Did the US Supreme Court really find that African Americans are less intelligent than people of other races?
"Disparate impact" reasoning in equal protection cases has a long history, by the way. One of the earliest cases, Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886),
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2131565438211553...
held that a local law that regulated laundries in San Francisco violated the federal Constitution because most of the laundry businesses banned by the law were owned by Chinese immigrants, while most laundries that fit the law's requirements were owned by people of "white" backgrounds. (Knowing the time and place of this case, it's rather plain that the law was designed to discriminate in that manner.)
Context matters. But some of the comments above are true, that today many companies use school credentials as proxies for intelligence, and give higher education institutions a lot of incentive to operate as diploma mills. But there ARE companies in the United States that use various tests (the Wonderlic test is one example) that are essentially IQ tests as part of the hiring process.
The current claim in the mainstream literature on hiring procedures is that the two most effective screening procedures for job applicants are
1) work-sample tests
or
2) IQ-like tests (these two are tied for first place),
with all other procedures such as personal interviews, resume reviews, diploma requirements, personal references, etc., etc. ranking lower in practical usefulness. IQ-like tests are also quite inexpensive (in the form such as the Wonderlic test) and thus fare well for organizations that use them. That is the current claim in the literature, across a broad array of occupations in a broad array of industries.
After edit: Here's a link to a reasonably good, current bibliography on IQ-testing issues, including some of the issues about legal requirements and trade-offs in efficacy of different ways to rate applicants for jobs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...
It's already common knowledge that African Americans, as a group, score poorly on IQ tests as opposed to other groups.
I personally find it strange that people feel it is all that important. After all, what if it was provable that a racial group was less intelligent than other groups? How could one reasonably and humanely find that information actionable?
Certainly people here on Hacker News don't need to be convinced of the value of finding elite engineers, or the very real wealth they can generate from book learning.
The problem is the doublethink that allows the IQ elite -- graduates of highly selective institutions like Harvard and Stanford -- to pretend that there is no such thing as an IQ elite, while simultaneously selecting their peers (coworkers, marriage partners, fellow students, etc.) from that very same ostensibly nonexistent IQ elite.
The contrast is whiplash inducing. One minute IQ doesn't matter, the next minute everyone is talking about how all these "idiots" can't solve FizzBuzz... Very big blind spot here, which many Asian countries don't share in the same way.
Aha, fifth-grade-me thought, a trick question! “The Indians,” I said confidently.
The woman administering the test rephrased the question: “Who is generally credited with discovering America?”
Even though I scored well enough to qualify for the “IQ elite”, that experience gave me a livelong skepticism about how seriously to take IQ tests. I don’t need to ask for someone’s IQ scores before deciding whether or not to work, hang out, or have sex with them.
The comparison with FizzBuzz is not apposite, because nobody is claiming that FizzBuzz is a measure of general intelligence or even a measure of general programming aptitude. If candidate A solved the FizzBuzz problem twice as fast as candidate B, no sane hiring manager would conclude that candidate A is going to be twice as good at programming.
If such a section was used on a test they described as an "IQ test", it was almost certainly there only for statistical validation purposes.
There have been a number of studies done which ask obviously knowledge based questions, obviously g-loaded questions, and unknown questions. They then compare the statistical distribution of answers to the unknown questions to the obviously bad questions ("who discovered America") and the obviously good questions ("you want to carry a fox and two goats across the river in a 2 seated boat, but if you leave the fox alone with the goat the fox eats the goat..." [1]). If you aren't misremembering, I suspect you were participating in such a study.
[1] This is unbiased because all information is given. You don't need to know what a fox or goat is, or have ever seen a boat. It could be rephrased "you want to transport a X and two Y's from location A to location B. But if you leave an X and a Y alone, you fail."
When I Google “who discovered america? wisc-r” I get several hits mentioning this test question.
This isn't even a new idea - it dates back to the original Spearman paper from 1904. Start reading on page 65.
In this case, though, it is biased because some people will have heard the puzzle before, and having heard it before is tied to culture rather than to intelligence.
The correct answer was "Wait 10 minutes, then leave if it's not open." But people with lower incomes were disproportionately likely to say you should just walk away and come back some other time. This is because people in low-income neighborhoods have been taught that loitering in an empty lot leads to bad things.
The good news is that there's also emerging research showing how test scores for blacks & women can be raised by exposing them to certain facts/examples that reduce the effect of "stereotype threat".
It completely debunks the theory of disparate impact, assuming you believe IQ drives general problem solving ability. This information would be useful in rejecting a huge number of baseless lawsuits.
It also suggests that racial gaps in education are here to stay, and nothing can be done about them. Therefore, we should accept them and move on.
I don't accept for a moment the notion that "blacks" are "less intelligent" than "whites", or even that we can with any useful precision define what these terms are, but the way you've summarized the points seems to illustrate well the reason people have such a hard time discussing this issue.
"After all, what if it was provable that a racial group was less intelligent than other groups? How could one reasonably and humanely find that information actionable?"
I didn't feel the need to carefully explain the exact policy implications of this fact since the hypothetical didn't give enough info to work from. I also don't feel the need to couch a conversation on this topic in terms of "I'm not racist" "scare" "quotes" and genuflections towards diversity since I think most HN readers can distinguish a positive claim from a normative one.
Our politics clearly couldn't be more different, but I didn't set out to offend you. I'm sorry.
For what it's worth, you are absolutely right that my hypothetical claim is stronger than most reasonable claims I'd make in reality. I wasn't aiming for completeness, merely trying to illustrate the fact that there are ways one can find such information reasonably actionable.
''Did the US Supreme Court really find that African Americans are less intelligent than people of other races?''
Simple answer is no, they didn't.
The court basically found that because African-Americans had suffered a lower standard of education (their wording: ''Because they are Negroes, petitioners have long received inferior education in segregated schools, and this Court expressly recognized these differences in Gaston County v. United States, 395 U.S. 285 (1969)'') and that DP knew this the whole point of the new scheme was to continue segregation.
More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co. (it's an interesting case)
Whether that would be the same now, I don't know. On the other hand I could completely believe that companies are still worried by it, and so avoid IQ tests etc.
> The court basically found [...] that DP knew this the whole point of the new scheme was to continue segregation.
No, not quite. The WP article (which incidentally I couldn't get at with your URL, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v_Duke_Power_Co worked) quotes the judgement as saying that they didn't question the company's motive, but that its policies were illegally discriminatory regardless of motive.
The WP article was a bit of a mess so I've been rewriting/sourcing it - and, yes, the court carefully states that it didn't believe it was deliberate discrimination. That part of my comment was incorrect. :)
This is provable. Suppose that all racial groups were equally intelligent by some metric. Then the average value of that metric for each racial group would be the same. Assuming a sufficient resolution for the value range and millions of people taking the test, the odds of any racial groups average value being equal to any others is astronomically small.