Posted on 05/10/2013 6:43:17 PM PDT by Zhang Fei
American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray suggested on Friday that former Heritage Foundation analyst Jason Richwine, whose doctoral dissertation at Harvard included evidence that Hispanic immigrants have lower IQs than non-Hispanic whites, had been railroaded and forced to resign by people without integrity or “balls.”
Quote: Jason Richwine, guilty of crimethink, "resigns." The bashing from the right has been as mindless as from the left. Thank God I was working for Chris DeMuth and AEI, not Jim DeMint and Heritage, when The Bell Curve was published. Integrity. Loyalty. Balls.
DeMuth was the president of AEI from 1986 to 2008. The Bell Curve, which examined issues relating to intellect, including race, was published in 1994. DeMint is the president of Heritage.
I remember being slammed here for saying DeMint was a CINO. I was not wrong.
I think half of Heritage’s budget is directed toward harassing former & current members for money.
I base this on the fact that they call me incessantly to renew when I’ve already (generously) renewed. Sadly, I think I’m done with Heritage.
I’ll pass.
Murray’s obsession notwithstanding, all I.Q. tests show is how good you are at taking tests.
Oh, and by the way, I’m GREAT at taking tests.
I heartily agree with Mr. Murray.
IIRC AEI is okay with amnesty for alien invaders.
I'm not sure that that's entirely true.I wonder how the IQ test score of the "typical" MIT grad compares to that of the "typical" resident of Nuevo Loreado.
To me Ivy Leaguers are generally educated far above their intelligence.
Seems both groups lack integrity...
Heritage for not having the stones to defend their research and researcher
. AEI for supporting Illegal Alien Amnesty
If you are not committed to deporting ALL Illegal Aliens... you support Illegal Alien Amnesty
No more BS
I had thought that both groups were against amnesty. It looks like Heritage is agin and AEI is for. Thanks for the reminder.
It looks like Heritage had to throw Richwine to the wolves to stick to its anti-amnesty guns, whereas AEI did not have to worry about political correctness because it is pro-amnesty. I guess we need both organizations - Heritage to champion non-PC positions and AEI to champion non-PC research.
“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.” H.L. Mencken
Gimme a break.We're talking about people in an advanced,prosperous country like the US...not the Third World.*Here*,a normal,or superior,IQ,combined with a lack of serious disabilities,will almost certainly ensure that you live at least reasonably well if not *very* well.And don't get started on the Third World...I'd be willing to wager that I have,given my *personal* experience there,*forgotten* more about the Third World than you've ever known.
When it comes to The Bell Curve nonsense, as a Conservative Black Hispanic I will vigorously oppose this racist bullshit!
Whole damn country is falling apart and all we can do is feed the enemy more "proof" of their stereotype of the right; like it's not hard enough already for us to make the case to our fellow minorities. This is not personal as I have no misgivings about my own intelligence.
Bottom line, I stand with Heritage.
You're funny; and, by the way, you lose.
Stand with Heritage all you want.
Just remember to write “Culture Counts” and “IQ is predictive” 100 times.
Yeah, well; I’m an old man now. Good luck brainwashing me.
I don't understand the animosity over statistical fact. IQ's are what they are. I've pasted below a talk given by John Derbyshire at UPenn at the Black Law Students' Association's invitation, about the some of the differences, at a group level, between people from different regions of the world.
Amy Wax, a professor at the law school, had published a book titled Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century. The argument of the book, very briefly, is that what can be done in law, politics, and social engineering to make amends for slavery and Jim Crow has been done, and the rest is up to African Americans themselves.
The following was Derbyshire's response:
Thank you, Madam Moderator. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
I am here this evening in the capacity of a wet blanket. I am here not to take one side or the other on the topic under debate, but to say that the topic, as written, is based on a false premise, and therefore has no satisfactory answer. I don't believe the disparities under discussion can be eliminated. Debate about whether government should play a greater or lesser role in eliminating them is therefore, in my opinion, otiose.
When the organizers first emailed me to suggest I appear on the panel, I told them that this is my view of the matter. I said that I was flattered to be invited to speak at such a prestigious institution, and that, having two teenage children, I am always glad to get out of the house for a few hours; but that racial disparities in education and employment have their origin in biological differences between the human races. Those differences are facts in the natural world, like the orbits of the planets. They can't be legislated out of existence; nor can they be "eliminated" by social or political action.
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That there are natural, intractable differences between the human races seems apparent to me on both rational and empirical grounds.
First, the rational grounds. If a species is divided into separate populations, and those populations are left in reproductive isolation from each other for many generations, they will diverge. If you return after several hundred generations have passed, you will observe that the various traits that characterize individuals of the species are now distributed at different frequencies in the various populations. After a few ten thousands of generations, the divergence of the populations will be so great they can no longer cross-breed; and that is the origin of species. This is Biology 101.
Our species separated into two parts 50, 60, or 70 thousand years ago, depending on which paleoanthropologist you ask.++ One part remained in Africa, the ancestral homeland. The other crossed into Southwest Asia, then split, and re-split, and re-split, until there were human populations living in near-total reproductive isolation from each other in all parts of the world. This went on for hundreds of generations, causing the divergences we see today. Different physical types, as well as differences in behavior, intelligence, and personality, are exactly what one would expect to observe when scrutinizing these divergent populations.
Now, the empirical grounds. We all notice the different physical specialties of the different races in the Olympic Games. There was a run of, I think, seven Olympics in which every one of the finalists in the men's 100 meters sprint was of West African ancestry — 56 out of 56 finalists. You get less pronounced but similar patterns in other sports — East African distance runners, Northeast Asian divers, and so on. These differences even show up within sports, where a team sport calls for highly differentiated abilities in team members — football being the obvious example.
We see the same differences in traits that we don't think of as directly physical, what evolutionary psychologists sometimes refer to as the "BIP" traits — behavior, intelligence, and personality. Two of the hardest-to-ignore manifestations here are the extraordinary differentials in criminality between white Americans and African Americans, and the persistent gaps in scores when tests of cognitive ability are given to large population samples.
There is a huge academic literature on the gaps in cognitive test results, practically all of it converging on the fact that African American mean scores on cognitive tests fall below the white means by a tad more than one white standard deviation. There is in fact so much data on this now that we have meta-studies — studies of the studies: the one best-known to me is the meta-study by Roth et al. in 2001, which covered 39 studies involving nearly six million test-takers. That one standard deviation on cognitive testing has been so persistent across so many decades, a friend of mine, an academic sociologist, calls it "the fundamental constant of American sociology" — it's like the speed of light in physics.
To see whether that universal constant appears in the study of law, I looked up the LSAC database before coming here tonight. LSAC — the Law School Admission Council — publishes splendid statistical tables on the results of the LSAT exam, broken out by sex, region, race, and so on. The last figures I could find were for 2007-08. In that year, 117,530 students took the LSAT at least once. Of these persons, 69,792 identified themselves as "Caucasian." Their mean score was 152.56, standard deviation 8.96. In that same year, 12,152 test-takers identified themselves as "African American"; their mean score was 142.15, standard deviation 8.40. That's a difference between the means of 10.41 points, which is 1.16 times the white standard deviation. So perhaps my sociologist friend is on to something.
Should you want to say at this point that these so-called tests of so-called cognitive ability measure nothing important, you had better go and argue with the authorities here at the University of Pennsylvania law school. They have carefully recorded, and posted on the internet, that half their student intake, second and third quartiles, falls between LSAT scores 166 and 171.**
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Thus there are both rational and empirical grounds for believing in intractable group differences between the big old inbred paleolithic populations of Homo sapiens. In the context of this discussion, there are two things that need saying about these differences.
First, the differences are statistical. Any population contains variation. Variation within a population is the essence of biology. Those of you familiar with Charles Darwin's great classic On the Origin of Species will recall that three of the first five chapters have the word "variation" in the chapter title. Any population will contain individuals who are fat, thin, fast, slow, tall, short, and so on.
And in the grand biological scheme of things, human population divergences are slight, the populations overlapping massively on most kinds of traits. To go back to that "universal constant of sociology," for instance: Given a one standard deviation gap between black and white means, one thing we can deduce from pure mathematics is that around six million African Americans score higher on cognitive tests than the average white test-taker. In LSAT terms, over 1,300 African American test-takers in 2007-2008 scored above the white mean.
Second, the differences are abstract. Group differences are statistical truths. They exist in an abstract realm quite far removed from our everyday personal experience. They tell you nothing about the person you just met.
Group differences are, for example, one degree more abstract than individual differences. We all acknowledge individual differences all the time: she's fat, he's thin, she's shy, he's outgoing, she's smart, he's dumb.
We are all, to various degrees, aware of our own individual strengths and limitations. Certainly I am aware of mine. For example: My wife is a keen ballroom dancer. Because I love my wife, I did my best to become a ballroom dancer myself. For two years — two blessed years, ladies and gentlemen — I went along twice a week with her to the local Arthur Murray studio to take instruction. At the end of it, I still had two left feet. The instruction I received was like water poured on to a sheet of glass.
Even at the things we are good at, most of us are not very good. I make my living by writing; yet I can name, in my own small personal acquaintance, a dozen people who are better writers than I am. That's not even to mention the Shakespeares and Tolstoys. Most of us are hopeless at most things, and mediocre at the rest.
And yet — look! We don't lose sleep over this. We don't sink into rage and frustration at our own individual differences, or agitate for politicians to put balm on our psychic wounds. We accept our individual shortcomings with remarkable equanimity, playing the cards we've been dealt as best we can. That is the attitude of a healthy human being. To do otherwise would, most of us I'm sure would agree, be un-healthy. How much more unhealthy, then, to fret and rage and agitate about mere statistical abstractions?
Thank you, Madam Moderator.
Two things:
First of all, I have no animosity.
Second, I reject your reality and substitute my own. These are not "facts" but interpretations of "facts". In short, opinions. Don't hate me because I'm not ready to accept your superiority over me just because you happen to be white.
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