Quigga wrote:One question I have is whether or not the mind can function without any prejudice at all.
oragami_itto wrote:Ah, the marriage of science and racism, how lovely.
Quigga wrote:One question I have is whether or not the mind can function without any prejudice at all.
Steve James wrote:I worked at ETS --the company that creates the standardized tests. Forget about IQ tests; they can change during anyone's lifetime. It's also possible to practice and prepare for them. But, say IQ tests are like other standardized tests --like the SAT, LSAT, MCAT, and GRE-- which are often used to determine college admittance, for ex.
Anyway, while at ETS, I became friends with the chief statistician. If you've seen the movie "Stand and Deliver", he's one of the people who contested the scores received by the Chicano students on the calculus exam. He had his reasons, but we got into a conversation about the differences in scores among the various groups (races, ethnicities, etc). The fact is that the group that scores the best in these tests categorize themselves as "Other." The groups that score second highest are Asians and South Asians. The third highest --in the early 2000s-- were Eastern European Jews. All of those groups had higher scores than "Whites," "Blacks," and Hispanics.
So, I asked the statistician why Black scores were compared to White scores. Actually, I was hired to do research as to why Black test takers didn't do as well on specific questions on these tests. It was called the "DIF," or differential item function. There was/is also a DIF when it comes to the scores of Whites versus Asians. I asked why "Other" wasn't used as the comparator, since that group had the highest scores. His answer was "Nobody cares about Others."
You see. It's not about the scores. It's about the conclusions that are made about them. The English disparaged the intelligence of the Irish. No one today is really interested to comparing the intelligence of Germans to Serbs, or Irish to Italians. What would we do with the results? But, Graham, what do you think about the "Black" boy in London with an IQ higher than Gates or Einstein?
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-london-46788534
Otoh, it's ok to watch people arguing about the capacities of other people --it's just dumb for anyone they're talking about to take them seriously.
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