Political Roundtable Part XI

[AFM]

I thought this thread would die out after the election, but the Wizards are so bad, this is the best reason to visit these boards.

Does Drain The Swamp include this schit team?

[dckingsfan]

I think Trump will be Trump. Guessing every President has their own management style.

The key will not be the management style, rather the issues on which this administration focuses.

[I_Like_Dirt]

I thought this thread would die out after the election, but the Wizards are so bad, this is the best reason to visit these boards.

Does Drain The Swamp include this schit team?

No wonder they changed the name from Bullets to Wizards. It takes true Wizardry to turn basketball into a more painful experience than squabbling about politics. Want to see some more Wizardry? Just wait until next offseason when EG will make even more money disappear in free agency. He does it with draft picks, too, sometimes, particularly when he has a playoff ready roster as this team clearly is. Plus, don't forget all the illusions about tickets being worth the amount printed on them. True brilliance.

[Zonkerbl]

Nate you should take a psych class and learn how iq tests were created.

Basically you get a group of kids you consider to be intelligent and a group you think are dumb, ask them a bunch of questions and keep the ones that do a good job at distinguishing between the two groups.

Since you don't really know what intelligence is, what you end up doing is recording your culture's prejudices about what is smart and what isn't.

When the first iq tests were created back in the early twentieth century, the iq tests faithfully recorded all our prejudices about how dumb black people are and they honestly haven't improved much since. Current questions are kept if they do a good job predicting last year's scores.

IQ tests are, by definition, culturally biased and are not a good source of evidence of non-white intelligence.

1. It's odd that white people invented a culturally biased test in which they perform worse than East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews.

2. Whether or not IQ measure "intelligence" all depends on how you define intelligence. But IQ tends correlate with economic success and academic achievement far more than any other measure. I tried to be careful in saying that whites outperformed blacks in IQ tests. I didn't say whites were "smarter" because that's an impossible to define term.

Man, correlation does not equal causation. Consider the alternate, much more credible causal connection between economic success and academic achievement.

Do you think that being white might give you an advantage in both of these things? Is it remotely possible?

As to your first point, please read my post carefully, since I did not say what you implied I said. I'm not going to argue with some crazy idiot image of me in your crazy head. Argue with me please.

[AFM]

Is Vladimir Ashkenazy an Ashkenazi Jew?

[montestewart]

Is Vladimir Ashkenazy an Ashkenazi Jew?

Nope, Anasazi Indian

[I_Like_Dirt]

Man, correlation does not equal causation. Consider the alternate, much more credible causal connection between economic success and academic achievement.

Do you think that being white might give you an advantage in both of these things? Is it remotely possible?

Wealth is such a universal factor in determining things it's ridiculous, and it's also ridiculously overlooked. And while wealth is a bit more of a nuanced term overall, it's just such an obviously large factor that it makes it tough to see past it, even though people never cease to try.

The thing about race is that genetics isn't nearly as simple as it gets made out to be. My wife is of Canadian Aboriginal ancestry. She is very visibly aboriginal and has faced racism all her life. Despite that, she went to school and has done quite well for herself. She recently took a DNA test for various reasons, and found out that she was ~8% aboriginal by DNA and instead is over 50% British + Irish by DNA. Turns out that doesn't stop the racism. Meanwhile, I have friends who are significantly higher aboriginal by DNA but face 0 racism (not counting the stuff where people make racist comments to them thinking they're white and will understand) because they aren't visibly non-white. Does anybody here think that Jason Kidd has faced the same levels of racism in his life as Obama has? What part of DNA defines race, and what part of DNA defines skin color? How related are they, really?

It's funny to me, because in theory, people trying to understand these issues are very well educated and are generally trying to speak to a more unbiased way of analyzing things, but in reality, talking about races like that is basically just allowing your eyes to overrule your brain, which is a fundamentally flawed premise. If you start from a foundation of prejudice, which skin color very much is, since many people (and not just those doing the study themselves) tend to allow their eyes to overrule their brains and lump people together based on what they immediately see, it really shouldn't be a surprise that you find prejudicial confirmation in the results. It's an effect that makes analysing data collected along the lines of skin color really difficult to do, yet it gets thrown out there a whole lot more than anything along the lines of how much money people make, established family wealth going back a generation or more, etc. The cynical part of me thinks that it's because deep down everyone knows the results of poverty and so nobody wants to acknowledge it because to acknowledge it would require attempting to address it, and the only ideas that tend to rise to the top are giving money welfare-style, or letting them sink or swim (usually sink), and nobody really likes discussing either option that much.

And you can bet somebody is going to come in here and point out that poverty with certain skin color results in more violence and crime than poverty with other skin colors, but the reality is that there is 0 proof that the part of DNA that affects skin pigmentation also just happens to be the miraculous violent crime gene. We're clearly seeing social phenomena, not genetic ones, but I guess it's easier to propose banning certain genetic traits than it is to ban social activity related to specific cultural experiences.

[Zonkerbl]

Man, correlation does not equal causation. Consider the alternate, much more credible causal connection between economic success and academic achievement.

Do you think that being white might give you an advantage in both of these things? Is it remotely possible?

Wealth is such a universal factor in determining things it's ridiculous, and it's also ridiculously overlooked. And while wealth is a bit more of a nuanced term overall, it's just such an obviously large factor that it makes it tough to see past it, even though people never cease to try.

The thing about race is that genetics isn't nearly as simple as it gets made out to be. My wife is of Canadian Aboriginal ancestry. She is very visibly aboriginal and has faced racism all her life. Despite that, she went to school and has done quite well for herself. She recently took a DNA test for various reasons, and found out that she was ~8% aboriginal by DNA and instead is over 50% British + Irish by DNA. Turns out that doesn't stop the racism. Meanwhile, I have friends who are significantly higher aboriginal by DNA but face 0 racism (not counting the stuff where people make racist comments to them thinking they're white and will understand) because they aren't visibly non-white. Does anybody here think that Jason Kidd has faced the same levels of racism in his life as Obama has? What part of DNA defines race, and what part of DNA defines skin color? How related are they, really?

It's funny to me, because in theory, people trying to understand these issues are very well educated and are generally trying to speak to a more unbiased way of analyzing things, but in reality, talking about races like that is basically just allowing your eyes to overrule your brain, which is a fundamentally flawed premise. If you start from a foundation of prejudice, which skin color very much is, since many people (and not just those doing the study themselves) tend to allow their eyes to overrule their brains and lump people together based on what they immediately see, it really shouldn't be a surprise that you find prejudicial confirmation in the results. It's an effect that makes analysing data collected along the lines of skin color really difficult to do, yet it gets thrown out there a whole lot more than anything along the lines of how much money people make, established family wealth going back a generation or more, etc. The cynical part of me thinks that it's because deep down everyone knows the results of poverty and so nobody wants to acknowledge it because to acknowledge it would require attempting to address it, and the only ideas that tend to rise to the top are giving money welfare-style, or letting them sink or swim (usually sink), and nobody really likes discussing either option that much.

And you can bet somebody is going to come in here and point out that poverty with certain skin color results in more violence and crime than poverty with other skin colors, but the reality is that there is 0 proof that the part of DNA that affects skin pigmentation also just happens to be the miraculous violent crime gene. We're clearly seeing social phenomena, not genetic ones, but I guess it's easier to propose banning certain genetic traits than it is to ban social activity related to specific cultural experiences.

On your last point, there are surveys out there that ask people whether they've committed crimes. These surveys show a lot of interesting things - because there is so much attention on them, african americans actually commit less crimes than white people. The fact that a disproportionate amount of african americans get convicted of crimes is evidence of institutional racism, not racial inferiority.

[Wizardspride]

Read on Twitter

[nate33]

C'mon people. The people who study IQ and race aren't idiots. They're aware that you must normalize for income when comparing IQ's. Those IQ gaps still persist when comparing poor whites versus poor blacks and rich whites versus rich blacks.




Find another explanation. I'm all ears. Again, I'm not saying that we should be absolutely certain that there is a genetic component to the IQ differentials consistently measured between blacks and whites. I'm merely saying that we shouldn't rule it out just because it sounds mean. That's not science.

[Wizardspride]

Read on Twitter

[Zonkerbl]

C'mon people. The people who study IQ and race aren't idiots. They're aware that you must normalize for income when comparing IQ's. Those IQ gaps still persist when comparing poor whites versus poor blacks and rich whites versus rich blacks.




Find another explanation. I'm all ears. Again, I'm not saying that we should be absolutely certain that there is a genetic component to the IQ differentials consistently measured between blacks and whites. I'm merely saying that we shouldn't rule it out just because it sounds mean. That's not science.

As I just said, the tests are culturally biased. Nobody said you have to normalize for income. Only you are hearing that.

[Ed Wood]

Holy ****, SAT scores as an effective measure of something that's supposed to have been effectively abstracted from cultural manipulations?

[Zonkerbl]

In other words, the tests are performing exactly as designed.

Although there was an interesting story on NPR the other day:

http://www.radiolab.org/story/301401-inner-voices/

Researcher asks black students to take a test. Half the students are told it is a test of their intelligence. The other half are told it is trying to measure something other than intelligence, so think of it as a puzzle.

Among students who were told its a test, scores were one standard deviation lower.

[Zonkerbl]

"You may have heard women don't do as well on math as men. But on this test, this test there's no such effect."

Just SAYING that makes the performance gap on math between men and women disappear.

For African Americans, "this is an instrument we use to test problem solving, it's not an IQ test. Just do the best you can."

After saying that, black and white students got the same results.

[tontoz]

The first NBA teams were all white. The first black NBA player was drafted in 1950 by Boston. Other teams were much slower to add black players. Black basketball players also faced discrimination in college ball, yet by the 80s blacks dominated the NBA.

Anyone care to explain how this happened?

[AFM]

Oh god we're having this discussion again...

Look, everyone knows black people are better at basketball, dancing, banging beats out on middle school desks, plus they have bigger dicks.

[penbeast0]

"You may have heard women don't do as well on math as men. But on this test, this test there's no such effect."

Just SAYING that makes the performance gap on math between men and women disappear.

For African Americans, "this is an instrument we use to test problem solving, it's not an IQ test. Just do the best you can."

After saying that, black and white students got the same results.

Citation please? I'd like to see the research and if I buy it, use this. Particularly to see if I can design some classroom evaluations where my kids (I teach in a school of kids with identified learning disabilities) don't think they are being test because I can see this type of attitude in a lot of test taking.

[penbeast0]

Oh god we're having this discussion again...

Look, everyone knows black people are better at basketball, dancing, banging beats out on middle school desks, plus they have bigger dicks.

Damn, I missed all the good ones. I am part Lene Lenape however so what's the stereotypes on (as those of us raised as Washingtonians no longer refer to them) Redskins? Particularly looking for anything positive on the sexual front . . . (see the above post for reasoning)

[nate33]

On your last point, there are surveys out there that ask people whether they've committed crimes. These surveys show a lot of interesting things - because there is so much attention on them, african americans actually commit less crimes than white people. The fact that a disproportionate amount of african americans get convicted of crimes is evidence of institutional racism, not racial inferiority.

This is false. All one has to do is note that crime rate is heavily correlated to the percentage of black people present. That method eliminates the bias in policing. You can use homicide so there's very little error in the victimhood rate. Simply count the number of dead people. Then count the number of blacks, whites and hispanics in the city. Here is the correlation for all cities with a population of 250K or higher:



What this graph says is that there is 0.8 correlation between the percentage of population that is black, and the frequency of homicides. There is an inverse correlation with the percentage of whites or Hispanics in the city and the homicide rate. More whites or Hispanics - less crime. More blacks - more crime. That's just a statistical fact.

http://www.unz.com/article/race-and-crime-in-america/