Israel's Ministry of Education has an ongoing program to identify gifted children and direct them to special courses. Yet no children from the Ethiopian immigrant community was being selected. Their conscience (pic.: Prof. Firestein) could not stand this injustice. They had to do something.
They prepared a special culture-dependent test for Ethiopians only.
My souq informer supplies the consumables. He says that a bunch of bananas is lowered from the ceiling while the testees build wooden block structures to reach the fruit. He is a hideous racist; all souq merchants are.
16 comments:
I've mentioned this before - my daughter is a member of something called "The Study of Exceptional Talent" at Johns Hopkins University. To qualify you must take the SAT College admissions test before age 13 and achieve a score of above 700 out of 800 (the 90th percentile for high school seniors) on either the math or verbal section. They estimate that .01% of the population has the IQ to do this. We attended the awards ceremony (they did a nice job - gave every one a medal and a free lunch) and out of the several hundred present, none were black. None. Because the black mean IQ is one standard deviation (around 15 IQ points or 100 SAT points) to the left of the general population, .01% becomes some infinitely small # which when multiplied by the total # of blacks in the Northeastern US does not add up to 1 child. Somehow they have not been pressured for affirmative action YET. About 1/2 the enrollees were Asian, mostly from 1st generation (immigrant) parents. Both East Asian (Korean, Japanese, Chinese) and SOuth Asian (Indian). There was a fair smattering of Jews but not an overwhelming #.
On the other hand, professional basketball and football leagues today are mostly black. Blacks have different talents than whites - no better or worse, just different. But "affirmative action" tries to pretend that there are no differences, at least in those areas where most blacks are inferior. It is even forbidden to put "black" and "inferior" in the same sentence.
There is a (cropped) photo of a winners group here: http://cty.jhu.edu/set/index.html
I think the saving grace (in terms of why they have not been crushed by affirmative action) is that the group is "rainbow" colored enough - there are plenty of brown (Indian, not Hispanic) and yellow faces to balance the white.
K
K
American Blacks are in fact mulattoes of the Bantu stock and about 30% North European male genes. Bantus are the top achievers of Africa, well above other African populations like the San, the Pigmies, and so on. Ethiopians are are mixture of older human populations (before the emergence of Homo sapiens) and I presume their average IQ is much lower than the American Black population. In fact, the tests say that they are "borderline moron" or some other unkind qualificative.
Question: Did also parents receive a medal?
No medal.
On the other hand see this photo:
http://www.ushistory.org/presidentshouse/plans/images/opening_121510/ph52.jpg
Recently the location of the home of the US presidents in Philadelphia from 1790 to 1800 (during the term of Washington and Adams) was turned into a museum (nothing remains of the house itself except some foundation stones). Because Washington had owned slaves (a few of whom he brought with him to Philadelphia as house servants to supplement the staff of white hired help and indentured servants) the entire museum became not a shrine to Washington and the fabulous democracy that he fathered, but one dedicated to the crime of slavery - Washington as war criminal. If this is what they teach schoolchildren, to hate their own country and its founders, we are in big trouble. And they do and we are.
K
P.S. the "Pan-African libation" is particularly charming and pathetic in its nonsensical made up phoniness and ignorance - by representing all African cultures you represent none. This is like having a "Pan-European Meal" - you could have pierogy with marinara sauce accompanied by English bangers and it would have the same level of integrity and authenticity.
If you believe the literature, the Africans (by this I mean the Bantu) have an average IQ of about 75-77, ie 2 standard deviations below the white mean of 100.
Legions of Denialists, form Gould to Jared Diamond, persist in trying to explain this gap (which they reluctantly acknowledged only recently as real) as being due to something-ANYTHING-other than genetic differences.
But now we have two objective tools to evaluate both the reality of the gap, and its causation: neurophysiological reaction time testing, which is, subject to a decision components' being built in, highly correlated with "G"; and the sequenced human genome.
Only those with real, as opposed to feigned compassion for the IQ have-nots (and who are not all black, by a long chalk) understand this most fundamental of truths, which is that the IQ disparity albatross around all our necks will not be cut loose without a genuinely scientific understanding of the phenomenon, and an honest march up the long, expensive and difficult path to effective physical treatments.
And there will be people with a huge stake in not relinquishing their advantages, as well as the brainpower to enforce their will.
This of course has implications for raising everybody's IQ, not just at the lower end; the next arms-race, in fact.
To be a fly on this wall over the next 50 years...
Anon.
I think we are a long way from effective "treatments" and in the meantime, in a world where brain power is more important than brawn power, those lacking the former either nationally or individually will be increasingly screwed despite the best wishes of the denialists. People are increasingly sick of funding the less intelligent to reproduce, which only makes the problem worse. Nazism gave eugenics a horrible name that it did not entirely deserve. We have no qualms about selective breeding for tomatoes or apples or dogs but when it comes to humans not a word must be uttered.
K
The main reason we are a long way from effective treatments is that we refuse to acknowledge either the existence of the problem, or its magnitude, or its true causes.
Anon.
The problem is how to avoid destructive behaviour by people who are incapable to take equal part in society. For a person it is terrible to be a qualified hopelessly inferior forever and be discriminated against. The solution was already described in Plato's Republic: False Equality. The inferior people (I think Plato called them Iron people while others were Gold people) is made to believe that they are equal, while in fact they are being subrepticiously cheated.
That is more or less what is happening in all Western societies.
It is better than having a large angry and hostile subclass. Let them feel they are equal and their past and current suffering (which are real) are being appreciated.
Yet no children from the Ethiopian immigrant community was being selected.
Ethiopian Jews?
I thought Israel is Ashkenazi Ethnostate?!
J, you are right as far as it goes, and nobody wants to gratuitously humiliate these people who are in a very real sense disabled, and badly so. They desperately need help, and this is why I think the problem is actually best conceived of in quasi-medical terms.
But the truth is that we need fewer of these people, not more, and the exuberantly dysgenic policies being pursued in the West, and by the West in Africa and elsewhere, are not aimed at containing the numbers of these people but rather at expanding them. The load placed on normal people, already under all sorts of other stresses, quickly becomes intolerable; low IQ people are often criminal, usually do not contribute to their own upkeep (unless they are "celebrities", of which there is no shortage), require constant custodial supervision and if present in large numbers, make life a squalid, violent hell for everyone including themselves.
As smart people give up and move out, the whole place gets worse and worse as the ratio of problem solvers to problem creators ("Anon's Ratio") tips over into unsustainability; witness Zimbabwe, Haiti and the Congo, for off-the-shelf examples, and parts of South Africa.
The UK, frighteningly, is not far behind.
The humane, albeit expensive solution is to assist these people with contraception, to provide supportive environments,and to understand the physical limits on their brains, and the mainly genetic underpinnings of their deficiencies. And then to think constructively how to really solve these problems in the long term. I don't doubt it's a long way off, but there might be low hanging fruit which could help a lot in the short term, especially in respect of the mildly impaired.
Anon.
To a very considerable extent a lower IQ can be compensated for by working harder. A 15 year old student with an IQ in the 130-140 range may pick up basic calculus in 3 months. Those in the 100-130 in a year. Others will take perhaps two years, but they will get there in the end if that is what is required. The trouble with American style affirmative action, is that it undermines the work ethic of the average student, who being a natural loafer is only too happy to accept any excuse for his laziness. I had some pretty average friends in Singapore who went on to obtain Masters and what not in engineering from US universities.
"in the meantime, in a world where brain power is more important than brawn power, those lacking the former either nationally or individually will be increasingly screwed"
You are a judge or some other kind of attorney by profession, right? I think you are biased in your outlook by working in a field which requires relatively high intelligence and allows considerable autonomy. Most jobs -- even white collar ones -- are not like that. Thinking is generally discouraged and obviated by technology and rote procedures. Employees are treated like children (this is why intelligent, self-styled creative types often chafe at cubicle jobs).
Herman Wouk put his finger on this in The Caine Mutiny, where he described the U.S. Navy as an organization "designed by geniuses to be run by idiots". The same could be said of Wal-Mart, for example, but the trend extends into many white collar jobs as well.
The "run by idiots" thing doesn't always work out that well and even when it does the idiots don't get paid much. Maybe we can operate on the Brazilian model of a few rich people and a vast underclass (somehow combined with a European welfare state - I frequent a supermarket in the ghetto of Philadelphia and 99% of the customers pay for their overflowing carts of food with foodstamps) but I doubt that this is sustainable.
Two general points I'd like to make.
1. As predicted 20 years ago (before I grew hair on my junk!) in the Bell Curve, America has continued to become more stratified by IQ, with the present result that not only do 40 year olds with IQs of 140+ have no idea how those with sub-100 IQs (half the population!) think and respond to their environment, they don't have any idea of how those with IQs in the 100-120 range (those mid-level managers who implement policy) operate. In effect, to the guys running our society, those who make up 75% of it are foreign, incomprehensible creatures, like...shit, I don't know, grizzly bears or something. You see them on t.v. once in a while, but that's about it. I lack optimism about a society where those writing policy lack the ability to imagine how it will be implemented or received; it will probably meet the fate of some giant animal which has distorted and delayed sensory feedback loops. The ludicrously inappropriate responses by our society to such stimuli as the Nigerian underwear bomber and Julian Assange suggest to me that this is already going on at an organizational level; O's reactions to the reception of many of his policies by the American population are another example of a fucked up feedback loop.
2. Fortunately, natural selection hasn't stopped; those of us who are religious are outreproducing those who aren't by a long reach. Religions, especially the Abrahamic religions, serve the vital function of keeping us grounded and in touch with human nature and the reality of this life. In 100 years, those atheistic Fabian socialists running things into the ground today will have gone the way of the dodo, like the Fight Club pandas who will not fuck for their species, and the descendants of the Mormons, Evangelicals, Orthodox and so on shall inherit the Western nations (I'm leaving Islamic immigration out of my analysis for the moment.) There is a bigger negative feedback loop in play here.
Atheistic Fabian socialists screw as much as the next guy (or gal) - they just don't reproduce. There was an amazing article in this weeks NY Times about some cougar woman who waited until she was 41 to get married (to a younger man) and surprise surprise she was too old to conceive even after expensive fertility treatments at an age at which women were once grandmothers if not dead. So he hire one woman to produce embryos for her and then implanted them in 2 more women (paying them all) and now she has 2 babies and all 4 of them and her milquetoast husband are all the parents of what will be 2 very confused little girls.
K
As I said before, we are going to have tax people who fail to reproduce and transfer the $ to those who do.
Distasteful, but necessary.
Anon.
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