Racism? It's Not How Good; It's Skin Color

I read the book long ago. There are recent talks on youtube about race and IQ. It is still thought crime but more people are thinking about it. People wandered out of Africa 50,000 years ago and split up into different regions and races. There is nothing in biolgy to say they did not evolve differently. Yes some intermixed. There are actually intelligence tests for dogs and different breeds have different avg intelligence and different temperaments. I asked myself why this would be impossible for different races. I noted that the most violent cities on earth are not Asian. Culture is one explanation but not the ony explanation.

Our Troublesome Inheritance (Wade) is a good book.

 

This is nonsense, with respect. Equal opportunity has existed in the First World for decades. Even in my country, which arguably offers more 'equality' than America (natinalised healthcare and very generous welfare payments), we are still seeing the same processes taking place. More 'poor', more 'homeless', more people unable to afford housing in big cities, etc etc. This tells you that there is nothing you can do if people are determined not to take the opportunities provided.

 

I recall that after Finland admitted refugees their test scores fell and they were called racists. Either they had racist teachers or they had racist tests. In Germany the test scores for immigrants vary from ethnic Germans.

Some people look at the facts and see where they take them. Some people decide on the conclusion first then ignore the facts.

In the US Cal Tech uses race race blind admissions and admits around 40% Asians. Other top schools use lots of fudge factors to account for race and admit around 20% Asians.

 

We have the same approach here (as Cal Tech), but it applies to all schools using academic selection, and all universities. It's illegal here to ask for or document racial heritage unless indigenous. No educational institution knows what your race is during the application process .. all of it comes down to your marks. The higher the standard of academic excellence the school or university is known for, the higher the number of Asian students.

 

More interested in Mars.

 

But will the static electricity generator work there?

 

Human beings are a fractious, nasty lot. Making a large, diverse group of them live together in relative peace is difficult.

No one, so far as I can see, has worked out the perfect solution, especially not if we want to maintain a free society. (China does pretty well by dropping that requirement.)

The American Founding Fathers were suspicious of direct democracy, and I think their reserve was justifed. The arrangements they made to try to prevent its worst excesses -- separation of powers with an independent judiciary, a difficult-to-amend-Constitution with limits on the powers of the state, the clumsy machinery of the electoral college -- can be irritating at times, when it goes against one's desires.

Judges prevent the popular will from being exercised on issues that provoke powerful emotions, the person with the majority of the popular vote gets a minority of the electoral college, the elected President is prevented from implementing part of his program by a Federal judge ...

But you are to consider: over time, it's generally been liberals, or at least liberal values, which this sometimes-annoying machinery has protected.

Let's not be too quick to dismantle it.

 

If you want to become a cabinet-maker, and design beautiful furniture, you have to pass through an apprenticeship in which you do a lot of rote learning: how to hammer in a nail without bending it, how to start a saw cut and then cut through a board without it splintering on the other side., how to countersink a woodscrew. You learn these things and hundreds of more so that you can do them without even thinking.You don't learn them by 'discovery', you're shown how.

You're just absorbing the accumulated wisdom of centuries of carpenters. Once you've 'learned by heart' all these things, then you can start to exercise your creativity.

Mathematics, science, same-same.

In a way, the fondness for 'discovery learning' and the aversion to 'rote learning' is like some of the hot-button topics in politics: there are certain things which are true -- I won't ignite a thread-diversion by mentioning them -- but which you've got to be very careful in talking about, because a fact that is technically true can be taken up by stupid or malicious people who will drop all the qualifying truths that should surround the first truth, and use it for bad ends.

So people in the Jo Boaler camp are not wrong when they say that children need to learn about the times tables more than they need to just learn the times tables. They need to see and appreciate the deep relationships hidden in them ... the procession of the square numbers, the occurence of 'twin primes', those numbers which are both cubes and primes, the peculiar properties of multiples of three and five and nine.

But there are teachers who will just hear the disparagement of learning the times tables by heart, and will be happy to drop one more annoying exercise from the list of things they've got to teach Year 3. Their unfortunate wards will learn neither the times tables, nor the mathematical facts about the times tables.

 

well we have to try, segregation is not the answer

some Americans votes are worth more then others as they offset millions of votes

even Trump thinks this is bad

 

Yes, there's of course a distinction between school and out-of-school. In a 'good' home, children learn a lot out-of-school. Their parents discuss the news over dinner, they listen to documentaries, they take their children to museums. They teach their children good manners, inculcate the value of hard work, set a good example.

Then there are homes where this doesn't happen, where just the opposite happens. Children raised in these homes are, to be brutally honest, beyond hope. They're in the school-to-prison pipeline from the very start.

But there is a spectrum -- homes where the parent (generally just one nowadays) would like her children to escape the environment that surrounds them, but where she herself cannot offer much to them besides the example of good character.

It's the hundreds of thousands of homes like this which have provided the impetus for the Charter Schools movement in the US -- and for School Choice in general.
We need to think about ways to provide opportunities for these people to get their children on the right path. Even if the mother wants to do the right thing, a chaotic school with a high turnover of able teachers, and a core of mediocre or bad teachers, will undermine her efforts.

 

Yes, Nicholas Wade had to skirt delicately around this issue, and be very cautious when he addressed it directly. The Thoughtpolice still saw that he had rejected the Central Dogma of the Social Sciences, which is that all human groups have exactly the same cognitive capacities, and are Blank Slates at birth, so that any differences among them later are due entirely to the environment and to it alone.

But as the Russians say, you can't fool life.

 

I always knew that it would take only a little time from demanding stereotyping and hating Muslims be acceptable till it turned on Blacks. Wow, white nationalists knew Trump would be a win, win for them. I have lurked on Stormfront, did so quite a bit a few years ago till I got where they were coming from. I never posted there and I have no wish to do so with such here. It is known that genetically there is more difference between people claiming to be of the same 'race' than between people claimed to be of a different race. It takes 3 generations for a black person to become white and 3 generations for a white person to become black. White people have only been around for about 5,000 years - but as I said I do not involve myself in talks with White Nationalists - even if they now like to try and pretend they are not by suggesting 'asians' have higher IQ than them. I look forward to the day they go back in the closet.

 

It's important that people believe that their system of government is basically fair. Of course, this means that majorities should not feel that minorities have unjustly gained power. But it also means that minorities should feel that a majority cannot misuse its power against minorities.

The American system is designed to prevent too much concentration of power in the hands of our elected representatives, even if they have a majority of voters behind them. Originally, the idea was you would elect a College of Electors, who would then debate among themselves and choose a President. But as it worked out, it's a sort of weird refraction of the popular vote.

Non-Americans often find the American system of long terms for Senators, only a third of whom face election at any one time, and short terms for Congressmen, with a President who may preside over a 'parliament' where he has no majority ... strange. But it has more or less worked. And many systems which are far more 'democratic' in a formal sense, have resulted in chaos, and worse. The most democratic system you can think of would have a single chamber, with its executive chosen by the elected representatives, yearly elections, and all based on proportional representation. God save us from such a system!

Our current arrangement does have the virtue, or should, of preventing a few populous big states from dominating the smaller states. However, with a winner-take-all rule for electoral college votes, which is the case in most (but not all) states, campaigners will tend to ignore states where they believe they can't win anyway.

So what about a Constitutional Amendment requiring electoral college votes to be allocated on a proportional representation basis: that way Republicans would get some of California's electoral college votes, and Democratic Socialists would get some of Alabama's. And candidates would have an incentive to campaign in all of the states.

Small states (i.e those with not-large populations) would still be "over-represented" in the Senate.

However, I am not optimistic about the possibilities of consensual Constitutional changes. My side of the barricades has the feeling that your side wants to use governmental power to force your social values on us -- putting Christian bakers in prison, for example. So don't expect us to do anything that will make it easier for you to do that.

 

Yes, we could have a long debate about all this, including what is known as "Lewontin's Fallacy". But the technical issues are probably above the pay grade of most of us. So best to let the scientists get on with their work, identifying the hundreds of genes which influence IQ, determining their distribution among the human population, and, eventually, working out how we can give all our descendants the best variants of these genes.

 

it could still happen, the electors are under no obligation to vote as the voters did, so the state could vote against Trump and the electoral college still vote for him....

this system needs fixed, no one should win with millions less votes

 

It definitely would help; though I suspect power would be nuclear generated.

 

Surely John Galt must have discovered clean, safe, efficient fusion power by now?

 

That could happen, but it would only happen in very extraordinary circumstances.

I think you're making the case for direct democracy here: annual elections, a single chamber, frequent referenda, no restrictions on what the majority votes for. It's pure democracy ... As a conservative I'm suspicious of pure democracy -- tyranny of the majority and all that -- and want to hedge it about with all sorts of restrictions. The election of Trump doesn't remove my suspicions.

The problem is in the 'hard cases make bad law' category. The election of someone like Trump was a rogue wave, historically speaking. The Republican Party, responsive to its donor class, got out of sync with its base, who are actually -- I know liberals find this hard to believe -- economic liberals. Or, I should say, the social conservatives are economic liberals and the economic conservatives are social liberals.

Since the culture war has been lost, the Republicans have found it harder to mobilize their base around cultural issues.

Nor will waving the flag work as it used to, since it's now identified by the base as sending their sons to be maimed and killed in obscure foreign countries for no good reason.

So they were open for someone who was more in harmony with their beliefs. Unfortunately, we got Trump instead of Hucklebee.

We'll just have to live through this period and hope that the mullahs or the Chinese don't do what FDR did to Hitler -- personally insult him so that his judgement is clouded and he impulsively does something really stupid in military terms.

 

I'm sure there are some creative minds working on the problem. However, wether or not Rand’s science fiction elements in Atlas Shrugged become as real as some of Jules Verne’s ideas, is dependent upon the degree we move from faith towards reason, from collectivism toward individualism, from socialism towards capitalism, or vice-versa.

 

nope, I am only saying 1 vote should equal 1 vote, no ones vote should be worth more then anyone elses, everything else stays the same

 

But it is fun!

 

Nobody chooses to be poor.

 

Neo-liberal is already a thing and it is an economic term nothing like what you are trying to imply.

Social Marxism is what Anders Breivik was raving about when he shot all those kids on summer vacation on that island. Is that really the example you want to follow?

Liberalism is not what you think it is. It is almost completely absent from political life today.

The origin term liberalism was meant to describe a form of libertarianism.

The term has been bastardized and lost its original meaning so that right-wingers can have something to condemn - much like socialism.

 

Well, language is generally imprecise. I prefer to use the term 'fun' for things that light up my lower brain functions without engaging the higher ones much, things which are easy to do, or which require no effort at all.

Probably there are people, and I suspect you're one, for whom engaging with serious mathematics is easy, and therefore 'fun' in the sense in which I use the term.

But down at my level, it involves a lot of pain and hard work! And when I'm trying to get kids to appreciate serious mathematics, I want to acknowledge that it's probably painful for them, at first. But also that when it 'clicks' ... when you finally see and understand, for example, the proof that there are an infinity of primes .... you have a good feeling ... partly about yourself. I call it something other than 'fun' but it's just a personal preference.

 

No, but don't you believe that in some cases at least, people choose to behave in such a way that they remain poor.