Poetic justice also works in positive ways. It's nice to read something uplifting once in a while, though finding a Russian oligarch in such a story feels strange.
> It's nice to read something uplifting once in a while
Dr Watson said: he is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours" but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true".
He sold the medal because he wanted the money to acquire an expensive painting.
Sounds more like racism than political correctness.
> Racist or not, he is still a pioneer in biology and
> should keep his award for his contributions
He chose to sell it because he wanted to buy an expensive piece of art.
So? Usmanov decided he would rather make a charitable contribution to Watson in a symbolic manner. Does not change the fact that i was an admirable thing to do (it was, after all, $4.7 million of his own money)
sounds like his statement is based on facts known to him (and being Nobel winning scientist he probably has good skills at understanding and analyzing facts)
>Sounds more like racism
Either you're trying to say what his statement wasn't based on his knowledge and analysis of facts or you're introducing a concept of "racism rooted in facts"
I wonder though whether the Watson will accept the medal back from Usmanov's hands.
> > whereas all the testing says not really.
> sounds like his statement is based on facts known to him
My understanding is that IQ correlates to socio-economic background, but once that's adjusted for, all race considerations fall away. If you've got a credible source that says something else, I'm sure we'd find it interesting.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2014/03/2008-sat-scores-by-race-b...
Besides it does not really matter - the fact is that blacks in Africa have much lower average IQ than average in most other countries. It could explain lack of positive examples of countries in Africa developing as fast as China, SKorea or many other countries in other part of the world.
Unfortunately, that's not true, but it's a common myth that's repeated. Poor whites do nearly as well as rich blacks, on average. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_achievement_gap_in_the_U...
We're still searching for something that would correct for racial differences in testing, but socio-economic background does not correct for it. And even supposing it did, it doesn't directly refute the premise, because it conflates cause/effect, which is why sociologists are searching for other explanations (other than the obvious one, of course, because it goes against our societal values).
> Poor whites do nearly as well as rich blacks, on
> average.
Do you think Aborigines in Australia have the same IQ as the Japanese? Or Pygmies? Part of accepting diversity is accepting that diversity is very real. But we want it both ways.
[1] http://m.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/201207/men...
Surely you would agree we're smarter than Gorillas. Given that, how long as human intelligence been fixed? How long has it not been a selective force in evolution for humans? Does evolution not apply to the human brain?
Evolution is a great idea, but the evolutionary history of humans is of course almost entirely speculative. I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but I think there is enough trouble explaining why we walk up right or have smaller jaws than neanderthals let alone explaining how we evolved current levels of intelligence.
Japan was in stone age as late as 2000 years ago, which is ~2500 years after the Pyramid of Giza was built. Yet we don't see a wave of genius Egyptians now. Where are they?
be my guest, the first simple Google search immediately brings it :
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2964318/
"Our primary finding is that when compared to Caucasians, an African-American cohort exhibited smaller cerebral volumes but larger absolute left OFC volumes. Additionally, the OFC and amygdala appear to occupy a significantly greater proportion of the total cerebral volume in the African-American cohort. [...] Our findings are generally concordant with recent work that brain structure may vary significantly across populations of different racial or ethnic backgrounds [5]."
* "Conclusions: The biological implications of our findings are unclear as we do not know what factors may be contributing to these observed differences"
* "This study was a secondary data analysis examining volumetric MRI data gathered from healthy control subjects participating in a study of bipolar disorder"(!)
* "the parent study was not designed to examine ethnic or racial differences"
Take a hypothetical, but concrete, situation : blue people are less "bulky" than green humans, and thus can't carry as heavy loads.
Then, if the situation is a fire department hiring, there's 2 ways to go about this :
1) you don't invite blue humans, only green ones -> discrimination.
2) you invite both, test them, and all the blue applicants happen to get disqualified during some test, this is not racism (the odds are very good this will happen if you try it, sadly, but that's not the fault of any fire department. Nor are the resulting ethnic imbalances in companies indications of racism)
Then there are the difficult cases. Like for a fireman interview not inviting anyone under 70 kg because it's just not going to happen ...
(This is the current European legal standard for discrimination. Where racial/sexual/religious/ethnic/... differences directly conflict with tasks to be carried out, like in the case of a fire department it is OK to refuse based on those criteria, provided you give individuals a chance. E.g. there was a European-level case of a muslim who was refused as a fireman because he refused to carry women, that was not considered discrimination. They actually hired a muslim doctor, and then fired him because he refused to operate on a woman, while he was on call, at 3am. That too was considered not discrimination, nor was a certain reluctance to hire this guy (any doctor would of course have been fired for refusing to operate on anyone))
Let me give an example where I think this kind of discrimination rooted in fact is acceptable. A company trying to hire a software engineer might only interview people with CS degrees. There is a factual basis that people with CS degrees are more likely to be qualified for the job, although there certainly are qualified people without degrees. Refusing to test those degree-less candidates is discrimination based on education.