Comment by ErrantX | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ErrantX | Hacker News Reader

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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 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.

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 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.

I've seen the claim that black academic test scores are consistently one standard deviation below the norm regardless of the test: sat, gre, lsat, mcat, erb, afqt, whatever. Always one standard deviation. Unfortunately, that lends weight to the genetic argument.

People that are 1/4th black and identify themselves as black, have the same issue on standardized tests as people that are 3/4+% black. If DNA was the cause you would expect a non uniform distribution.

The typical black American is 85%+ genetically "African". A tiny slice of people misreporting race wouldn't impact things much.

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.

People that are 3/4 "European" and 1/4 "African" and people that are 1/4 "European" and 3/4 "African" score the same on standardized tests. But, they don't have the same skin color / shade.

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.

> score the same on standardized tests

Statistically that's not true. I don't understand what you're trying to say.

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.

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.

> "race" and ancestry are not directly related

Of course they are.

Ancestry is objective. Race is subjective. There is a many-to-many relationship between the two. If people say you're black, then you're black. Different groups may come to different conclusions on what your race is depending on varying social norms. If you disagree with this, then you're not using "race" in the same way that the rest of country is.

You're conflating two distinct concepts. By the genetic definition, a 3/4 European 1/4 African would be white. By the social definition, a 3/4 European 1/4 African would be black.

According to whom?

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.

Popular perception of race among Americans. The "one-drop rule" is widely attested, and for the most part is still true.

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.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/6dydh0fawxuuhg1r/

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.

Why would that lend weight to the genetic argument?

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.

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.

Financial gain is independent of learning new roles and environments. I wouldn't be comfortable in a job where I wasn't constantly expanding my knowledge and learning new things. However, once I make enough money to cover good food, nice housing, and a few adult toys, I couldn't care less about how much I earn. Making more money is a very small factor in my career decisions.

I seriously think the three contradicting people commenting on each others are right (P, GP, GGP). :-)

I think people differs a lot in these kind of priorities. (Well, maybe not so much on HN.)

A family income of $300k is upper class, by the way. No one likes to call themselves rich, but $300k is at least in the top 10%, which is decidedly not middle.

If you're making 300k you're in the top one percent, or very near: http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032007/hhinc/new06_000.htm

There's a lot of room at the bottom.

The top 1% of the total population, but if all your friends are investment bankers, the average doctor might seem poor.

They were talking about $300k from a two-income household. Not that it makes you middle class, but that $100k-$150k bracket is fairly large.

The data is per-household.

Well then. I guess I can't read. My bad.

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.

Maybe parents are right in not being that interested in schooling. I think I wouldn't be. School is mostly about rote learning, fitting in and being a good worker drone.

Sure, it worked in the past, but perhaps in the future other skills will matter more.

Maybe parents are right in not being that interested in schooling. I think I wouldn't be.

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 hope my kids would do reasonably well in school. I wouldn't say "whatever" if they brought home very bad marks. I just would want to avoid making them believe that school is the only thing that matters.

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.

> I would certainly be very interested in making my kids become autonomous learners and achievers.

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).

As an addition to dagw's response the other crucial thought that occurs ot me is that, yes, I agree with you schooling probably needs a big refresh. BUT if a parents response to that is "well schooling sucks so there is no point bothering" then their kids will probably inherit that attitude (this is my Aunt's problem - her kids struggle a LOT). If the yhave that view they should be providing alternative options in their own "teaching time" rather than take it out on the child - right?

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.

I hope you don't have kids. Whether you do or don't like school is immaterial. The fact is, schools take up a majority of your kids' time until they graduate and get a life of their own. By default, you should be interested in what your kid is learning. No one is asking you to sit in class 8 hours a day, but at least get to know what it is they are learning. If my kid takes an interest in music, I'm there, wrestling? me too, football/soccer/hockey? I'm game. God forbid I have to get up from the keyboard because junior wants to go to the park.

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.

"By default, you should be interested in what your kid is learning."

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?

"My goal would be to teach them how to get through school with the minimum possible effort"

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.

"Instead of learning from your mistakes, your kid(s) just inherit the animosity."

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 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 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.

I personally hated school for most of my life, and I have a hard time putting my kids through the same thing.

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.

"I hope you don't have kids" is, as far as I can see, very nearly the worst thing you can say to someone, if you mean it seriously. So far, everyone dies, but at least there's a chance that part of them will live on through their children; saying you'd prefer that they never have any legacy is even worse than flatly wishing they'd die.

You can have a legacy without having kids.

That's true, you can. How many adults of 100 years ago have a legacy today without considering their kids? A few million? How many of 1000 years ago? Thousands, at most? Kids are more reliable than making the history books or being involved in building or monument that happens to stand for a while.

"I hope you don't have kids" could have two completely different meanings:

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.

could have two completely different meanings

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.

It was meant in the sense that if he/she is a parent at the moment than he is a poor one. I would never tell someone not to have kids, it would be hypocritical on my part.

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