Question for the race supremacists...

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That does take my remarks rather out of context! I'm not making a claim about the entire morality of Affirmative Action, only the section of the morality related to effectiveness.

I do feel obliged to note that your account 1) contains several unfounded assumptions (for example, that your son would be earning more if he had been admitted to this university), 2) is anecdotal, and so has no guarantee of being representative, and 3) is personal to you, and so is likely to contain a degree of bias.

Do universities really say "we'd like to take you but we've decided not to due to AA"?

Yes, I think it is important to figure out whether it is in fact real or not. I'm stating I do not have the requisite knowledge to comment on whether or not the research supports it (although intuitively it makes sense to me).

What I'm also stating that anecdotally at one of the top schools in the U.S. that I attended for 4 years there was both a perception that underrepresented minority students were inferior and a resentment towards affirmative action-esque policies. I have to think that when these people go out into companies and become co-workers and managers that carrying that attitude will be detrimental to any minority individuals who seek a job from them. Also with subjective grading it may be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy in that if the professor believes minority students inferior they may receive lesser grades due to unconscious bias.

One interesting thing about the affirmative action bans in places like California is that the Universities have instead tried to boost minority content by "race-neutral" policies, that is using factors that correlate with race such as whether someone is a first generation student without explicitly using race. In terms of mismatch, this may actually be worse for said students, as it is (at least in my opinion) not a person's race that holds them back in academic achievement but factors like education level of their parents. In terms of social mobility it may be exactly what people have in mind.

I haven't played D&D.
The RPGs I have played follow the system what I have described.



African marathon runners seem to have done extremely well on the sports scene.
Could it be that running away from an attacking lion had a high priority in their culture? <joke>
Whatever the reason, their dominance in certain sports is note-worthy.

The Ashkenazi Jews are known for their intellectual acuity.
Might the cultural emphasis on commerce, requiring greater education, have something to do with their greater perceived collective IQ?



The brutal reality is that no matter the environmental conditions, the factor of natural selection takes place.

It's actually been posted numerous times on WP that African migrants in the US are actually among the more intelligent than white Americans
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2018 ... tinations/

The race based stereotyping that blacks are only good at sport is utter crap...they are also smarter than us....

Natural selection is very slow in humans. With some 15 years to reach sexual maturity and about 10 children at max to produce, we just can't explore much of the genetic possibilities.
Cultural adaptations are much faster - this is how humans thrive in so many different environments.

I would be very interested in IQ of immigrants form the old world in general vs local population.
My hypothesis is, large share of these immigrants come either to study or to work in highly specialized jobs like engeneering or academia.
That likely produces huge selection bias.

Nothing against students, engeneers or academicians from Africa, as the countries in sub-Saharan Africa stabilize politically, their societes become as capable as any other societes in the world.

I get your point....and yes there is some selection bias (I think this applies to East Indians where the IQ in India is 81 but Indians in the US have the most number of postgraduate degree holders and highest income of any group)

In any case racists who claim Africans are incapable of being successful are deliberately ignore the facts
https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/the-mo ... -you/86885

This:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3347764/

Immigrants from the former soviet union are almost twice as likely as white americans to have earned a college degree, and with respect to the former soviet union I do not believe it is because their populations are twice as intelligent.

It should be noted that many Africans who came to the US to study were probably:

1. At or near the top of their class in primary school;

therefore,

2. Deemed worthy enough to pursue secondary education by their families (who paid exorbitant school fees); or were granted scholarships;

and,

3. Were at or near the top of their class in secondary school.

That's exactly the selection bias I have in mind.

It should also be remembered that "intelligence" and "potential" should be assessed within many modalities.

Just because someone does well on an IQ test---doesn't mean they do well in "common sense." Or in something which requires mechanical aptitude.

You might have a bunch of people scoring, say, 110 on average on an IQ test; and a bunch of people, say, scoring 90.

Now....put all these people in the throes of a natural disaster. Who would come to the fore? Yes, very possibly, the person who might not have "book learning" in a scholarly sense---but who could put electricity and plumbing back into your house for you. Perhaps the person with the 90 IQ---race and ethnicity are irrelevant here.

Another one is that intelligence does not guarantee correctness. Einstein was famously very intelligent and one of the greatest particle physicists of his time yet did not believe in quantum mechanics. 90 years later and overwhelmingly the scientific evidence sides with the "lesser minds" that disagreed with him.

I mention this because too often I see some people adopting the Idiocracy view of "Smart people will fix our problems because they're smart."

This is an aside since I made no claim that Blacks are only good at sports.
You may or may not be jumping to conclusions here.
They are, however, known for sporting prowess in some area, supporting the evolutionary principle.

Laurence Krauss made an enlightened comment about why we humans find it an impossibility to fully comprehensively...err... comprehend quantum mechanics.
He pointed out that in the evolutionary development of humanity is had no survival value whilst the cognitive realisation that one should avoid falling off a precipice or avoid trying to run through boulders had a much greater urgency in the development of humankind.



When you say "us", you mean the Korean immigrants, the Chinese immigrants, the Mexican immigrants, the Vietnamese immigrants, the Porto Rican immigrants, the German immigrants, the English immigrants, the Irish immigrants?

In a multi-cultural setting, cultural influences would be mitigated in terms of evolutionary development, surely.

BTW, please keep virtue signalling to a minimum.
PC is a sure way to intimidate what people are prepared to explore.
It intimidates me but doesn't stop me.

Also, be aware that when discussing sensitive subject matter, emotion inspired bias often becomes painfully obvious.

The question is:
Do we want to have a civil and rational investigative discussion (please, no debates for me), or do we want to fling inuendos haphazardly with the intention of scoring virtue signalling points?

May I suggest we make this discussion (no debating/devil's-advocacy please) an objective rational exercise using our neocortex?

If I read you wrong may I say: OOPsie.
This is a sensitive area of discussion after all with attackers lurking in every crevis of the universe waiting to pounce, hence my defensiveness.

<pomposity mode off>

"Necessity is the mother of invention."



The following is a general comment:

Could I remind people about the importance of context?

As I mentioned in the above post, multi-culturalism, particularly these days, would influence the degree of...err...influence culture would have in the evolutionary process.
The context I am focussing on is the longevity of cultural isolation.

For example, the Aboriginal community here in Australia had 65 thousand years of cultural isolation.
And throughout history, there have been cultures in other parts of the world with long periods of cultural isolation also.

Let us not have a hybrid discussion using mixed contexts when replying to a post, please.

If you use Maslowe's hierarchy of needs humans need to sort out their basic needs first before they pursue higher studies into subjects like quantum physics. There was an interview with Afro-American Astrophysicist Neil De Grasse Tyson where he was in a dilemma in college whether to continue pursuing astronomy, not because it was hard but because he was worried what his family/friends would think of him. He disregarded the stigma from his own community and also had to face the hurdle of the glass ceiling for Afro-Americans wanting to break into astronomy which is almost entirely a white establishment.

I don't' want to hurt your feelings, Kraftie, but I have to ask, whenever a group of blacks excel, do we need to find an explanation?

Once again you gravitate towards the (metaphorically speaking) societal/cultural African celestial body.

I'm not sure of the point you are trying to make but it looks to me like you are saying: Look, an Afro-American succeeded.
I still think you are misreading where I am coming from.

Perhaps this will get you off the scent:

I spoke earlier about how culture can affect the development of the people embracing it.
Here is a rather disturbing example of how it can be detrimental.

Warning: The video is confronting.


https://youtu.be/hsrE-aNlSw0