What do you consider more important.....

[Otto3]

Re: What do you consider more important.....

ifi say this discussion is boring does that mean i am smart or dumb?

[Siggie]

Re: What do you consider more important.....

Then what exactly is intelligence and how do you guys measure it?

Intelligence is a mental quality that consists of the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations. (Myers, 2004)

Currently, it is measured by IQ tests such as the Stanford-Binet and the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS; also a children's version WISC). They're not perfect, but it's the best we have. There are also measures of cognitive ability which is believed to be highly correlated with intelligence. An example of that test is the Woodcock-Johnson III (some name huh?) Test of Cognitive Abilities.

What research?

Bouchard (1996), Devlin et al. (1997), Neisser et al. (1996), and Plomin (2003) to name a few.

You haven't shown me the path to adulthood. What sort of factors played a role there?

Again, I've said this already. They have assessed the IQ of monozygotic twin and siblings that have been reared apart (raised by different families, many in different socioeconomic classes even) and in childhood, there is a still a high correlation between the IQs of twins and siblings (though not as high as twins) which indicates a strong role of biology. Now if the correlations were perfect for monozygotic twins, that would mean it's all biology, but it isn't, so there's still a role for evironment. But realize that when they're finding correlations of .70 for example... that's saying that 70% of the variability in intelligence is accounted for by biology. That leaves 30% of the variability for environmental and other factors.
But when they test these twins and siblings as adults, they find that the correlation between them is higher than it was when they were children. So, it seems to indicate that whatever was producing that difference in the environment or whatever earlier, isn't functioning the same way anymore. So, maybe those environmental disadvantages are overcome? That's just speculation though. We cannot tease out the various environmental influences and control for them, so we can't know what exactly it is that was producing that difference in the first place, let alone what changed.

I don't care about citations. Give me your experience, your research.

I am not interested in intelligence research... this isn't an area I am doing any research in. I did provide some citations above though.

The only thing I can offer is that when I was administering IQ tests (the WAIS), I tested some Japanese students who had only been in the US between 1-4 years who outscored some whose families had been here for generations and thus knew the culture and the language.
There's a lot of individual variety. It could very well be that the small difference that exists between blacks and whites could be largely explained by that portion that's attributable to environmbent. The problem is that we can't really test that because there is so much that makes up environment.

Not when it comes to the brain, Miss Shrink. And not even when it comes to the body. Stop making silly comparisons that really only weaken your argument as a scientist, let alone a psychologist.

I am not a shrink dear. Does biology not make different races look different? It's not that different. I'm not comparing a dog's intelligence to a humans. It's relative to their own species.

Because, maybe you haven't noticed in your field research (not sure if they still teach you that sort of stuff), that schools in America are still extremely skewed and that blacks have only very recently started receiving formal education after being enslaved into believing that they were worthless for over three centuries. Give them some time. You yourself said that the difference was already much smaller. Is that not an indication in itself to leave dog breeds aside and concentrate on how to educate more people in America the way they should have the right to be educated? We don't need Phd's everywhere. We need to get kids off the streets and out of criminal behavior. Start working on that, psychologist, instead of creating and supporting biased tests that will ensure the present situation to continue and even grow worse.

? I dont think we can deny that blacks and other minorities are underrepresented in higher education or that many of the poorest schools are in areas that have large minority populations. I never said anything about this, so I don't see your point.
I think I addressed some of this above. Hopefully, that should settle our little debate.
Yet again, I am not a school psychologist, or clinical psychologist... I do study cognition, but not intelligence. I agree that education really needs to be improved and I do my share of educating in the courses I teach, but that's at the university level, so I'll leave it to elementary and high school teacher like yourself to improve the quality of education at those levels where it's really suffering. Our administrators and goverments aren't making that an easy task and I feel for you guys... but you seem to be doing what you know is right regardless of all that which is why I applauded you earlier.

FYI, I have a friend who recently got her Phd in Clinical Psychology. She has a major problem with IQ tests as well. Currently she's working on helping "lost" teenage kids find their way back into society again. That's what I call psychology.

Like I said above, I never claimed that IQ tests were flawless. Hell, when I was taking one there was a part where you are shown images and have to identify the object. They showed me a picture of what I later learned was a yoke. I am sitting there looking at it thinking "wtf is that?!" Where would I have encountered a yoke?
Yet despite that and having scored 40 percentiles lower on short-term memory and 30 lower on auditory processing (because of the ADD and this was on the cognitive abilities test I mentioned above btw and not an IQ test) than on the other sections, my overall performace was still iabove the 99th percentile. So however they calculate these scores must be taking some of these anomolous things into account.

What you're thinking is psychology is really a very narrow slice of the psychology pie. There are many many subdisciplines. It's not all therapy and mental illness like the majority of people seem to think. I would rather endure torture that be a clinical psychologist.

[Siggie]

Re: What do you consider more important.....

ifi say this discussion is boring does that mean i am smart or dumb?

Neither. It means you're not interested and should be posting in a thread which you don't find boring and can and have the desire to contribute to.

[Anonymouse]

Re: What do you consider more important.....

Where do you get this propaganda from? Always? That is not true, and I wish you knew that.

It absolutely qualifies for disqualification, because you are not considering why so many Asians score so much lower than the lowest educated African Americans, or why so many African Americans score much higher than so many whites, or why so many whites score much higher than so many Asians. All of the exceptions have reasons. You're just not looking at them, resorting instead to the easiest possible conclusion, namely that it is only, and only, a biological factor.

It is only propaganda when it disagrees with established prisms of our mind. Any legitimate attempt that has measured IQ has found the differential gaps in intelligence between Asians, whites and blacks. And more than anything, they have repeatedly established how IQ differs between these three racial groups with Asians tending to score the highest, whites intermediate and blacks are the further end of the spectrum. You do not have to like it, but that is the way it goes.

And no one ever said IQ was only a biological factor, but it is 90-95% of the time. When in 1969 Professor Arthur Jensen published a study showing that whites had higher IQs than blacks, it created shockwaves in the age of hippie liberalism that was so pervasive on American college campuses. What he did was study identical twins raised apart. Since they were the same in terms of genetics, the only difference between their IQ scores would be enviornmental. The difference was less than 10%. From this, using very good statistical methods, he proved that intelligence was over 90% genetic, and for that he was hounded, smeared and attacked for the next few decades.

Although I would recommend Jensen's book "The g Factor", I think it might get the tar brush of bias so this book, which is essentially an interview from one of the liberal ideologues at Skeptic magazine should do the job. Intelligence, Race, and Genetics: Conversations with Arthur R. Jensen.

And further evidence confirms my point as this study from late last year illuminates:

Good genes beat good homes as guide to pupils’ school success

David Smith and Abul Taher
NATURE not nurture is the main determinant of how well children perform at school and university, according to a study to be published this week.

The researchers came to their conclusion by comparing how well adopted children did at school when they were brought up alongside parents’ biological children. The relative effects of genes and the home environment were then separated out.

Previous studies have suggested that the home environment, and in particular the level of family income, is the most important determinant of educational attainment.

But the new study, to be published in the Royal Economic Society’s Economic Journal, will argue that while income and home environment account for about 25% of educational attainment, inherited intelligence is responsible for the rest.

Doubling a family’s income would have only a small effect on educational performance, say the researchers, who examined more than 15,000 children, 574 of them adopted.

It found that on average the adopted children performed less well. This of course need not be a bar to success in life. Many adopted children, including Roman Abramovich, the Chelsea owner; Kate Adie, the BBC journalist; and Eric Clapton, the guitarist, enjoy spectacular careers.

The research may lead some to question policies such as the child tax credit and education maintenance allowances, which are aimed at improving the performance of poor children at school and university. Such policies, it suggests, will work only if targeted at able children.

The study, Does Family Income Matter for Schooling Outcomes? by Wim Vijverberg, professor of economics at Texas University, and Erik Plug, an economics researcher at Amsterdam University, concludes that previous studies suggesting a strong link between family income and educational performance were flawed.

“Children of higher income parents probably do well in school because they inherit superior genes, not because they can afford to buy their children a better education,” said Vijverberg.

Adoption experts said the research failed to take into consideration other factors. Jonathan Pearce, director of Adoption UK, said: “A lot of adopted children have faced previous trauma or abuse.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1859545,00.html

I think Africans, out of all things, have contributed more to music around the globe, including classical music (many white composers were inspired by African music), than any other race in the world.

You clearly need a few more years of growth before speaking so confidently about truth.

What you think has no bearing on anything. Africa has been the richest continent in terms of natural resources yet the natives have made little or no progress beyond stone age. There are still instances of slavery and cannibalism in Africa.

And before you fall prey to that stupid error in judgement that somehow "age" establishes the rights of who has a monopoly on truth, I urge you to reconsider your faint efforts.

No one denies the reality of different races. Instead, there is an "opportunity for all" policy, and I don't see what is wrong with that. As long as people like you continue to believe that nothing can come out of these so-called lower class of men, and you don't even try to do anything about, the situation will indeed never change. Have you ever tried to educate blacks? What came out of it? Did they learn more than you expected? Are they able to score higher now on Western-designed IQ-tests than before you started teaching them? What if you had been born and raised into a rabiz environment that did not promote and support education? How far from the tree would you have fallen?

Save your egalitarian rant as it is wasted and has been uttered thousands and thousands of times of how society is not "compassionate enough" to understand "the plight of the black man". Whatever can you mean by your vague and pity soaked phrase of "opportunity for all policy"?

And by the way, it is not that I don't believe nothing can come out of the lower ends and dregs of society, I just don't care for them. They are not my concern and I should not be forced to subsidize them, nor should I be forced to constantly hear about their so-called plight. I am also tired of the hippie egalitarian slant of how society is never compassionate enough for blacks. They have been freed from slavery since 1865, and it has been more than a century and they have still not gotten their acts together. Millions of Asians have now come to the United States and are far more successful than blacks yet we never hear about them whining. After thousands of legislations, and statutes and Civil Rights policies and affirmitive actions, and quotas and litigation, what has changed? Can you seriously sit there with a straight face and blame the poor performance of blacks and other 'victims' on the "cruel society"? Whatever happened to individual merit and responsibility?

[Anonymouse]

Re: What do you consider more important.....

hey, I like where this is going...

And don't tell me you're not guilty of "choosing to measure" or analyze particular traits and circumstances in this whole issue Anonymouse. We all do this, when we try to make a point. If you really wanted to, you'd take into account that Sub-Saharan Africa was pretty much closed off from Eurasia except for brief periods when they'd have foreign relations with Greeks, Indians, Chinese and Arabs, where their cultures flourished. Finally their geopolitical positions in the world would not be so isolated from Eurasia, and they'd use foreign ideas to their advantage. Look at the Nubians, the kingdoms of West Africa and Greater Zimbabwe. If we allowed those cultures to flourish up till this point, that continent would be much more than a pile of xxxx run by military dictatorships that aren't going anywhere.

That is not the point. You were talking about genetics, not social conditions or history or other conjectures about such things. You claimed that genetics establishes more difference between individuals in one race, than individuals in separate races. I replied stating that is untrue and my reason given was because scientists can measure gene frequencies which are prevalent in all races and fail or ignore to measure gene frequencies that are different and indeed do very widely in between races.

Africans who don't know about their historical past, and the various "golden ages" they've experienced with this civilization, will have an inferiority complex and will not be able to compete with the same mentality as us whites, who most of the time, have much more opportunity to inquire about our glorious ancestors. (I'm not talking about intelligence here, I'm talking about attitude).

The African civilization is seen by us westerners as completely worthless, and our attitudes have a negative effect on blacks living here. I'm not saying we have to blindly embrace all these socialistic ideologies as you put them, but we should experiment and see what would happen if we changed all this. Instead of telling everyone that we're all equal, we can instruct everyone about the history of their indigenous or semi-indigenous civilizations. You're a proud Armenian, you know what kind of effect that has on our day to day attitude.

Even without those influences from abroad, Africa had societies that have perfected their own justice systems, migration routes, etc... over thousands of years. They had their own realm, and now, because so many have forgotten about it, there's a void inside of them. If you so badly want to get rid of them without genociding, you're gonna have to give them the resources to rebuild this realm they've had since the dawn of man. No one wants to do such a thing. It's like asking the Turks to give us our lands back, except at a much larger scale, because we're speaking of entire continents here.

And we can ask further, why is it that Africans don't know about their historical past? Can it be that because barely any of them had a written language or written recording of history? Written records are one of the requirements of a high civilization, and most of Africa has lacked it.

Basically that is nothing more than long social guess at trying to make us more "compassionate" and "understanding". While very touching, it is purely illusory and has nothing to do with the track record. So now supposedly, we are psychologically guilty for poor historical performance of blacks. No matter what, it is never there fault, or because we are genetically different and different genes have different capabitilies with regard to culture and civilization, but it is always the fault of whites that blacks have had poor performance.

[jgk3]

Re: What do you consider more important.....

I cannot refute what you said concerning gene frequencies, so I tried to take another path, I hope you didn't mind. I felt confident enough in my understanding of the social state of these people to do such a thing.

Writing only came into existance when tribes settled down and their rulers needed documentation and references to keep things in order in the tireless early city states.

Not everyone needed to do such things. Cultures with an extensive oral tradition that overcome the need for written documentation are often dismissed as uncivilized, when in fact, their tradition has many social benefits that are lacking in cultures that have written language. Look at the Native Americans. Their oral traditions play an integral role in their societies. If I'm not mistaken, it was the Apache who used silence as a means of testing out the trustworthiness of a stranger. Finally, when they found they could trust eachother a few days later, they would speak and be "all chill" with their language and have a good time. It's pretty simple and straightforward. Why would you need to complicate things with written language? Why should they develop it if things work fine without it? They understood their surroundings, they were taught by their elders, they didn't need to go to school.

Higher civilization you say? If by higher, you mean with more potential to conquer and spoil other cultures, then fine, sure, you can have it. I just don't think we should blindly believe in this "higher" civilization concept. What seems "higher" to you can be another's worst nightmare, especially if their ancestors found their respective form of order and balance with means that you frown upon. Cannibalism for example, is seen as a social stigma. In reality, it's a tradition that has been associated with death sentence and the consequences in the afterlife. In the indigenious cultures of Irian Jaya, the Indonesian half of New Guinea, cannibalism has been known for being practiced by certain tribes for the purposes described above. This sentence was reserved for those who commited murder, and punishment was a formal execution, afterwhich the body would be cooked and eaten, to prevent any chance of it being given a formal burial so that it can access the afterlife. I don't know about you, but the process makes enough sense to me. It may sound gruesome to you, but you don't live in such a violent place where people face death by nature and from rival tribes, as well as internal conflicts from within the chiefdoms they have there.

For them, this lifestyle has worked as long as they can remember, again, through oral tradition and not writing. They live in the present and have an egalitarian based society that does not require writing to pass laws and plans, they just speak to eachother, and it's more than enough.

It's sites that practice agriculture successfully that tend to develop the need for language, as the surplus of food creates an incentive for trade and diversification of trade. To keep track of these things, they begin writing. Since city states require military support to function, writing becomes applicable here too, but what if we are descendants from a region where we cannot practice agriculture successfully, does that make us stupid, because we have no need to develop language to keep track of such alien concepts?

[Anonymouse]

Re: What do you consider more important.....

Higher civilization you say? If by higher, you mean with more potential to conquer and spoil other cultures, then fine, sure, you can have it. I just don't think we should blindly believe in this "higher" civilization concept.

You very well know that is not what I am discussing about so please don't insert things I did not make in my argument. Conquering is not limited to high culture or civilization, it is universal and everyone engages in it.

And who said that somehow we are "blindly believing" in high culture? It could be stated that you blindly believe in your egalitarian fiction and your "cultural relativism", what is the point? Such assertions prove everything and prove nothing.

EDIT: By the way, it takes quite an imagination and ideological bias to state cannibalism as a pinnacle of culture.

[jgk3]

Re: What do you consider more important.....

well, you're guilty of inserting things I didn't make in my argument either with your last remark.

Well, I guess I've had enough with this discussion. There's nothing more to say.

Edit: The reason I said the whole higher civilization thing is because I was anticipating you'd dismiss my examples as lower civilization, and I was trying my best to show my perspective of the matter. I guess I acted too soon.

[Anonymouse]

Re: What do you consider more important.....

well, you're guilty of inserting things I didn't make in my argument either with your last remark.

Well, I guess I've had enough with this discussion. There's nothing more to say.

Edit: The reason I said the whole higher civilization thing is because I was anticipating you'd dismiss my examples as lower civilization, and I wasn trying my best to show my perspective of the matter. I guess I acted too soon.

What was it that I inserted in your argument? And do you really think I did it or was it more to the effect of it to prove a point? Either way, I like your contributions to this debate as a contrapositive to me.

[jgk3]

Re: What do you consider more important.....

EDIT: By the way, it takes quite an imagination and ideological bias to state cannibalism as a pinnacle of culture.

That felt almost insulting.

That's what I was refering to.

The death sentence for them isn't what their entire culture is based upon, sorry if I didn't make that clear for you. Now that I think of it, it's like a representation of America as a nation that excercises the capital punishment, and as nothing else.