the mean. Two geniuses do NOT normally have genius children, despite efforts to raise them as such. Two dullards do not have children innately dull (though the family environment may not be inspiring), but are more likely to be closer to average.

Intelligence itself is so multifaceted in humans, that it really defies full measurement, though tools like IQ tests can be part of a set used to form an idea of individual weaknesses and strengths.
40 posted on 11/23/2013 8:30:55 AM PST by Dr. Sivana (There's no salvation in politics.)
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To: Dr. Sivana

Here’s the problem.

While IQ tests may not accurately measure “intelligence,” (whatever that is), they do accurately measure the ability to do well on IQ tests. For sake of simplicity, let’s call whatever it is that they measure “g.”

And many decades of evidence show, as conclusively as anything in social science, that there is an extremely strong correlation between g and a host of life outcomes. Much stronger than any other single factor.

In fact, white people who score low on the IQ tests tend to have very similar life outcomes to black people who score low, to the point that the vast majority of differential between black and white life outcomes can be assigned to this single factor. The difference between black average life outcomes and white is thus largely a consequence that a much larger percentage of blacks score low.

What you have to realize is that for many decades now the majority of psychometricians, those who write the IQ tests, have been through the same liberal indoctrination as other scientists. So fame and glory awaits the psychometrician who can produce an IQ test demonstrating that there is no average difference between the races. That none has been able to accomplish this is perhaps the most profound statement that the difference in outcome is measuring something real.


49 posted on 11/23/2013 9:30:49 AM PST by Sherman Logan
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To: Dr. Sivana
This assumes that folks with the "innate mathematical ability" have access to the education, means to make good on it, visibility to the Fields judges and no bias on the part of those judges. Based on the same thinking, 50% of the men with the best innate ability to skate in the world are from Canada.

In order to learn to skate, you need ice, which Canada has a lot of, but Africa not so much. In order to learn math, you just need to think, after you are told the foundations. Come to think of it, why weren't the great educational institutions formed in Africa first, which then spread to Western culture? Then again, they didn't have many official race tracks in Africa either, nor basketball courts, but blacks seemed to have not suffered any disadvantage there as a result, everywhere across the globe, so why so with math? The inescapable conclusion is that there is at least some genetic component to both academic and athletic performance. Different peoples are good at different things - and there's nothing wrong with that. (Except to the PC dogma, in which the foregoing statement is heresy.)

59 posted on 11/23/2013 1:33:22 PM PST by coloradan (The US has become a banana republic, except without the bananas - or the republic.)
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