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Rich, Black, Flunking

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Re: Rich, Black, Flunking

#81

Post by mynameishere »

thras wrote: post #32
miloshh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really - blacks from Africa and the Carribean do very well academically. It is only the American blacks that do poorly. They have the same biology and often a better starting line than the immigrants. Why is that?

It's a selection effect. Only a select population comes to America for college. Tellingly, the average population there doesn't do very well at all at home. And over here, they only do well comparatively. Compare them to say, Eastern Europeans, and it's a different story. Not many Nobel prizes per capita, I'm afraid.

That you are looking at people who "emigrated" to Shaker Heights also suggests a selection effect. There's really no easy answer in this case.

The problem isn't "why are blacks and whites different" but "why do blacks and whites who have similar outcomes still produce children who have different outcomes?" Three possibilities:

1. The premise is flawed; just being in Shaker Heights doesn't suggest significant uniformity.

2. Regression to the mean.

3. Culture, etc. But that begs the question of difference once again, but re: culture rather than achievements. Unless it's all hollywood's fault.

Re: Rich, Black, Flunking

#82

Post by anigbrowl »

Retric wrote: post #14
ErrantX wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the inherent problem I see in the modern "casual" approach to racism. It's "ok" now to be vaguely anti-white/anti-black in an "im not really racist, honest" way. With just the one attitude in the room your probably ok (just get a bit of awkwardness) but with both the divide is doubled and problems appear. I get frustrated with some of the big "anti-racism" campaigners; they strike me as making the smaller iss…

My first boss was a black guy who graduated from Yale. It took 7 years before I was making more money than he did. I tried to get him to move to a new company, so I could get a signing bonus, and he could get a 30k raise, but had little interest. My father grew up as a poor white guy and had the same attitude. "I make a lot of money why strive for more?" The people I work with have this attitude that 300k/year is exp…

My father grew up as a poor white guy and had the same attitude. "I make a lot of money why strive for more?"

This attitude is quite logical and reasonable if you consider relative achievement vs. absolute achievement. If you've started out near the back of the pack economically or socially, and make good, there's no shame in enjoying the fruits of your labors and directing your focus onto other things besides competition.

Money is one measure of success, but if you're making what you consider to be enough money, you may find other uses for your time whose utility is less obvious to other people but significant to you. Autonomy is often its own reward.

Re: Rich, Black, Flunking

#83

Post by nestlequ1k »

natrius wrote: post #29
Retric wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first boss was a black guy who graduated from Yale. It took 7 years before I was making more money than he did. I tried to get him to move to a new company, so I could get a signing bonus, and he could get a 30k raise, but had little interest. My father grew up as a poor white guy and had the same attitude. "I make a lot of money why strive for more?" The people I work with have this attitude that 300k/year is exp…

Switching jobs introduces a risk of not liking the new job. If you enjoy your current job and it pays you more than enough to make you happy, switching for $30k sounds like it would be a bad idea to me. Money can't buy happiness.

Having a comfortable job long term with this attitude is career suicide. Not only should you be constantly trying to advance financially, you need to be learning new things with different roles and environments. Else you risk putting all your eggs in one basket, with no where to go if your longtime comfortable position vanishes some day.

Re: Rich, Black, Flunking

#84

Post by kingkongrevenge »

natrius wrote: post #80
Retric wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh, ok, this is a case of "[Citation Needed]" and I am going to ask you first. PS: It's been a few years since I read that finding so it's going to take me a while to find it again. Edit: Americans that are 1/4 "African" tend to identify themselves as African. This seems odd to me but it's actually the case.

Race is a social construct. You are what people say you are.

Races are extended families. People in a race are genetically and genealogically closer to each other than to people outside of it. This racial clustering of relatedness is empirically testable. Race is not a social construct.

Re: Rich, Black, Flunking

#85

Post by tome »

hughprime wrote: post #44

Soon after he left Ohio and returned to California, a black parent from Shaker Heights went on TV and called him an "academic Clarence Thomas." Perhaps part of these kids' problem is that they have parents who think that being compared to Clarence Thomas is an insult. Such theorists often cite the 1994 publication of The Bell Curve, which argued that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, as evidence that nega…

I wondered what that meant when I read it. Having discovered Clarence Thomas was a Supreme Court judge doesn't help either. What did the man do wrong?

Re: Rich, Black, Flunking

#86

Post by [deleted] »

tezza wrote: post #59
cturner wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comments about low achievement for group defense/satisfaction are also seen in Elton Mayo's Hawthorne Studies ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elton_Mayo ) in a contact that's not related to race. As a Jew you're about as far away from "Underacheivement as a group Defense Mechanism" as it's possible to get. The history of the world is filled with stories of people who have lost their way, their identity and become…

Hi CTurner, I don't know why you were downmodded... what you said makes perfect sense. I am firmly in the camp of Achieve and Prosper. Being Jewish helps :) , but the Immigrant bit was the mainstay of my comment. jews have been thrown out of lots of countries (including Egypt/Israel/Iran in Bible) so it may be in our blood to be Immigrants and thus to trust most in the care you can provide to your own family via succ…

[deleted]

Re: Rich, Black, Flunking

#87

Post by thras »

radu_floricica wrote: post #79
thras wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've seen precious little research? I assume you've actually looked? Read things like The Bell Curve, etc.?

I'm not saying there is _no_ genetic component - I would be surprised if it wasn't. Just that compared to culture it's not important. I didn't read The Bell Curve, but as far as I know (and refreshed with a bit of googling) it states that IQ is partly hereditary - I don't think anybody doubts this - and makes it easy to go further and say some groups of people are smarter. This is most likely true, but still not so i…

These books come out every so often. 5 years ago "emotional intelligence" sold copy.

IQ has a heritability coefficient of between .5 and .8. The rest seems to be non-shared environment. IQ is a very good predictor of academic success and future income (.7 to .8 correlation). There's a hell of a lot of research out there that has shown this again and again.

I'd like to see Stanovich's definition of "critical reasoning" and the studies that show it to be both uncorrelated with IQ and a good predictor of academic success and future income. There just isn't that much left to predict -- two uncorrelated variables can't both have a correlation coefficient of .8.

I'm going to bet that whatever he has defined as "critical reasoning" actually has a high correlation with IQ when measured.

Re: Rich, Black, Flunking

#88

Post by natrius »

kingkongrevenge wrote: post #84
natrius wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Race is a social construct. You are what people say you are.

Races are extended families. People in a race are genetically and genealogically closer to each other than to people outside of it. This racial clustering of relatedness is empirically testable. Race is not a social construct.

You're using a fairly prescriptive definition of race. Race, as commonly used, is a social construct. Ancestry functions the way you describe, but as the example given above shows, "race" and ancestry are not directly related.

Re: Rich, Black, Flunking

#89

Post by javanix »

joshwa wrote: post #69

It seems to me that a much of the criticism could have been defused with some slightly different methodology. Some statistics that might been good ammunition (each gathered with rates of several different cohorts: white, black-non-immigrant, black-immigrant, non-black-immigrant) * # of hours spent on homework * # of hours parents spent with children on school-related activities * Rate of parental participation in sch…

Presenting data on the elements that aren't subject to self-bias would bolster his case - absenteeism and failure to complete homework (as opposed to completing homework poorly), from the list you gave. I'm not sure that he would have gotten much use out of the rest of them, as they would be self-reported in most cases and difficult to quantify in the others.

Re: Rich, Black, Flunking

#90

Post by kobs »

tome wrote: post #85
hughprime wrote: post #44

Soon after he left Ohio and returned to California, a black parent from Shaker Heights went on TV and called him an "academic Clarence Thomas." Perhaps part of these kids' problem is that they have parents who think that being compared to Clarence Thomas is an insult. Such theorists often cite the 1994 publication of The Bell Curve, which argued that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, as evidence that nega…

I wondered what that meant when I read it. Having discovered Clarence Thomas was a Supreme Court judge doesn't help either. What did the man do wrong?

Maybe this? http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=clarence+thomas+uncle+tom
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