With luck, this student won’t have her career ruined, or even much affected. I’ve seen a public call for her to be expelled.... but I doubt that this will happen. And even if some of the best future jobs are closed off to her, at least for a while, a Harvard Law diploma will get you to plenty of places. She doesn’t have to worry, I suspect, about not being able to feed herself or her future family.Isn't this a teaching moment for Harvard Law School? Dean Minow's memo dated April 29th said:
Yet the public revelation of a private conversation; the public condemnation by management; the obvious danger of serious career ramifications; the apology, which I take it came out of a fear of those ramifications — all for daring to say to friends something that simply represents a basic scientific principle (the need to be open to the possibility that there are racial differences in intelligence, as one is open to other possibilities on other scientific questions) — that just sounded a little too familiar to me.
It’s a pale echo, but of something so bad that we should be wary even of pale echoes.
A troubling event and its reverberations can offer an opportunity to increase awareness, and to foster dialogue and understanding. The BLSA leadership brought this view to our meeting yesterday, and I share their wish to turn this moment into one that helps us make progress in a community dedicated to fairness and justice.So the original "troubling event" was something Minow chose to use as a teaching moment to increase awareness, and to foster dialogue and understanding. She embraced the practice of turning the difficult material into an occasion to make progress in a community dedicated to fairness and justice.
Keep teaching, professor! A lot of us are prepped and eager for Lesson 2!
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218 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 218 of 218Theo, what do you think of my hypothetical job that requires a height of 6' 0"?
What I think society should do with that information is protect me from discrimination lawsuits because I have a thousand people doing that job and only three are women--and every single person, male or female, is at least 6' 0". But I shouldn't be held liable for not having a 50/50 gender ratio.
As for the question of what good it is to know that intelligence can be measured, my whole profession is predicated on abstract knowledge being worth knowing for itself.
If you want to to say something like I think people with 85 IQs should be forced to work in menial professions, that would be stupid and wicked, and there hardly needs to be laws on the subject because it's going to happen more often than not regardless. There's no reason to pass a law forbidding fat people from playing in the NBA either. A person with an IQ of 90 might, through Herculean efforts, put himself through college and get a degree in physics or whatever, but it's not very likely.
As Richard Dawkins said, that different races show different inherited traits is indisputable, but to base public policy on this fact would be immoral and wicked. An individual is not the average of the traits of his race or his gender. To treat him as though he is would be evil.
Nonetheless the races and genders do show meaningful differences in average traits. Just like women average 6 inches shorter than men. And Sally may well be taller than Hank.
I don't know why intelligence is the be-all and end-all of a person's worth to society. A person not smart enough to be neurosurgeon may be perfectly competent at many other things which society needs more of. Honest work shames no one.
Too many on this thread and elsewhere, including Ms. Grace, seem attached to notions of inherited deficiency, whose principal purpose, as far as I can make out, seems to be to allow such people to congratulate themselves that they were not born an African-American.
If the facts are against you, cry racism! Everyone who believes intelligence can be measured and inherited HATES BLACK PEOPLE.
I'm bored with you Theo, you're not even trying.
In my short career I've met black physicists--every one of whom is smarter than the vast majority of white people. As I said upthread, if you are of average intelligence there are five million black Americans smarter than you.
So knock off the racism accusations. You're smart enough that I know you're disregarding the statistics on purpose and concentrating on cheap accusations of racism.
Actually, learning to play Brahms' Second Piano Concerto to the level of perfection of, say, Condelezza Rice, would be even better self-improvement.
Dr. Condoleezza Rice is smarter than 99.999% percent of Americans.
And Sally is taller than Hank. So women can't be really be shorter than men, on the average, right?
Are you really this dumb, Theo?
I was going to say something nice, but let's just say I'm equally bored with you.
Accusations of racism are not nice, sir.
Gabriel -- When you say that one race may not be as smart as another race, you are a racist. It's not an accusation.
I, too, am bored with these people, Theo. Their science is pure crap but there's no getting through to them.
I will, however, say one more thing. Here is what I wish for you, Gabriel and Mr. Report and a couple others: I wish for ship to come and take you across an ocean to a place where you will be forced to do menial tasks until you die. I further wish that your children and their children will suffer the same fate. Then, their children and their children's children for few generations can live as third-class citizens with few rights and no opportunity for education or self-improvement.
Then, when we finally reach the next generation, I hope that my distant-future spawn goes up to yours and calls them fucking idiots.
Rev: But it is also possible that the explanation lies in heredity.
Theo: And then what?
And then nothing. (Assuming anyone at all sees this.)
Understanding and scientific inquiry and simply knowing something about the world does not equate to a pathology that requires action. We seem compelled, at this stage in our society, to try to FIX everything. And then we can't talk about anything that we ought not try to FIX because we can't accidentally suggest to anyone that there is a problem. We can't look at our differences because anything identified as a difference is understood as a pathology that must be cured.
It's a sad and twisted thing that likely started out as a desire to be more accepting but has ended up as being far less accepting. We don't accept any differences at all. No one is allowed to be different and we accomplish that by defining everyone as the same.
But what is, is. Nothing we can do about that. No amount of refusing to look at it will avoid it and the act of looking at it will not require that something be done to fix what isn't a problem.
But we shouldn't be afraid of looking at people, should we?
It could be that part of the problem is the insistence that we not consider people as individuals and take them as individuals. But that's a twisted and entirely voluntary thing, this refusal to take people as individuals. We end up taking the statistical stuff and misusing it because we insist on seeing people as advocacy *groups*.
What might an understanding be good for? What is science good for?
Maybe we get to understand better how brains work? Personally, I feel there is a window where intelligence is useful for survival and other good things, above which and below which the benefits diminish. Maybe we will get to understand why so many more children lately seem to be born with high intellects and functional disabilities? That would seem to be a good thing.
Maybe it will occur to someone to start valuing character and industry above other attributes... those things that we freely chose and acquire for ourselves and create within ourselves... attributes we are actually responsible for.
And maybe ask who it is most likely to fetishize intellect.
I suppose that knowledge of human nature would be used to inform some policy or law, or is this a curiosity only for abstractions?
Those are the only options for knowledge? "Government action" and "mere curiosity"?
The pretended knowledge that one race or another has some heritable advantage or deficiency has been used time and again for mischief.
Sure. But so what? It is either true or it isn't. The unfortunate thing about reality is that it affects you whether you know about it or not.
If the well-known problems of African-Americans are to be ameliorated, how will either the knowledge or belief that they, as a race, are deficient in intelligence be useful?
For starters, it will let us tell when some of those problems have been ameliorated.
If we determine that there are no genetic differences in intelligence between different groups of people, we know that any difference in educational outcomes must be the result of environment, and thus at least theoretically fixable. If, on the other hand, there are such genetic differences then we should expect corresponding differences in educational outcomes even if there's no problem at all. In the absence of that knowledge we have no choice but to keep throwing money into programs that may well have no chance whatsoever of changing anything.
If we were dealing with a truly inferior subspecies, such as surviving Neanderthals, other humans would have a tremendous moral dilemma.
That's ridiculous. We as a society already recognize that different people have different levels of intelligence, and we have already chosen to reject the notion that "smarter" = "gets more rights". The only group whose rights we restrict on the basis of intelligence are the mentally retarded, and no racial, ethnic, or demographic group scores anywhere near that badly.
Gabriel -- When you say that one race may not be as smart as another race, you are a racist. It's not an accusation.
Suggesting that one race might have different average skin color than another? Also racist.
Any suggestion that human beings are not clones of one another? Racist.
Failure to adhere to the scientifically unfounded and biologically ridiculous belief that the genes governing intelligence remained utterly unchanged across human populations separated by thousand of generations, even while countless other genes didn't, and even though no test of intelligence has ever been able to make those disparate populations perform equally? RACIST.
Their science is pure crap
The scientific consensus on intelligence is that it is at least partly genetic, that consistent differences exist across sub-populations of humanity even when education and socio-economic status are controlled for, and that nothing we've done so far has managed to eliminate those differences.
It would be "pure crap" to claim that we know the differences are genetic, just like it is pure crap to claim we know they aren't. The only scientifically responsible thing to say is that it is possible the differences are genetic, but that we don't know for sure.
I will say this, though: all you people screaming to high heaven that equal rights require equal intelligence had better pray to whatever higher powers you believe in that there isn't any genetic component to this. Because if there is, all that effort you've put into popularizing the "we can only be equal if we're identical" meme is really going to come back to haunt you.
The safer bet is the one the Founders opted for: the recognition that we deserve to be treated equally despite our individual differences in ability.
There is no scientific consensus on IQ. It is a relic of sadder time that has generally been discarded except by losers who belong to MENSA but never never get laid a few kooks, who probably also do not get laid.
Race itself will eventually be discarded as an artificial construct, excepting a few kooks who do not get laid. Your sorry, shameful arguments are an embarrassment to humanity.
There is no scientific consensus on IQ
I didn't say there was. Please re-read what I wrote, and pay attention this time. Note the use of the word "intelligence", not "IQ". The disparity appears on tests of intellectual ability in general, not just on IQ tests.
Race itself will eventually be discarded as an artificial construct
Sure, probably. That's pretty much irrelevant to this discussion, though.
Differing levels of human intelligence are at least partly genetic in origin. Unless humanity as a whole randomly interbreeds, random chance will produce disparities in the distribution of those genes. That's normal biology.
You, Theo and the other morons are choosing to read "black Americans have lower average intelligence" as "being black makes you stupid". No. If there is a genetic component here, it is almost certainly not caused by the same genes that control the features we identify as "African". The likely explanation, if there is a genetic component at work here, is simple genetic drift and differing selective pressures such as are found in genetically isolated members of any species. For example, black Americans are more likely to be malaria-resistant and sickle-cell prone than white Americans. Not because of RACISM, but because the populations were separated for around fifty thousand years and one of them dealt with malaria more often than the other.
That is why it is possible, and indeed likely, that the observed disparity in mean intelligence has a genetic underpinning. We certainly can't say that's the explanation, but -- as noted above -- we certainly can't rule it out.
Your sorry, shameful arguments are an embarrassment to humanity.
Seven, you've made it abundantly clear that you don't even understand the arguments being made. You're like one of those illiterate twits who screams "racism" when someone uses the word "niggardly".
The only argument I'm making is that nothing in our scientific knowledge can rule out the possibility of racial differences in intelligence. I'm one hundred percent correct in claiming that. You're welcome to stick your fingers in your ears and scream "RACISM RACISM RACISM", but at the end of the day I'll still be right and you'll still be ignorant. :)
Rev -- My post wasn't directed at you. I do think that you take your religious tenets of evolution entirely too far, but you aren't the person I am arguing with.
All of that said, intelligence is fundamentally unquantifiable. We'll never measure it. IQ tests certainly don't measure it. People who try to measure it are idiots.
Seven Machos said...
An IQ test gives a prediction of how smart you are.
No. It doesn't. An IQ test gives a result about how good you are at a very, very limited range of analytical games at a moment in time.
5/3/10 4:36 PM
Nope. An IQ test was developed with just push buttons and blinking lights.
It correlates well with the other kinds of IQ tests.
And the commenter above who said you are much more likely to be able to turn an IQ 180 into a good physicist than an IQ 85. Which is exactly why the tests were used by the US Army in WW1 and subsequently - to assign people to jobs they could handle.
Mark -- I have noticed that there is a strong correlation between stupid ass clowns and the belief that IQ is in any way a measure of intelligence.
Therefore, you are a stupid ass clown. QED.
Personally, I feel there is a window where intelligence is useful for survival and other good things, above which and below which the benefits diminish.
Actually, when it comes to civilizational survival high intelligence is very useful.
Alan Turing (among others) saved Britain.
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