Archive for the ‘HBD’ Category

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Apr
11
2010

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

From Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia and his colleagues have pinned down five basic “moral triggers,” or the factors people use to judge right from wrong and that have evolved in human societies. Different cultures and even individuals  place more emphasis on certain triggers compared with others.

In a broad sense, they boil down to:

  • Harm/care: People are sensitive to suffering and have negative feelings toward those who are harmful and cruel. They value kindness and compassion.
  • Fairness/reciprocity: A history of cooperation means humans have evolved a sense of fairness and reciprocity, leading to altruistic actions.
  • Ingroup/loyalty: People place moral value on those who do what’s good for the group; are loyal to the group; and dislike disloyal members.
  • Authority/respect: Humans tend to respect authority and tradition.
  • Purity/sanctity: The idea that we view our bodies as sacred. This idea ties into religious views about the body and human actions.

Studies have shown that liberals tend to care only about harm and fairness when considering whether something is moral or not, said Peter Ditto, a professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine, who is involved with Haidt’s research. In contrast, conservatives have a more traditional moral structure, and tend to care about all five morality factors, he said.

“So that’s where a lot of the problems come in, is that the things that really bother conservatives don’t bother liberals very much,” Ditto said. “And the two groups don’t understand each other’s morality very well.”

Take gay marriage, for example: “From a liberal standpoint, gay marriage isn’t a problem, it doesn’t harm anybody, and it’s only fair that gay people be allowed to be married just like straight people can,” Ditto said.

But for conservatives, gay marriage goes against the traditional idea of marriage, and so presents a real moral problem….

Of course, the idea of marriage being between one man and one woman is also Bible-mandated. So even just the fact that conservatives are more religious (on average) than liberals would skew the support/opposition for that issue.

Psychology research has also identified personality differences [e.g., conformity => conservativism] that might lead people to identify as either liberal or conservative.

“If you have a high need for certainty, you like things to be very sure or certain, [and] if you have a high need for order, if you tend to see lots of threats and danger out in the world, you’re more likely to identify as a conservative,” said Christopher M. Federico, a professor of psychology and political science at the University of Minnesota.

On the other hand, people with a lower need for certainty and order and who are less likely to see the world as a threatening place are more likely to identify as liberal, he said.

Plus, a greater competence in formal/abstract thought—which is a necessary condition for scoring well-above-average on IQ tests—is going to get you thinking about not merely the human rights of others (e.g., minorities) but also other “liberal” things like vegetarianism from an animal-rights perspective … with the predictable outcome of that being that liberals, on average, have notably higher IQs than conservatives (by a stunning difference of 106 vs. 95).

Contrast that with the one-dimensional, Steveospheric view of liberal motivations, as expounded by the Catholic Sailer himself:

I suspect … all that white liberals care about [is] feeling smarter than white conservatives….

Anyone even remotely interested in fairness would, of course, feel obliged to point out the different-but-equal ways in which (white) conservatives strive to feel superior to (white) others, e.g., in terms of financial status, rather than intellectual abilities … or even just to feel good about themselves, for example, in conservatives making themselves feel morally superior to others by doing “God’s will” as defined in the Bible—e.g., in terms of opposition to gay marriage and abortion—as opposed to liberals making themselves feel morally superior by, say, supporting the human rights of women and minorities. (When you compare the two approaches, the latter really is a case of moral superiority, while the former is just plain stupid; and as much as multiculturalism inherently doesn’t work, neither does conservative Christianity, e.g., for science and free-thinking, never mind in tolerance for gays, etc.)

And note: Sailer, as a good Catholic, is of course opposed to abortion. He couldn’t feel very good-and-moral about himself if he wasn’t, could he? Never mind that that opposition is scientifically indefensible: In the Steveosphere, science only matters when it supports HBD. Outside of that, the only way to fit in, in such a pool of global-warming deniers, is to be scientifically illiterate: accepting evolution while simply not worrying about at what point, exactly, a species descended from Great Apes supposedly started to possess a divinely-infused soul which will eternally outlast the body!

Is there a conceivable scenario in which liberals would have evolved to be overwhelmingly more status-conscious than conservatives are? No, there is not. In which case the worst thing you can say about the two sides, in blanket terms, is that they crave the very same status and feelings of moral superiority, but go about achieving that in different ways, within their respective in-groups.

If people like Sailer were interested in fairness, they would admit that painfully-obvious fact, now and then, rather than endlessly beating a dead horse about how voting for the “black” Obama “made [white] people feel better about themselves for liking him,” and indulged white liberals’ “desire to feel superior over other whites” … after eight years of Bush lying to and wantonly destroying the country, at a point where any alternative would have looked good by comparison, even if it wasn’t a “magical negro”!

Posted in HBD, Politics, Steveosphere | Comments Off

Mar
31
2010

Arriba! Escalante! Escalante! Arriba!!

You may have seen the much-ado about the death of Jaime Escalante, recently:

Escalante is legendary for creating the advanced math ‘pipeline’ program at Garfield High in East Los Angeles in the ’70s and ’80s, an area populated mostly by poorer Hispanic families. Escalante’s students eventually outpaced even richer schools in advanced placement tests for calculus. Escalante refused to accept excuses from his students or community about why they couldn’t succeed, and demanded a standard of excellence from them, defying the notion that poor Hispanic kids just weren’t capable of advanced work. While Escalante became a celebrity because of the hit movie about his efforts, jealousy from other teachers … as well as red tape from teacher’s unions and the public school bureaucracy, resulted in Escalante and his hand-picked teachers leaving Garfield.

And yet, from Escalante’s Wikipedia page:

In 1982, Escalante came into the national spotlight when 18 of his students passed the Advanced Placement calculus exam. The Educational Testing Service found these scores to be suspicious, because all of the students made the exact same math error on problem #6, and also used the same unusual variable names.

That “suggests” (cough) two things: One, that the students had seen that exact question solved by their instructor in class sometime before writing the test (e.g., from a stash of past-years’ exams, which were “good as gold” even back in my own university days, even without an answer key). And two, that they didn’t actually understand the solution they had been given, but were rather just reproducing the steps without comprehending them. Full marks for hard work and memorization, then; but there’s no way you can take the same approach in university and beyond.

You can “go far” in high school just with rote-work like the above—personally, even though I never had the least bit of difficulty doing long-division back in junior-high, I didn’t actually “get” why all that “borrowing” stuff works until I had to do multiplication and long-division in base-2 in a digital-logic course in second-year electrical engineering. ‘Cause there, even if you just start out doing it by analogy with what you’ve been doing in base-10, you’ll start to see why it works.

By contrast, I also remember a tensor question on a third-year classical mechanics test which was taken ver batim from a (solved, IIRC) example in the textbook. In Honors Physics, no less! So alright, sometimes you can do well just by regurgitating stuff without understanding it, even in junior-year physics; but that’s a dumb way to set a test, eh?

Fourteen of those who passed were asked to take the exam again. Twelve of the 14 agreed to retake the test and did well enough to have their scores reinstated.

A mere 12 out of 18 … after much additional coaching in the interim, one safely assumes. (If they could pass it the first time, why would one-third of them fail or not even try the second time around? Even if, one hopes, they didn’t have to answer exactly the same test questions the second time?)

By 1987, 73 students passed the A.P. calculus AB exam and another 12 passed the BC version of the test. This was the peak for the calculus program.

That’s 73 in a student body of over 4000 from grades 9 through 12, with around an 80% 4-year grad rate. So close to the top 10% of each graduating class.

(Growing up in a tiny rural community in southern Manitoba, I never had the privilege of taking advanced classes in high school … and actually had to take physics by correspondence, in grades 11 and 12. Literally aced it regardless, of course, and found the transition to university to be absolutely seamless. But if you want to hear about the disadvantages I’ve had to overcome, to do work at a best-in-cohort level in I.T., and at a world-class level in cult-busting and skepticism … well, any minority-member and any girl attending school in the “big city” has had advantages which I didn’t even know existed, when I was a kid. Of course, the flip side of going to a school which couldn’t afford new textbooks was that the math text I used throughout grades 11 and 12 was published before I was born, i.e., before the dumbing-down of the curriculum started. When I start thinking about what I could have accomplished in life if I’d had the opportunities which other 99th-percentile kids take for granted … and if I hadn’t wasted an entire decade of my life believing in Eastern fairy-tales, with no one to blame but myself for that … well, that’s when I start drinking.)

Admixed with the proudly raging scientific illiteracy one has come to expect from the Steveosphere (esp. on global warming, and esp. w.r.t. the “century El Nino” in 1998 which has skewed the apparent trend in the years since then), is this relatively intelligent comment (filled though it is with square brackets which have no business being there, in any style guide I’ve ever seen):

I have long thought that one of the most fascinating retrospective studies which could be directed at the recent annals of American high school pedagogical history would involve going back and figuring out once and for all just what it was that Jaime Escalante was doing with his AP Calculus classes at Garfield.

In particular:

A) Who were Jamie Escalante’s students at the time? [Where did their IQs put them on the greater IQ bell curve at Garfield, and what were their hispanic ethnicities as regarded "Castilian" -vs- Aboriginal blood?]

And:

B) What has become of Jaime Escalante’s students since then? [Have any of them maintained legitimate, non-AA employment in any technical field for the last quarter century? Or are they all now cabdrivers and short order cooks and groundskeepers? Or did they all get AA placement into law schools and now they're all pulling AA sinecures at "civil rights" law firms or in government jobs?]

Or maybe the pertinent question should be:

C) Just how difficult was the AP Calculus exam back in the 1980s? [Should a "4" on the AP Calculus exam have been a source of pride, or a source of embarrassment?]

I seem to recall a scene in the movie wherein a female math teacher at Garfield essentially accused Escalante of creating a classroom full of Pavlov’s Dogs, who memorized how to answer the questions, but who had no real idea just what it was that they were doing in so regurgitating the answers.

Yep, Pavlovian Dogs, each using exactly the same “unusual variable names,” and making exactly the same errors. Very damning, that—in any context where there wasn’t minority self-esteem and accomplishment hanging in the balance, there would be no question at all about whether the kids actually understood what they were doing: They didn’t. In fact, in any other context you’d start to wonder whether their Great Teacher wasn’t actively helping them to cheat on the exams. But to do that here would, of course, be “racist.”

In all honesty, though, if the Garfield kids had the kinds of IQs that pure-blooded Aboriginal lineage would demand of them [i.e. if they were exceedingly unlikely to have been much above IQ 105 to 110], then it’s difficult to imagine that now – a quarter of a century later – they would be able to retain much [if anything] of what they had “learned”, back in the day, under Escalante.

P.S. Compare, if you wish, the “Harlem Miracle”:

Fryer and Dobbie, and Brooks in turn, are putting an awful lot of faith in a single data point—the remarkable increase in math scores between seventh and eighth grade for the students at HCZ who entered sixth grade in 2006. If what HCZ is doing can routinely produce a .67 standard deviation shift in math test scores in the eighth grade, that would be great. But we’re certainly not seeing an effect of that magnitude in the seventh grade. And, of course, none of this speaks to the continuing large gaps in English performance.

But here’s the kicker. In the HCZ Annual Report for the 2007-08 school year submitted to the State Education Department, data are presented on not just the state ELA and math assessments, but also the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Those eighth-graders who kicked ass on the state math test? They didn’t do so well on the low-stakes Iowa Tests. Curiously, only 2 of the 77 eighth-graders were absent on the ITBS reading test day in June, 2008, but 20 of these 77 were absent for the ITBS math test. For the 57 students who did take the ITBS math test, HCZ reported an average Normal Curve Equivalent (NCE) score of 41, which failed to meet the school’s objective of an average NCE of 50 for a cohort of students who have completed at least two consecutive years at HCZ Promise Academy. In fact, this same cohort had a slightly higher average NCE of 42 in June, 2007….

The ones who skipped the Iowa test will not have been the “keeners,” so on average (i.e., with that “attrition”) the group should actually have scored higher on the Iowa test than on the NY state one, all other things being equal.

An NCE of 41 corresponds to roughly the 33rd percentile of the reference distribution, which for the ITBS would likely be a national sample of on-grade test-takers. Scoring at the 33rd percentile is no great success story.

How are we to make sense of this? One possibility is that the HCZ students didn’t take the Iowa tests seriously, and that their performance on that test doesn’t reflect their true mastery of eighth-grade mathematics.

And the other, much more likely possibility, of course, is that the kids were “taught to the (in-state math) test” by teachers who, at a minimum, had a thorough background in exactly the type of questions which were likely to be posed on it (e.g., from copies of past-years’ exams from their own state … but perhaps not from out-of-state, or at least not placing the same emphasis on previous-years’ examples from the latter).

Posted in HBD, Steveosphere | Comments Off

Mar
02
2010

Prehistoric 7-11

Behold, one of the few things which the Steveosphere actually gets right … now confirmed by Nicholas Wade at the New York Times:

“… for the last 20,000 years or so, people have inadvertently been shaping their own evolution.

The force is human culture, broadly defined as any learned behavior, including technology. The evidence of its activity is the more surprising because culture has long seemed to play just the opposite role. Biologists have seen it as a shield that protects people from the full force of other selective pressures, since clothes and shelter dull the bite of cold and farming helps build surpluses to ride out famine.

Because of this buffering action, culture was thought to have blunted the rate of human evolution, or even brought it to a halt, in the distant past. Many biologists are now seeing the role of culture in a quite different light.

Although it does shield people from other forces, culture itself seems to be a powerful force of natural selection. People adapt genetically to sustained cultural changes, like new diets. And this interaction works more quickly than other selective forces, ‘leading some practitioners to argue that gene-culture co-evolution could be the dominant mode of human evolution.’”

Which, of course, is a Very Bad Thing for societies/cultures which got a late start on agriculture, cities, and civilization.

But Very Good News for whitey and Jewey. :)

[U]p to 10 percent of the genome—some 2,000 genes—shows signs of being under selective pressure.

These pressures are all recent, in evolutionary terms—most probably dating from around 10,000 to 20,000 years ago….

Genes that cause paler skin in Europeans or Asians are probably a response to geography and climate.

Yep, and that same “geography and climate” are what forced us into hard-scrabble farming, grain surpluses, and trade, rather than merely subsisting as simple hunter-gatherers, getting our food from the prehistoric version of a 24/7 corner store, with no need to plan beyond the next meal.

A third group of selected genes affects brain function. The role of these genes is unknown, but they could have changed in response to the social transition as people moved from small hunter-gatherer groups a hundred strong to villages and towns inhabited by several thousand, Dr. Laland said. “It’s highly plausible that some of these changes are a response to aggregation, to living in larger communities,” he said.

Posted in Evolution, HBD, Steveosphere | No Comments »

Jan
30
2010

Ruthless (Haitian) People

The average IQ in Haiti is ~70.

You need to have an IQ above 115 in order to be even minimally competent even in the easier branches of engineering (e.g., civil).

In Haiti, that’s three standard deviations above the mean, i.e., 99th percentile. And anyone with that level of intelligence will have brain-drained out to the civilized world as soon as they could haul their nigger asses out of that shithole (pop. 9 million), to somewhere that they could make decent money (and be hired in minority-preference to whites who were born here).

So it’s no surprise that buildings collapsed during the 7.0 earthquake, given that it was Haitian engineers who designed them: Those buildings were designed by literal incompetents, in the profession. Presidential palaces, low-rise apartment blocks, cathedrals, schools, power plants, malls (if they have any)—all were designed by literally incompetent engineers/architects. No doubt the foremen and grunts who put the structures up were niggardly incompetent too; but it wasn’t just that they were too stupid to follow building codes—they weren’t the ones who designed buildings with “unwieldy slabs of concrete.”

And through all this, I can’t stop thinking of the lines in Ruthless People:

“And then we’ll fly to Haiti.”

“That’s Tahiti.”

(“Either he’s a complete moron, and complete morons are rare….”)

Posted in HBD, Niggers | No Comments »

Jan
25
2010

Breeding Has Made Dogs’ Heads Incredibly Diverse

Breeding Has Made Dogs’ Heads Incredibly Diverse:

A new study reveals that the variety of skull shapes among domestic dogs has become just as diverse as the variety between other mammal species, such as bears, weasels,  and seals. In fact some dog breeds’ heads vary in shape by more than the variation between cats and walruses….

“We usually think of evolution as a slow and gradual process,” said study researcher Abby Drake of the of the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. “But the incredible amount of diversity in domestic dogs has originated through selective breeding in just the last few hundred years, and particularly after the modern purebred dog breeds were established in the last 150 years.”

Posted in Evolution, HBD | No Comments »

Jan
23
2010

Eye Que

Hmm, seems that Mensa will accept GRE results in place of a formal IQ test for membership … but not results from after November, 2001. And SAT scores … but not after 1994. And the Canadian Armed Forces GC Test … but not if it was taken after 1980.

After decades of falling SAT scores—in part a result of more and more (i.e., less-and-less smart) people taking it—the SATs got “renormalized” (i.e., made easier) to a 500 score in 1994. Similar thing must’ve happened with the others.

You can’t fool Mensa, you know. Not on IQ, anyway.

Posted in HBD | No Comments »

Jan
17
2010

Richard Dawkins is a Hypocrite, a Fool, and a Disgrace

Well, this is interesting: Richard Dawkins is a Hypocrite, a Fool, and a Disgrace:

[W]hat goes down in Richard Dawkins’ name on “The Official Richard Dawkins Website,” RichardDawkins.net?

The purest form of censorship of an unwelcome truth of evolution.

A day or two ago, I registered on the site so that I might comment. I mean, it’s talking about what evolution and biology imply for society, right? What more natural venue in which to talk about biorealism?

Well, I got exactly three posts in before I was banned for, and I quote, “racist bigotry.” Now I suggest that the reader go to the thread in question, read my three posts, and decide for himself or herself whether I in any way make any assertion that goes beyond the bare claim that genes likely play a major role in the differing performance of different races on tests of cognitive ability. Do I in any way try to justify discrimination against people of certain races? No. Do I even claim that, say, Affirmative Action is a bad policy? No. I make no value or policy statements at all. In fact, of course, as my previous posts on this blog make clear, I emphatically do not believe that discrimination of any kind against disadvantaged races or ethnicities is in any way warranted, and indeed believe that Affirmative Action has strong justification not only in the face of facts of racial differences, but in no small part because of them.

Posted in HBD | No Comments »

Dec
27
2009

The 10,000 Year BitTorrent

Hmm, if you’ve been thinking of reading Cochran’s The 10,000 Year Explosion, there’s a new torrent up on TBP. (No, I didn’t put it there.)

Me, I accidentally ordered two copies of that book from amazon, some time ago. So I’ve paid my dues.

Plus, I’ve already done more debunking of the stupider/quackier ideas in that otherwise-probably-right book than anyone else. So there.

Posted in HBD | No Comments »

Dec
26
2009

50 Years of Domesticating Foxes For Science

50 Years of Domesticating Foxes For Science:

In 1959, Soviet scientist Dmitri Belyaev set out to breed a tamer fox that would be easier for their handlers in the Russian fur industry to work with. Much to the scientist’s shock, changes no one had expected emerged after just 10 generations. The foxes began behaving playfully, were smaller in size, and even changed color—much like dogs.

And then there’s 10,000 agriculture-driven (villages->cities->gene-swapping, etc.) years of human domestication … well, outside of tribal Africa/Australia, at least….

What’s surprising is that we haven’t changed more than we have, in that time—both physically and cognitively. Even if the average differences in IQ between races (and individuals) were 100% genetically based, is the cognitive ratio between the average Ashkenazi Jew and the average sub-Saharan African notably greater than that between the smartest breed of dog and the dumbest?

Oh-oh, that could be mistaken as being racist, couldn’t it? You know, comparing Jews to dogs. Didn’t the Nazis do that, too?

Richard Wrangham, a primatologist at Harvard, has proposed that people are a domesticated form of ape, the domestication having been self-administered as human societies penalized or ostracized individuals who were too aggressive. [Of course, societies like the Yanomamö do exactly the opposite, with status being directly related to their aggressive/warrior activities.]

Dr. Paabo said that if Mr. Albert identified the genes responsible for domestication in rats, “we would also look at those genes in humans and apes to see if they might be involved in human evolution.”

Human self-domestication, if it occurred, would probably not have exactly the same genetic basis as tameness in animals. But Mr. Albert said that if he could pinpoint the genetic difference between the tame and ferocious rats, he would compare the chimp genome and the human genome to see if they showed a similar difference.

Oh-oh: Comparing humans to chimps, that could be … well, science.

Posted in Evolution, HBD | No Comments »

Dec
25
2009

Black Christmas

Dr. Bono and Mr. Hyde:

In Africa’s case, because the destitute there simply keep breeding at way Way WAY!!!! too high a rate, we really are throwing money into the ocean by helping them. Until they get their birthrate down to 2.0, we should not give them anything. They are only breeding more poverty.

We should only give them some seeds, and show them some farming techniques, and teach them about replacement birthrates and contraception, and then leave…………………and whatever happens from that point forward be damned. Or better yet, let the Chinese and Indians worry about it, since they are more-or-less recolonizing the continent.

The pygmy black-Asians (they are Asian according to their DNA) living in stone-age conditions on the Adamintine islands were not confronted with colonialism, and they still saunter about bare-assed naked like savages. Since we have heretofore have had no contact with them whatsoever, this is NOT OUR FAULT in the least. In truth, and we all know it, Sub-Saharan Africa would be a stone-age place if it were not for colonialism and modern communications that have availed it to the modern world. If it were left alone, it would find a stable population and it would slowly evolve to a more modern situation on its own over several hundred years. But since we “baby” the place by giving them medicine and food, like all “welfare” recipients, they are dissuaded from developing successful agriculture and institutions of education, law enforcement, and medicine of their own. We could have helped them speed up the process by showing them “how,” giving them a written language, some basic hardware to get started, and then leaving. Come back in 100 years and see if any progress has been made.

But we didn’t do that. We stayed [for the resources—rubber, diamonds, gold, etc.] and became their life-time nanny. The result is that there is infinitely more of them to feed, and increasingly they cannot make it on their own. South Africa is falling into Zimbabwe-like array, and Zimbabwe might be like a starvation-war-zone in another 10 years. The answer is not to let them overwhelm the West via immigration, but for them to fix their own land themselves.

You cannot let someone who is letting his own home fall apart, who won’t retain employment and pay his own rent, to come and live with you. He will never leave, and you will just have to pay for him. But what about when he finds a slag and starts having babies? Are you going to feed them all when he and her have five kids? You cannot. You have to let him go to sink or swim for himself.

And apparently America has a new Surgeon General. And not an oppressive (i.e., competent) whitey, either:

In what was one of her first speeches to a large crowd since she was sworn in Nov. 3, Dr. Regina Benjamin noted that the proportion of U.S. physicians who are minorities is only 6 percent—the same proportion as a century ago.

That percentage is probably directly tied to the proportion of blacks who have IQs high enough to develop a basic level of competence in the (non-rocket-science) subject. And since that percentage hasn’t changed in a hundred years, and blacks are certainly not discriminated-against in medicine now … it’s a good argument that they already weren’t being discriminated-against in that same subject, in the early 1900s.

Blacks have a big problem in graduating from proper medical schools because, with their lower IQ levels they can’t handle the academic workload. It’s as simple as that. Wherever you see black PhDs you’ll note that they’re invariably in the soft subjects like ebonics, black history, languages, racism reparation studies or other crap like that. And that’s so because faculty in those fields, being culturally sensitive, can award the highest degrees, secure in the knowledge that it doesn’t matter and that nobody really gives a shit anyway. [Women's Studies and the like are, of course, in precisely the same category: fake degrees for people who lack the brains and determination to complete a real degree (or its practical equivalent).]

However, in science, engineering and medicine there’s usually only one right answer. And that’s where blacks come unstuck. According to two of my friends who are doctors in the US, reputable medical schools there did try to push through unqualified blacks a few decades ago—at the expense of whites, of course. However, they failed their internships in droves, which then (happily) reflected back on the medical school faculty.

Even scarier is the new “medical initiative from the colour-blind Obama Administration”:

It directs the secretary of health and human services to award federal grants worth billions of dollars to educational institutions that train medical-service providers. However, “priority” for federal dollars is to be given only to those institutions offering “preferential” admissions to underrepresented minorities.

The measure will force medical institutions to hire based on race and sex, not qualifications, and to lower their admission standards, which will lead to even more “low-quality” doctors.

If you can’t find a competent doctor, it doesn’t matter so much who’s paying for your insurance, does it?

Posted in HBD, Race Relations | 1 Comment »

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