Rich, Black, Flunking
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When I arrived at MIT as a first-year graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, I asked a professor for help with a research problem. He said "The reason that you've having trouble is that you don't know anything and you're not working very hard." A friend of mine was a surgery resident at Johns Hopkins. He complained to one of his teachers that he was having trouble concentrating because he'd been up all night for several nights in a row. The professor replied "Oh... does your pussy hurt?" According to Business Week, Jack Welch "encouraged near-brutal candor in the meetings he held [at GE]".
The bottom line: self-esteem is great but beware of creating a cozy home for unproductive people with bad ideas.
When people ask why he "wasted" all those years of a medical degree his response was simple:
"yeh it felt like a waste at first; especially as I knew for a large part of it I wouldnt ever be a doctor. But then I realised how far it was pushing me to my limits. I learnt much more about myself than I did about medicine"
He's in his mid twenties and easily the most successful person amongst his peers.
If you're working too hard and bragging about it, good chance that you aren't performing terribly well and, certainly, rather inefficiently
Because he was an intern a qualified doctor always double checked him so none of the mistakes were enacted. But he learned his limits and how far it was safe to go.
People put their lives in the hands of doctors; they are under pressure, overworked and often have a tiny margin for error. Knowing your limits is one of the most important aspects.
This is the reason usually only the brightest and hardest workers at school make the grade to become a doctor. Not because of their smarts - but because they can concentrate and focus on a task and achieve highly on it in a consistent way, even under pressure.
Everything can be.
Working sleep-deprived for long periods of time doesn't really teach you anything after the first couple weeks. It just lowers your efficiency and increases your error rate. In software development, that causes you to waste time. In medicine, that causes, er, iatrogenic death, or something like that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libby_Zion_law#Libby_Zion.27s_d...
When I was learning to kiteboard I was out one day for a couple hours, had a good session and decided I was ready to get out of the water. I wasn't exhausted, but I was getting tired.
My instructor came speeding up next to me and asked me what I was doing. I explained I was getting tired and wanted to head in. He tossed his really nice new kiteboard my way, told me to give him the old beat up kiteboard I was riding and to go back out. I was reluctant but he pushed me and I caved in. My session went from good to great, and I think my kiteboarding skills improved more in that extra hour than in many of the days prior.
Later that night I was telling my instructor how well I did on the newer board and how I had been ready to give up for the day. He told me "Sometimes you just have to push yourself that extra 5%, even when you think you can't." That statement has been a guiding principle throughout my life ever since.
Any time I feel like I'm in too much in my comfort zone, not challenging myself to learn new things, or feel I'm incapable of doing something, I remember my kiteboarder's adage and try to push myself just a little bit more. So far it seems to have worked well.
It has[1]. However, it's not as cut-and-dried as it might seem at first. Decreased hours for physicians lead to more handoffs between physicians, and each handoff is a potential source of error[2].
Therefore, a proper balance between hours and handoffs, as well as new institutional practices, are required to bring patient safety to an optimal level.
[1]: http://sumerdoc.blogspot.com/2006/04/sleep-deprivation-leads...
[2]: http://www.boston.com/news/health/blog/2008/09/hazards_of_ha...
The funny thing about this is that I'll bet if that resident socked that professor in the face, the 'tough guy' routine would drop pretty quickly. In any case, I don't think that trying to turn Med School into boot-camp is necessarily the right thing to do. If all those students take after that professor I shudder to think of what their bedside manor would be like:
Patient: The pain is coming back again. Can I have some morphine?
Doctor: Suck it up maggot! Are you crying for your mommy again?"My work at Howard was a further handicap, for that experience gave me no inkling of the kind of time and effort required at Harvard, and in fact lulled me into a false sense of security. I thought I was being a conscientious student, so I was shocked one day when Nort [his roommate] suddenly said to me:
"Tom, when are you going to stop goofing off and get some work done?"
"Goofing off! I didn't know what he was talking about. But I learned the hard way when the mid-term grades came out."
This was about 1956. He pulled his shit together and graduated magna cum laude.
I tend to agree with the conclusion that it's an attitude issue on the part of most (but not all) African-American parents more than any kind of funding or other issue. As I wrote about in my book, the cafeteria self-segregated and so did the classes for the most part. No one told us to--it just happened that way.
That being said, the notion that everyone in Shaker Heights is "rich," whether Black, White, Asian, or otherwise, is extremely misleading. It's a middle-class suburb. There are lower-income sections and $8 million mansions. Hardly anyone is rich though, and if they are, their kids are going to private schools like University School, Hathaway Brown or Hawken.
I speculate that the phenomenon you observed in the lunchroom could have been caused by a mechanism similar to the one described in Schelling's model.
http://timharford.com/2009/03/the-logic-of-life-racial-segre... http://web.mit.edu/rajsingh/www/lab/alife/schelling.html
People (adults and children alike) are not really equipped to resist societal pressure. We have a lot of things we are supposed to do- graduate high school/college, get married (maybe even to someone of our own race), have children, get a good job, shower everyday, wear "cool clothes", get good/bad grades, act black, act white and we often suffer societal consequences if we don't "behave"... I think the HN community, being more counter-culturalist/entrepreneurial than average can definitely see where I am coming from on this.
So although I've lived in both Pittsburgh and Boston for a total of 16 years now, including grad school where I was very social, I haven't had much of a chance to have African American friends because I've met almost no African Americans.
So does "average" exclude major (maybe East Coast) U.S. cities? Should I look at cities of smaller scale... say Oxnard, CA? Which criteria should one consider when deciding a city is "normally" segregated? Just want to know how things are different in the average American city with a significant number of ethnic minorities.
It is in part do to the fact that whites comprise a much larger portion of the population (70+%) in most areas, but also they don't necessarily (need to) express themselves as "white" as their defining social trait, so they may choose something else as the major one.
A disturbing thought: if black racist sentiment says "Plato and hypotenuses are for whites", and white racist sentiment says "crime is for blacks", the performance disparity between the two racist asshole groups isn't all that surprising!
I'd also be very interested in similar in-depth causal studies on the gap between white and Jewish academic achievement, because this makes me, and more importantly my kids in the future, part of the underachieving group.
I get frustrated with some of the big "anti-racism" campaigners; they strike me as making the smaller issues big ones and causing divisions all over again.
On the specific issue I think it's not so much because the students are black they have this attitude - just because they are in a minority and have the anti-majority sentiment. I saw a similar problem at my school when girls where let into the all male establishment for the first time. Even though girls tend to do better academically at that age in our school they did worse and had higher rates of no homework completion/detention (as I recall). Im guessing for very similar reasons.
To be honest though I think parents are the main problem; and not just in minority groups now. Even my Aunt who is in her early 40's has no interest in her kids schooling - and they suffer for it. The current parental generation seems full of similar attitudes - my mother is a teacher and she says getting parents to take an interest, encourage learning out of school and other activities is the biggest challenge she faces at the moment.
Sure, it worked in the past, but perhaps in the future other skills will matter more.
You'd be doing your kids a great disservice.
School is mostly about rote learning, fitting in and being a good worker drone.
Only if that's what you want it to be about. My parents took a great interest in my schooling and I feel that those years where both educational and formative. First and foremost they where willing to acknowledge that not all schools are equal and that not all schools work for all people. So they made sure I went to good schools that worked for me. They also continuously monitored my progress and where in dialogue with my teachers and where willing to go to bat for me. They made sure I got extra tutoring in subjects I had problems in, and helped me advance in subjects I was doing well in.
So while it is only one data point, I believe that the parents interest in their child's schooling is critical for the child getting anything out of school. You cannot show a complete disinterest in your child's education and then complain when he doesn't get education you think he needs or deserves.
I acknowledge that it is necessary to learn putting up with unloved tasks - I am just not convinced that learning that has to take 13 years (length of school in my country). Maybe a couple of years of boredom could be shaved off without a great loss.
I would certainly be very interested in making my kids become autonomous learners and achievers. Just, as I say, the school metric does not mean very much to me. In the best case scenario I hope to teach them how to cope with school without expending too much energy. I think I would also encourage them to do all sorts of voluntary school projects they can possibly do (like writing for the school magazine, making movies, drama, science projects, whatever). I would not encourage them to spend every waking hour learning arbitrary stuff for school.
"My parents took a great interest in my schooling and I feel that those years where both educational and formative."
So what were the things you took out of it?
There are things to learn - namely, how to learn, I suppose. But again, as I said, I question the time it takes to learn these things.
You can't really do this by leaving them to their own devices in the school-system and using report cards as a 'checkpoint system' to evaluate how well they are doing. Remember that this study was K-12, not just high school or middle school students. When you're raising your kids you are molding them into what they will become, so you need to have a more hands-on approach early in their life to point them in the right direction for later on (when small deviations/whatever don't matter as much/have less effect).
What I was mostly talking about was this annoyingly prevelant attitude of some modern parents where they believe schools are where their kids learn and non of that responsibility lies with them.
If you know any teachers ask them about this: I bet what they have to say will be a shock.
As for rote learning. Every other nation has stuck to rote learning or some form of it. It's only the US that has taken a method of education that has worked for hundreds of years in many nations and manage to completely fuck it up. And every few years some academic will invent some new form of learning, convince the school board to buy into, and then after 10 years of "experimenting" on kids they might have gained/lost 0.5% on the academic test compared to rote learning.
I'm not sure where the skill of learning will be replaced by another, except maybe unlearning. Rote is just a baseline, if you can't work your way through a basic problem set then you certainly aren't qualified to handle something that might require a bit of brainpower.
I hope your still young because you'll realize, after many years, that in high school no one truly fit in. That is why John Hughes films (RIP) and shows like Freeks and Geeks were so popular. Everyone was awkward and that was the point. High school is a microcosm not a career, there was no skill to learn there.
I hope they would learn interesting stuff, but if they don't, should I really try to make them believe it is interesting? I personally hated school for most of my life, and I have a hard time putting my kids through the same thing. Maybe it would help them more if I told them that I understand why they hate school so much. My goal would be to teach them how to get through school with the minimum possible effort - hopefully with reasonable grades, though, as they do help later in life. But only so much.
"Every other nation has stuck to rote learning or some form of it."
Sure, one probably needs to know how to do it - but is it necessary to practice it for 12+ years to get the hang of it? I rather doubt it.
Obviously it is not all so black and white, but lately I see a tendency of putting way to much importance on school. When can kids be kids?
This is commendable. You don't have to agree with what they are teaching, but declaring school as evil sets a bad tone. Instead of learning from your mistakes, your kid(s) just inherit the animosity. Unless you enjoy homeschooling* then schools will always have aspects of it you won't like.
You don't practice the same learning for the 12 years. You reach a level and move onto the next challenge. Just like no one takes 12 years of handwriting or 12 years of algebra. A good school would recognize you've mastered the subject and send you on to the next one. I finished 3rd grade reading 5th grade books. In the 4th and 5th grade I was outside playing basketball while the rest of class had to complete their reading assignments.
I agree that the importance of being a kid seems to be lost on the current generation. Schools are expanding and playgrounds are being paved over. 24-hour news has turned child abductions into a national epidemic instead of what they really are, isolated incidents.
* I don't mind homeschooling, but I don't have the time nor expertise to commit to it.
True, that needs to be avoided. I guess I hope they would have a good time at school - basically, that they would figure out how to make the best out of a miserable situation.
Even most of the stuff that is being taught can be interesting or useful - just not always in the way it is being taught. I guess going away from "I have to learn this to get good grades" to move to "hm, while I have to do this, I might as well have fun and learn as much as I can" is what I really have in mind. I just wouldn't count on schools getting this right. So the kids would have to find a way to learn independently of school.
I commend your accomplishments. Still, it seems there was an opportunity lost here. Instead of allowing you to continue to advance, you were held back (in a way) until the rest of the kids caught up to you.
Similar experiences in my own earlier education soured my taste for school, though in my case I remember being given explicit directions to stop working ahead and wait for the class to catch up, on multiple occasions.
So put them through a different thing. There are several different types of schools offering several different educational philosophies. If you look around a bit you might just find something that is a good match for your kid.
1) I hope you're not a parent at the moment.
and
2) I hope you never conceive!
The first is a lament over the fate of any children that the addressed might have parented. The later is wishing ill fate upon the addressed.
Ah, I actually had missed the sense in which yardie might have meant "I hope you don't already have kids", and they've actually said that that's how it was meant (approximately), so I was a bit out of line, above.
The people I work with have this attitude that 300k/year is expected (aka middle class) from a two income family. IMO, DNA has little impact on Black achievement, rather culture is "crushing" black America. When 80% of any population is not playing the game they hold the average hostage.
My personal theory is you tend to measure yourself in comparison the well to do people around you. If you fail to reach that level you are more likely to push your children up a notch. However, everyone needs to balance success vs. personal sacrifices and needs to decide when enough is enough.
And I don't follow your premise that inherent differences wouldn't be quantitatively consistent. That's how it is with all the other measurable differences between races.
If there was a genetic based IQ difference you would expect the same shift as you see in skin color. But, that's not what happens, thus it's probably not a genetic trait.
Statistically that's not true. I don't understand what you're trying to say.
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.
Of course they are.
My roommate in college was half-Haitian half-Portugese and identified more as European. My near 100% African-American buddy I played cards with identified himself as fully black. A half-Carib half-French (black skin tone) girl I knew identified as French. In London, a good friend who is half-Arabic half-Indian identifies equally as Arabic and Indian. My three-quarters Chinese one-quarter Japanese friend raised in Beijing identifies as pure Chinese. I think a 1/4th African 3/4ths European blood person raised in a predominantly black community would identify as black, and raised in a non-black community would identify as European.
All my data is from people who live in international coastal cities though, so maybe it's different in various provinces and less affluent middle-of-country areas.
This can and does vary from country to country--mixed-race Brazilians are considered white in Brazil, but black if they immigrate to the United States.
The African American adolescents had a lower birth weight, a lower verbal IQ, and a higher number of sexual partners than did White adolescents. For each characteristic, the mixed race mean fell between the means of the two parental populations.
Also, I have seen a lot of claims. I have seen claims that IQ is not even distributed in a bell curve.
In the actual book "The bell curve" there is also a small (non-normal) spike for very intelligent blacks, if I remember correctly.
I think people differs a lot in these kind of priorities. (Well, maybe not so much on HN.)
There's a lot of room at the bottom.
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.
I'm not sure what you mean here. There are European White Jews (They are the Jews with elevated IQ, Ashkenazi), African Jews, Oriental Jews, and so on. You can't say that Jews are not white or Jews are not black. You'd be surprised by the number of blond hair, blue eyed Jews in Israel. There are Jews with a Jewish characteristic, but just as many without. There are also non-Jews with Jewish characteristics. In my Jewish circle, they all claim to be white, and that's what you'd call them, you'd never know any difference unless you found out that they go to synagogue.
There are a few ideas of why this happened. The slower, unable to adapt, were killed off over thousands of years. When finding a mate, it was recommended to marry the child of a scholar. Jews are one of the oldest groups to become fully literate, as it was required to read and study the Torah, which later gave them the name "People of the book". European Jews were regulated in the type of commercial occupations that they could hold, that being money lending. Money lending required higher IQ over other occupations. All of these compounded over hundreds and possibly thousands of years could have possibly affected the IQ of the Jewish population. There is one problem with this idea, in that most of that requires an elevated IQ to begin with.
I'll end with a quote from this article https://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/jewish-ge...
>Insofar as I am suggesting that the Jews may have had some degree of unusual verbal skills going back to the time of Moses, I am naked before the evolutionary psychologists’ ultimate challenge. Why should one particular tribe at the time of Moses, living in the same environment as other nomadic and agricultural peoples of the Middle East, have already evolved elevated intelligence when the others did not?
Also, does your theory explain the high average IQ in e.g. South Korea?
High IQ among East Asians is fascinating. The fact that they can migrate to the US, and perform as well or better than others, even if they are in the lower socioeconomic tier, tends to make me think that genetics does play a large part in IQ. I do not believe that it is the sole factor though.
This is my take on it. If your child has a really low IQ, then it will be a hard life for your child. If your child has an average or higher IQ, then IQ stops being a factor and attitude, values, and work ethic play a bigger role.
No. If you're willing to believe IQ is genetic, you must also believe IQ is is a stronger factor than work ethic - otherwise Jews would've been selected for work ethic instead. It certainly sounds like an easier variable for evolution to optimize.
Not sure if you got my point about Koreans. If they have genetically above-average IQ, what selective pressures contributed to it? That's one possible way to test your explanation of Jewish intelligence.
One thing that we all must keep in mind, not all Jews are smart and intelligent, as with any other group. It just happens that of the extremely smart people in the world today making breakthrough advancements, there's a good chance that they are Jewish.
>If you're willing to believe IQ is genetic, you must also believe IQ is is a stronger factor than work ethic (How do you make italics/quotes on HN)
A stronger factor contributing to what?
Doing well, being able to provided for yourself and your family doesn't require a high IQ. One can do that merely with an average IQ, and do well in life, as long as on has a good work ethic.
Having said that, it isn't very likely that a person with a slightly above average IQ will be able to produce the type of works of say a Newton or Einstein. That requires a genius IQ which almost nobody has, of any ethnic group.
Although East Asians have one of the highest average IQ's, they have not dominated intellectually in the same way as Europeans. It's fascinating to me, asking why Europeans and not Asians, dominated the world, especially given the huge population of East Asians. It's a very complicated and touchy subject, but fascinating nonetheless.
1) sufficient work ethic may be culturally transmissible enough that genetic selection pressure is reduced
2) work ethic may be as strongly selected for genetically, but is more complicated to implement via random genetic variation than higher IQ
I don't understand why this requires an elevated IQ to start with. If we suppose that IQ is partly genetic, and therefore subject to random mutations, and if we further suppose that the smarter offspring have better opportunities to mate, then wouldn't that be enough to end up with a smarter group of people over time?
I was. I noticed this on my trip to Israel in 2007. Even as a total WASP (blonde, blue eyes) you can still be mistaken for a Jew in some places.
* # of hours spent on homework
* # of hours parents spent with children on school-related activities
* Rate of parental participation in school activities
* Absenteeism rates
* rates of student failure to complete homework
* rates of student participation in school-related activities
* all of the above plotted across grade levels (do any of these statistics vary over time as children become more susceptible to cultural forces from peers?)Ogbu's research is useful today simply because political correctness has reached a point where we can't even consider the role minorities play in their own academic achievement. 50 years ago the opposite was true; the political mainstream was looking for anything they could to justify the status quo.
The bottom line is that if you are trying to explain some phenomenon, you won't reach very good conclusions by taking certain aspects off the table for political reasons.
"I find it useless to argue with people like Ogbu," says Urban League educational fellow Ronald Ross, himself a former school superintendent. "We know what the major problems in this school system are: racism, lack of funding, and unqualified teachers."
This guy's issue isn't with any particular bit of Ogbu's methodology or logic, just the places it takes him.
How this can fly in any academic field is shocking to me.
The most staggering (to me) finding was that poor African Americans (not just blacks — specifically Americans) ask their small children fewer questions that the parents already know the answer to (e.g. "What's that?? Right! That's a kitty!"), say "No" way more often, and expect unquestioning obedience rather than questions, exploration and creativity.
Lower class whites also trend that way in their parenting styles, but not to the same degree.
And of course, parenting styles tend to transfer from generation to generation. Thus the whole "I'm becoming my mother" and "I want to be a better father than my father was" cliché, heritability of depression and also the legacy of child abuse.
When you think that yeah, really, in terms of the number of generations, it was not long ago at all that these people's ancestors were bought and sold like property.
Combine the slavery aspect with the parenting aspect -- and the fact that parents act like their parents -- and you can see how, as a race in America, those kids could be behind, even if their families are much wealthier now.
Their parents' parents probably were not. To say nothing of their parents' parents' parents.
It was this realization I had, more than anything else (in addition to a visit to London), that made me realize that American society truly was racially biased -- at a much deeper level than most people talk about.
These sociological findings are not new or obscure -- and yet, there are so very few programs to help break the cycle by helping those families improve their parenting.
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 negative stereotyping of African Americans still exists.
I don't think any of the critics, nor the author of this article, have actually read The Bell Curve.
Like Colin Powell and Condi Rice, if he was a Democrat he'd have a road in every town named after him.
I can accept differing political views or party affiliations, but that man sold out his country. For shame!
He also allegedly sexually harassed a subordinate of his, Anita Hill, though the allegations were never substantiated. This was prior to being appointed to the Supreme Court.
"'I find it useless to argue with people like Ogbu,' says Urban League educational fellow Ronald Ross, himself a former school superintendent. 'We know what the major problems in this school system are: racism, lack of funding, and unqualified teachers.' Although Shaker Heights is in fact an integrated, well-funded, and well-staffed school district, Ross is nonetheless convinced that it suffers from other problems that contribute to the achievement disparities between the races."
Reading this, I was reminded of some of the things that were described in "Common Ground," the book about the Boston school bussing crisis in the 1970s, as well as "All Souls," a book about the struggles of an Irish-American family growing up in South Boston in the 1970s and 1980s. For those families -- black and white -- that had parents who were uninterested or unable to push their kids in school, the kids' peer circles tended to take over, with predictable results.
In the 30+ since the bussing crisis, Boston has spent huge amounts of money and effort to improve the schools and teaching quality, yet some of the high schools still have huge behavioral and crime problems. And guess what? Many parents still aren't invested in their kids' education, or even their extracurricular activities (there was an article in the Globe a few months ago about how few Boston parents show up for games, even when their kids are on the teams).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ogbu
A somewhat more recent source
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/noexcuses/
brings the story a little more up to date, by mentioning places where the achievement gap is not so broad.
I seem to have moved on from that, and now work pretty darn hard at learning stuff, but only once I was away from my peers culturally as well as physically. It sucks but it is the truth.
.. * I) Underacheivement as a group Defense Mechanism ::
Some social-groups actively encourage what I call "Perennial-Underacheivement". This is in my opinion based on a group defense mechanism[2].
This defense mechanism is to ensure the weak and sick and those unable to care for themselves are not left behind. They value support for the less-able and believe that informal community support is far better than State supplied support. The reasons are a topic unto themselves but my take is that this group behiour ensures those with latent talent don't leave the community and thus those who cannot care for themselves. Some talented people may not reach their potential, but they may still lead a happy, fruitful life. Some members may take the lack of excellence to extremes and die in prison as hopeless drug-dealers.
Basically, in these groups, overacheiving and commercial gain is downplayed. Here, to be rich is to "Sell Out" and to move out of the neighbourhood it to betray your "Roots".
.. * II) Acheivement is better for the Acheiver and the Group ::
The opposing view is that each person tries for themselves and their immediate family and this works because everyone "succeeds". People who cannot care for themselves are kept at a distance, cared for by the State which is paid for by tax. Individual families may still take care of their own, but it helps to be a "successful" family.
.. * Evidence of this divide ::
My data point of a divide link here would be to consider Immigrant versus 3rd generation Locals. This is touched on in the Article, where a Black Man (but immigrant) is in conflict with American born African-Americans. I offer an explanation that some of the American born blacks are using race issues to form the defense mechanism which conciously or unconcsiously they know protects their group.
First I will state the obvious. Immigrants by definition cannot belong to the group-care mindset. Why? Because by definition they have left many, many compatriots behind to fend for themselves in a different geographical place. They may not like it, and they may send every penny back to their village. But in their mind the gain overall to themselves and the group behind is clear: immigration is better than remaining.
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[1] I am not a black, and I am not American. But I wish to say something on this topic because I am an immigrant (to Oz, then UK) myself and part of an oft-picked upon ethnic group (Jew). This issue is complex and there are many commingled ingredients, economic-social-racial-ethnic-familial-historical
[2] I am not making a comment on the rights , wrongs of this defense mechanism
Some social-groups actively encourage what I call "Perennial-Underacheivement". This is in my opinion based on a group defense mechanism[2].
But I must really disagree with you wrt to African American youth addressed in the article and its subject research: they came from well off families that didn't need to hold their children back.
What you're speaking of is something widely practiced against women, specially in the Middle East: girls are often talked out of higher education and told they will need to care for their little siblings, elderly, husband and whoever is in need.
Here I would say that you are right and that the article focuses on Rich students. Why do they need to worry about group-care? I cannot offer a complete response. The reasons are too many and different for each person, region.
I only sought to comment on one ingredient of the complex reasons. The Defense Mechanism is a economic-social reason occasionally dressed up in race-division garments. I wantedto disrobe some of the arguments so that they can be addressed properly when they are a factor of underacheivement.
Superficially, it would seem like racial tension would be the concern that needed fixing. But if that tension is just a defense mechanism, then to spur acheivement the solution is to emphasise that your community will receive excellent care and no-one will be neglected.
The good news is you can choose your culture. The bad news is, it's hard to overturn what you grew up with.
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 bland (not least the ten tribes of the north, if you buy into that). Despite all the stuff going against them, people who know that they're Jewish (even when they don't have a particularly strong connection to the group) manage to pull themselves out of difficult situations and rise to become very successful in whatever challenges they set themselves.
Immigrants by definition cannot belong to the group-care mindset.
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 success. I know lots of 5 generation jews who underperform versus some dynamic Israelis. Different topic, different discussion.
--
I only commented on it because I work extensively with Charities. I now do volunteer work with the IT4Communities[1] and have worked with lots of others in the past too.
I have perceived an active repulsion to Money and Success amongst many Charity Staff. These staff are often recruited from the community which normally does the rest of the caring.
This is where I have developed my idea that the Fear of Money is actually misguided Concern for Community. They love their community as it struggles to help the needy and are petrified of being left as the only broke fuckers who care as the University grads end up in finance.
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http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/people/g/nebuchadnezzar.h...
Later they were freed to go back to remnants of Jerusalem.
Not all cultures are created equally. What your parents did in the home, and who your friends were matter much more than anything else.
Does a Jewish kid from a family of scientists and scholars have much in common with so-called "white trash"? They're both white, right?
Does the child of a black immigrant who comes from a culture of learning and achievement have much in common with some other random brown-skinned person? They're both brown, right?
The problem here isn't race. It's a loser culture.
http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall09/mcguem/psy8935/defau...
today, and I had occasion there to hear Tom Bouchard, indisputably one of the leading experts on human behavioral genetics research, say that the number-one thing to tell members of the general public who read about this research is "correlation does not imply causation." The simple blunder of assuming that phenomena with some kind of positive correlation are in a cause-effect relationship is one of the most enduring cognitive biases in human thinking, and the bias doesn't appear to be any less frequent in high-IQ persons, nor does it appear to go away even after student receive statistical education.
The ratio between black and white GPAs = .55
"Ogbu worked from the 1990 census data, which showed that 32.6 percent of the black households and 58 percent of the white households in Shaker had incomes of $50,000 a year or more"
The ratio between number of blacks/white making above $50k/yr = .56
- My most influential mentor was born in the ghettos of London and dropped out of middle school. When he was 12, his home was raided by the police and he had a gun to the back of his head as his brother was arrested for dealing drugs. He can't read or write very well and he's dyslexic. He became a construction worker. Now he's running one of the most profitable construction firms in the Middle East and owns properties in five or six countries. He makes about $20,000 per month in salary and bonuses, not including his investments.
- My best friend had the hell beaten out of him by his father, until he got big enough to fight back and eventually kicked the hell out of his Dad, which then ended in an uneasy truce. He dealt drugs in high school, got into college, and dropped out. He became a self made millionaire at age 24. He's 29 now, lives in Bel Air in a three million dollar home, and in a bad year he makes $200,000.
Me? I dropped out of two high schools and left home at age 16 or 17, just scrapping here and there to get by. I then dropped out of another university. I didn't have what you'd call an easy childhood, but I did okay too.
A lot of my friends and mentors are like this. We're all self-made - we get along sort of okay with old money people, but fit right in with entrepreneurs and self made people. Many of them come up from hard times. An acquaintance of mine is 60ish, Polish, and spent her childhood in a concentration camp. Her family became wealthy black-marketing goods past the Communist lines for sale, and eventually a branch of their family came to America. She's a psychologist, her husband is some sort of businessman.
Everyone successful I know internalizes their problems - that means they blame themselves and take responsibility. This is key - if other people are doing things to you, then you can't change that and you're stuck. But if everything is your fault and responsibility, you can change that and win. So, dyslexic? Up to me to deal with. Racism? Up to me to deal with. Grew up poor? Up to me to deal with. Spent childhood doing forced labor in a Nazi factory? Up to me to deal with. Abused? Up to me to deal with. Speak very lower-class English? Up to me to deal with. No English? Up to me to deal with.
Now, I remember some sort of study that quoted: "People who internalize failure and externalize success are less happy but more successful. People who externalize failure and internalize success are more happy and less successful."
The "it's my fault, and my problem, and I'll deal with it" attitude makes you more successful and less happy. As a bonus, everything good that happens is luck and a blessing and can't be counted on. You'll be less content, much less content, but go much further.
So me? I always blame myself. "Partner stole a lot of money? That's my fault, I should've been paying attention to the finances." Success? "Got an important order? That's good luck, can't count on that in the future."
Most people do the opposite. "Life is hard and unfair, but everything I've achieved despite that is because I'm awesome." Everyone successful I know - "I've been dealt a good set of cards, I'm extraordinary lucky, and every mistake and hardship is on me." Less contentment, less surface happiness, much more accomplishment and triumph. It's the only way to the highest levels of accomplishment in any field.
There are a million places to start if you want to find a critique, but you can start with Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man".
Now, Murray had problems in The Bell Curve -- he didn't properly understand regression to the mean, for example. But did you students actually read it before laughing? He was pretty solid on most of the genetic topics he covered (a small part of the book).
Here's a good start to correcting your opinion about Gould: http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2009/01/a_week_with_gre.h...
EDIT: Yes I'm a bit bitter about it, I read it and believed it for years, before learning better. I don't like wasting my time and I HATE being lied to (and even more being taken in).
I'd have a laugh too. And some of whatever you're drinking.
I just finished reading What Intelligence Tests Miss, by Keith Stanovich. Summary: critical reasoning skills are much much better predictor of academic and social success then IQ, and (that's the shocker) largely _not_ correlated with IQ. And this is just one of the factors which influence success. Even if a group is a few IQ points above or below average, the final effect is very unlikely to affect anything.
edit: Oh, and yes, critical reasoning skills, even if they're not as well studied as IQ is (which is a shame, but it's being corrected) have a much much smaller genetic component and are easier to change during lifetime.
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.
But you won't find much more in this, unfortunately. For the link (or lack thereof) between IQ and critical reasoning search for Stanovich, it's mostly his own research. For link between (parts of) critical reasoning and academic success look up Mischel's marshmallow experiment. Personally I never saw 0.8 correlations with IQ mentioned anywhere, so I'd be grateful for a pointer.
Also, which 0.8 correlation were you asking about?
Academic success and income, sorry.
I'm sorry about the number for income -- everyone has it at a correlation of .3 to .6. I believe that I was thinking of Lynn's numbers for national incomes, which is correlated at .7 or so to average IQ.
Kindly explain why that is at all relevant to the issue at hand. (Since you have been carrying on a conversation with another participant here as the thread has deepened, it might be a good idea to make clear just what point of his you were responding to with that point.)
I'm joining the call of another participant here for references to back up that statement.
There just isn't that much left to predict
This seems to be mistaking a statement about what is currently observed with a statement about what might be possible under experimental interventions. No one has shown what the maximum possible influence of other independent variables might be.
I'm going to bet that whatever he [Keith Stanovich] has defined as "critical reasoning" actually has a high correlation with IQ when measured.
You will lose the bet. He and other authors on cognitive psychology and behavioral economics have already repeatedly replicated the result that many forms of rationality have meager or no correlation with IQ. He cites the references in his book.
Can you prove this? I think that the greatest possible correlation is sqrt(1/2) (around .7), but I have no idea how to prove it.
(Formally, the conjecture is as follows: if X,Y, and Z are random variables, and k is a real constant, with:
corr(X,Y) = 0
corr(X,Z) > k
corr(Y,Z) > k
It is indeed possible for corr(X,Z)=corr(Y,Z)=sqrt(1/2), here's an example. With sample space {a,b,c,d}, let X,Y, and Z be:
a b c d
X: 1, 0, 0, -1
Y: 0, 1, -1, 0
Z: 1, 1, -1, -1
Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220.
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/cdir/2009/00000018...
(one online abstract)
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122587149/abstrac...
(the main link to the article)
Alas, a peek behind the pay wall that was available the other day when I posted this article here on HN
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=838534
is now dead. But I have the full text of the article at hand, as I am currently attending a weekly journal club with some of the authors, and one key paragraph from the article must be read by anyone who draws conclusions from heritablity figures:
"Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)."
This simply reemphasizes a point that is familiar to anyone who has studied genetics carefully, namely that the pre-Mendelian concept of heritability says nothing about malleability, the degree to which a trait can be influenced by environmental variables.
Angoff, W. H. (1988). The nature-nurture debate, aptitudes, and group differences. American Psychologist, 43, 713-720.
Mange, A. & Mange, E. J. (1990). Genetics: Human Aspects.
Kaufman, Alan S. (1990). Assessing Adolescent and Adult Intelligence.
So the statement above that heritability somehow constrains the expression of IQ or of consequences of IQ such as occupational success is actually conceptually incorrect. But I appreciate you going to the effort of doing the math.
Another thought is that relating one correlation coefficient to another with linear algebra probably depends too heavily on applying linear tools to a not fully linear model. Increases of income are plainly linear and are on a ratio scale. (There is a zero point for income, and each dollar increase in income has the same magnitude anywhere along the scale.) But IQ test standard scores are at best ordinal scales, so it is already an abuse of mathematics to treat them as a linear variable, or to treat a figure derived from them as a linear variable.
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.
It was drilled into my head that I should feel lucky to be in the US. My siblings don't have that problem, they are part of the US. I notice that these social changes can happen to any group and is not specific to black/asian/hispanic. One of my high school friends, 2nd-generation India-American, is going to be in jail for a long time. He has fully absorbed the gangster culture even though according to most race-based sociological studies he shouldn't be in jail.
Are a couple of recent papers from Science good enough?
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/309/5741/1717
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/309/5741/1720
At least have the courage of your convictions and be brave enough in the truth of your pronouncements to say what you really mean: "White people are smarter than Black people on average, by their very nature".
Perhaps you don't say it because, as is often the case, utterance of foolishness is its own reminder.