November 7, 2008

Who says the social sciences aren't sciences?

People are always putting down the social sciences, saying they aren't real sciences. When an astronomer predicts a solar eclipse, it happens. But when a social scientist predicts something, how often does it come true?

Well, it depends how unpopular the social scientist cares to be. You don't even have to be a scientist. For example, it's easy as pie to make accurate predictions about school test scores. You just have to be willing to put up with little things like being denounced as evil and getting fired. The problem with the social sciences is that there's little demand for social scientists. What there's a huge demand for is social shamans who can lift the curse of the evil eye.

For example, last year there were complaints about admission to the "gifted" programs in New York City public schools. Admissions were done in a kind of haphazard fashion with some parents better able to game the system than others. The NYT reported at the time:

[Gifted programs] have also been controversial, as other parents say they have discriminated against black and Hispanic children. School officials say they hope the new plan, coupled with an intensive outreach effort, will increase those numbers.

So, what did school superintendent Joel Klein do? He sounds like a smart guy, right? So, he should understand simple cause and effect, shouldn't he?

Klein came up with the idea of using a standardized test and accepting only students who scored at the 95th percentile nationally or higher into gifted programs. What a brilliant concept! Why didn't anyone in New York think of that before! Surely, that couldn't cause any political problems!

Half Sigma immediately blogged in 2007:

I'm trying to figure out what this is changing. Without any affirmative action, the gifted classed will be dominated by Asian kids, and blacks and Hispanics will complain that they are being discriminated against.

Last week, the NYT reported on the results of Klein's brainstorm:

The number of children entering New York City public school gifted programs dropped by half this year from last under a new policy intended to equalize access, with 28 schools lacking enough students to open planned gifted classes, and 13 others proceeding with fewer than a dozen children.

The policy, which based admission on a citywide cutoff score on two standardized tests, also failed to diversify the historically coveted classes, according to a New York Times analysis of new Education Department data. ...

The incoming gifted class is 9 percent Hispanic, 13 percent black and 28 percent Asian. Their kindergarten and first-grade peers in the city are 41 percent Hispanic, 27 percent black and 15 percent Asian. Students admitted to gifted programs under the previous policies are 15 percent Hispanic, 31 percent black and 20 percent Asian.

See, it turns out that in a lot of NYC neighborhoods, almost nobody is at the national 95th percentile or above. Who could have imagined that? Apparently nobody in Joel Klein's office ... Of course, they could have just read Half Sigma's blog, but understanding how the world works is evil, so who would do such a thing?

It would appear that whites (and miscellaneous) make up 48% of the new gifted class accepted meritocratically while making up only 17% of the total kindergarteners. Under the more haphazard old system, whites made up only 33 percent of the gifted classes.

Today, the NYT is back with a report on the results of an expensive program that's been running for 14 years to boost test scores among Non-Asian Minorities (NAMs) so they can qualify for Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and the six other elite high schools in NYC where admission requires taking a test. (By the way, at Stuyvesant the average SAT score of seniors is supposedly 1410 out of 1600.)

You'll never ever guess what happened!

Racial Imbalance Persists at Elite Public Schools

by Javier C. Hernandez

Recent efforts to get more black and Hispanic students into New York City’s elite public high schools have fallen short, with proportionately fewer of them taking the admissions exam and even lower percentages passing it. The performance gap persists even among students involved in the city’s intensive 16-month test prep institute, designed to diversify the so-called specialized high schools, including the storied triumvirate of Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech.

Among the 21,490 public school students who last year took the exam, the single gateway to eight high schools, 6 percent of blacks and 7 percent of Hispanics were offered admission, compared with 35 percent of Asians and 31 percent of white students. The disparities were the worst at Stuyvesant, where 2 percent of blacks, 3 percent of Hispanics, 24 percent of whites and 72 percent of Asians were accepted. (Over all, 1 in 5 test-takers is offered a spot; racial data is not available on private school students.)

The disparities were the worst at Stuyvesant because it's perhaps the most famously competitive high school in the country.

Parents of black and Hispanic students have long complained about the lack of diversity in the elite schools’ enrollment, and the Department of Education promised two years ago to study whether the demographic lopsidedness was the result of certain groups’ doing poorly on the grueling two-and-a-half-hour test, not taking the exam in high numbers, or simply choosing not to attend the schools. The city abandoned that effort, but an analysis by The New York Times shows that not only do blacks and Hispanics lag behind whites and Asians in succeeding on the exam, they are far less likely to take it.

Perhaps most surprising is a close look at the students enrolled in the city’s Specialized High Schools Institute, created 14 years ago to prepare students for high school and recently expanded by Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein. Black and Hispanic students who attend the institute are more likely to succeed on the test. While 90 percent of Asians and 85 percent of white students at the institute take the test, 65 percent of blacks and 70 percent of Hispanics do; last year, of the institute graduates taking the test, 58 percent of the Asians, 49 percent of whites, 21 percent of Hispanics and 19 percent of blacks were offered admission.

Let's do the math. Among Asians enrolled at Specialized High Schools Institute, 52% pass the test (90% times 58%), as do 42% of whites, 15% of Hispanics, and 12% of blacks. It looks like another example of La Griffe Du Lion's Fundamental Constant of Sociology -- the gap between blacks and whites in average scores on tests of reasoning is about a standard deviation.

Deputy Mayor Dennis M. Walcott said the data showed there was work to be done both to get black and Hispanic students to take the test and to help them pass it.

“I’m not ever happy when I see a low percentage of those students participating in schools that are high rigor,” he said. “It’s important for the halls of Stuyvesant, the halls of the Bronx High School of Science, to be reflective of the city itself.”

Instead, the schools that make up the upper crust of the public education universe belie the system they are part of and the city where they reside, and the disparity between the races has grown even more pronounced over the past decade.

In this city of 1.1 million public school students, about 40 percent are Hispanic, 32 percent are black, 14 percent are Asian and 14 percent white. More than two-thirds of Stuyvesant High School’s 3,247 students are Asian (up from 48 percent in 1999). At Brooklyn Technical High School, 365 of the 4,669 students, or 8 percent, are Hispanic; at the Bronx High School of Science, there are 114 blacks, 4 percent of the 2,809-student body.

The other schools in the elite group, considered a second tier, are more diverse: Brooklyn Latin School, for example, which became a specialized high school in 2007, is 23 percent Hispanic and 32 percent black (though it has 183 students, a fraction of the top three).

The portrait of test-takers from public schools is closer to the overall enrollment, but hardly a mirror: 28 percent of last year’s were black, 23 percent Hispanic, 30 percent Asian and 19 percent white.

Marcia V. Lyles, deputy chancellor for teaching and learning, acknowledged that racial diversity at the schools “is not where we would want it to be.”

Elizabeth Sciabarra, who oversees student enrollment planning, said the city had increased its efforts to inform families about the test, with the hope that interested students of all backgrounds might start preparing earlier. But, she noted: “It is a choice. There are kids who might be wonderful candidates for this who will just not sit for the test. That transcends ethnicity; that’s across the board.”

The test-prep institute, which includes a full-time five-week summer session and twice-a-week workshops during the school year, was a core part of the city’s strategy to diversify the ranks of the elite schools. But the intensive program has been hampered by a Supreme Court decision last year that ordered districts to remain race-neutral in efforts to diversify schools. Now the program gives preference to students based only on family income, not race.

And enrollment in the institute has fallen to 2,800 students at 10 sites this year, from 3,800 students at 17 sites in 2006. Education officials said that they reduced the number of sites to standardize the curriculum and that despite the drop in enrollment, more students were currently receiving the full test-prep regimen.

The test itself, consisting of 45 verbal questions and 50 math questions, measuring students’ ability, for instance, to put sentences in order and discern geometrical angles, has also become a subject of criticism.

Joshua N. Feinman, an economist who graduated from Stuyvesant and is the parent of a Bronx Science junior, recently released a study challenging the validity of the test, saying it had not undergone normal predictive bias studies to see if it was skewed toward any gender or racial groups. The study revives complaints from the 1960s, when civil rights groups charged that the tests were unfair to black and Puerto Rican children and should not be the only criterion determining access to the schools.

Department of Education officials said they were confident that the test, which is manufactured by Pearson and has been used since the 1970s, was reliable.

These results are all straight out of La Griffe du Lion 101, but it constantly comes as a big surprise to people like Joel Klein.

But, of course, now that Obama is in, we have Hope and Change, so everything will be different Real Soon Now.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

75 comments:

  1. This blog post should actually be an article and be circulated to as many audiences as possible all over America.

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  2. This isn't "science" this is common sense.

    Statistics isn't a form of science, it's a form of mathematical logic.

    Applying statistics to human phenomena isn't "science" it's common sense and correct use of mathematical logic.

    You're making a pun here using the word "science", if you're trying to say this is natural science going on here.

    It's more like "nursing science" or "library science".

    It's common sense using simple math.

    It aint' "science.

    The crime here is the crime of using common sense, not the crime of using "science" or mathematics.

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  3. It's making more accurate predictions.

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  4. Only 14% of NYC public school kids are white? Wow.

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  5. Oh, screw you, Steve. You are so politically correct when it comes to Asian and Jewish IQ.

    The salient point is that their intelligence is fundamentally not the same as Europeans. All of homo sapiens racial subgroups process the world differently. And we don't want to lose our white societies. They are wonderful and unique. Is that so hard to understand?

    You don't mention it but La Griffe du Lion has also explained why filling the USA with Asian elites would be a different kind of disaster, but a disaster still the same. And Kevin MacDonald has explained in detail the Jewish elite disaster that is unfolding.

    White societies work just fine when they remain white. In fact the white countries are the great societies of the world. Enough goddamn globalist koolaid.

    I am so sick of your acceptance of our supposed improvement via replacement with Asians and Jews in the high IQ niches. That whole operation is such an evil scam. The takeover of the California university system by Asians is a historic fiasco and a crime against our forefathers. Giving away a country to aliens is a crime.

    You can't replace white genius with clever non-white peoples and get anything but decline. I know that's hard for you to digest, Mr Citizenism, but digest it you will.

    Look around. New America guided by an Asian/Jewish elite is fast turning into a shithole. And the Asian/Jewish dominated Ivy League has morphed into a politically corrected clever idiot farm. We will end up a broken country that functions like Mexico and ironically attracts absolutely no immigrants but felons on the lamb.

    Asian/Jewish elite California is a disaster. A goddamn disaster.

    And yet our new alien elites are acclaimed by all as being superior to Whitey. Yes, so nuanced and sophisticated in their thinking compared to old-fashioned white bread. What goddamn lies.

    Screw you, Steve. History books will barely even mention the Asian/Jewish elite phase of America. This sick era will get as much attention from historians as the pathetic tail end of the Roman Empire when various other genius aliens seized the controls and reaped an incoherent mess.

    Why don't you put your money where you mouth is and move to some Asian country? Or frigging Israel? Why don't you go immerse yourself in a society guided by their superior brain power and wisdom? NO. You'll stick close to whitey until the day you die. In the end you know his society is the best deal you're gonna get with your penchant for a crusty old concept like personal liberty.

    Still it all could've been so much better if mostly Asians and Jews were at the Constitutional Convention instead of miserable white bread, right? Too bad America didn't have an Asian/Jewish elite firmly in control since 1776 or even earlier. Yes, that would've produced Utopia. Heaven On Earth.

    Yes, a truly great America would have sprung from that superior Asian/Jewish DNA instead of the long lame history of Dumb Whitey America.

    You fool.

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  6. Speaking of being denounced and fired, isn't it good news that Larry Summers is on Obama's cabinet?

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  7. I agree. As an amateur sociologist, I see trouble on the horizon for South Africa.

    I doubt I would succeed as a professional sociologist.

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  8. One thing that is jokingly suggested in these circles from time to time is to complain of "preferential treatment" of asians. Has this ever been tried to anyone's knowledge? I just want to see some self righteous sputtering... :)

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  9. Re white NYC students - it may be the reason they seem to stack up fairly well vs the Asians is that many of these whites are Ashkenazi Jewish, with a distinct right-shifted IQ distribution (ie they're smarter)?

    I find it interesting that Diversity allows discrimination against Asians (by treating them separately from whites, and capping numbers) but not against Jews these days.

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  10. The admissions test worked: The six brightest kids in my junior high made Stuyvesant.

    (It's easy to tell. Smart kids are grouped in the top class or two per grade, and everyone knows who's the smartest in each class.)

    Also, one gets the impression the standard deviation of Hispanic IQ isn't very high. For some reason Hispanics simply don't produce top students, just a gigantic mass clustered around mediocre.

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  11. research psychology is really pretty good and advanced now, and can predict a lot of things.

    like a lot of science fields, i think people who never took a few courses in it at a good college probably have the wrong idea about it.

    one of my best friends is a physics PHD from MIT, and unfortunately "psychology" means psychotherapy to him. he's never been exposed to the multiple directions psychology has moved in, so he doesn't even know.

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  12. The same thing is going on all over the country.. Look at honors classes in high school.. these are limited to perhaps 5 to 10 percent of the cohort. There are hardly any NAMs in this group, at least in the better high schools; of the NAMs who do make it, a significant number will probably be bi-racial. I see quite a lot of asian-african american mixtures on college campus (they must be a miniscule percentage of the AA population). All things being equal, shouldnt this mixture outperform the white-african american mixtures in standardized tests? The principal beneficiaries of AA are in fact either elite africans or white/asian+african bi/multi racial mulattos.

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  13. Here's Yahoo's most popular news story of the moment. I expect we have four more years of this sort of fawning and vomitsome crap to look forward to.
    ___

    'Mutts like me' - Obama shows ease discussing race AP

    WASHINGTON - It popped out casually, a throwaway line as he talked to reporters about finding the right puppy for his young daughters.

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  14. As I've said before my pet bugbear of the 'social sciences' is economics (which for some unfathomable reason has a kudos that sociology - which is probably more truthful- does not).
    The essence of my coplaint is since all the non-trivial propositios of economics are unprovable - really the word 'worthless' would be used in a real science for this state of affairs - the rantings, pomposity and theorizing of the whole gaggle of fools should be given very little creedence.An even bigger objection is that for the most part economist play a lttle childish game of party politics bending their verbiage and theorizing to suit whatever particular juvenile college student allegiance they ever had.
    By contrast sociology is almost all observational - it has no pretensions to be 'scientific', and so perhaps is first brother to the humanities such as history and anthropology in providing an empirical description of the world as we see it.Unfortunately, for the most part (at least 99%) it is tainted with the stink of party politics and juvenile self-indulgence.

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  15. Stuyvesant's white students are hardly typical whites Steve, ignoring this fact entails giving generic whites too much credit.

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  16. Let's call the whole thing off

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  17. A few semi-informed comments:

    Joel Klein knows full well what he's doing. His job is one of the most political in the nation, and if emulating the CA state college system (of guaranteed admission above a certain %) helps cover his ass when it comes to disparities, he'll publicly support it.

    The 14% "white" public school students also includes middle easterners. I wonder how much of that 14% is "traditional whites": Staten Island Italians, Brooklyn Russians, Jews who never left for the burbs. I'd guess 6%.

    A lot of Asian kids in NY are raised from elementary school with one goal: Stuyvesant, then Harvard. It would blow your mind how single-minded some families are toward this goal.

    The NY public schools are really, really struggling to deal with all the Spanish-speaking kids in their schools. Roughly 11.7% of the children in the city's public schools are kids of illegal immigrants. And to most of these parents, Stuyvesant is just a part of Brooklyn where the black people are scary.

    There's a new documentary called Frontrunners about competitive kids in Stuyvesant. Brilliant movie and great piece of sociology, check it out if you can.

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  18. La Griffe also offers a solution to Joel Klein´s problem.

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  19. Does everything in the world hate black people? Of course, we all know that there's a racist inside every white person. Then we read about how even dogs can be racist. And now we learn that pencil-and-paper exams hate blacks!

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  20. "Only 14% of NYC public school kids are white? Wow.
    "

    You wouldn't know that if you look at stuyvassant ,brooklyn tech or bronx science. I live by Brooklyn Tech - one of the elite schools - and its about 95% white, Oriental, and Indian.

    Sometimes in the morning there are brooklyn tech kids sitting on my stoop, smoking cigarettes, when I come out they get up and say 'excuse me sir'

    on the other hand, occasional the NYPD schools unit (forget what its called) has to occasionally sweep the area because black kids are hanging around there- trying to deal drugs or beat up the brook tech kids

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  21. rightsaidfred said:

    "Only 14% of NYC public school kids are white? Wow."

    According to the Wikipedia, 34.8% of NYC's population was non-Hispanic White in 2006. However, a lot of these are hispters (idle children of out-of-twon rich people). Those almost never have any kids. Wall Street and media types send their kids to private schools. Same with Orthodox Jews. So yeah, 14% sounds about right for public schools.

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  22. Only 14% of NYC public school kids are white? Wow.

    Walk around any upscale residential area in NYC, such as the West Village, and you'll notice the Disappearing White Child phenomenon. You will see white infants and toddlers, but at age four or five white children mysteriously vanish. What happens, of course, is that parents move to the suburbs as their children approach school age. I will note, however, that this phenomenon would occur to some extent even if the schools were excellent, as many people figure that living in small urban apartments isn't really suitable for school-age children.

    Another factor which may contribute to the low number of white children in the NYC public schools is the fact that a non-insignificant percentage of the white children in the city are Orthodox or Hasidic Jewish and attend religious schools.

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  23. The incoming gifted class is 9 percent Hispanic, 13 percent black and 28 percent Asian. Their kindergarten and first-grade peers in the city are 41 percent Hispanic, 27 percent black and 15 percent Asian. Students admitted to gifted programs under the previous policies are 15 percent Hispanic, 31 percent black and 20 percent Asian.

    So black kids are more than twice as likely as Hispanics kids are to be part of the incoming gifted class this year? I wonder what that says about the value educational attainment/academic success is given in Hispanic and black homes. Seems to be inline with what Steve's observed previously--that Hispanics tend to be less curious and driven than other groups, even when intelligence is taken into consideration.

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  24. An aside from your larger point...

    In the minds of the parents clamoring to get their kids into gifted programs, they are being rational. Their view of intelligence is that it's a function of exposure to education. Exposure to better education causes higher intelligence. Gifted programs represent the best education -- obviously a scarce resource -- and thus are something to to sought after by everyone.

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  25. As a European I find the continued usage of race categories by American authorities interesting. In Europe collecting such information is generally illegal or otherwise discouraged.

    Considering the hysterical, denialist attitude of Americans towards racial differences, you'd think that the authorities wouldn't classify citizens by race, but I guess the information is needed for affirmative action purposes. Of course, this availability of information on e.g. racial differences in school performance in the US offers reams of evidence for HBD. In contrast, it's rather difficult to find such data for the majority of European countries.

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  26. Steve,

    Of course, your big point is right, but sometimes your tone really is offputting. And you say things in the course of making the big point that are silly.

    Where in the NY Times article does it say that the results will surprise Joel Klein? Klein isn't stupid and he knew damn well what would happen.

    Regarding the "old haphazard" system, in fact, the old system depended on standardized tests. Then it didn't. Now it does again. I'm trying to find out where Klein went to high school - I think it was a special NYC high school, but I'm not sure.

    This is all a tempest in a NY Times teapot. Nothing will change as a result of this article.

    PS I think that Stuyvie is 67% Asian because a lot of whites just don't want to go there. That's something clander should probe. Whites love Asians, esp. chicks. But not schools that are too Asian.

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  27. La Griffe du Lion also said that to optimize a school's performance one had to account for measurement error. He suggested setting a higher cutoff for the test scores of NAMs (it follows from Bayes' theorem). I will send any educrat who publically suggests this a $1000. The blowback would be hilarious.

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  28. Even the current, supposedly-test-selected gifted classes must have been partly filled by affirmative action, if the NYT's numbers are right.

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  29. Would anybody care to predict how long Michelle Rhee will last?

    http://www.edutopia.org/michelle-rhee

    "For example, Rhee says, the differential between the city's white and African American students, as illustrated by their SAT and Advanced Placement test scores, has reached "hundreds of points." And the problem, she says, is the school system, not the students. The city's African American students, Rhee says, are not getting the quality of instruction they deserve. She believes those scores can rise significantly, but it is the job of the adults in the school system to see that they do."

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  30. Is Asian immigration IQ,or status related? By that I mean when Asians choose and are chosen to come here,do they tend to be above their nations average in IQ and occ. status. If so,are they,uhm,way above? They call UCLA the University of Caucasians Lost among Asians. So Asians are making an awful big impression academically(and of course,career-ly.) So is Asia exporting members of its elite class to come here and take advantage of our system,where the rewards and opportunities are so much greater? Did we Americans build and maintain our worlds greatest university system to serve the needs of Asias ruling class? It seems a cruel and stupid trick on us.We need to spend less time jerry-rigging cockamamie Rube Goldberg schemes to get NAM's into these top schools where they havent a chance of learning,and more time getting white students into the schools our ancestors built. Maybe a note to Obama...

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  31. Anyone kmow what percentage of New York City public High School students are white? I suspect it's much lower than the overall white public school percentage. (9-10%?) It would be interesting to see how the percentage has changed from 1945-present.

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  32. My wife is an elementary school teacher in South Carolina. To gain entrance into the gifted program at her school, a student must score at a certain percentile on a standardized test. Not suprisingly, in a school exclusively comprised of white and black students, the students who qualify for AP classes are mostly white.

    However, the principal has the authority to make exceptions. So is the principal swamped with black parents demanding their children be admitted to the AP program? No. It's the white parents of the children who didn't qualify that exert whatever influence they can muster to prevent their kids from languishing in the non-AP ghetto.

    Needless to say, the gifted program isn't functioning at an optimal level.

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  33. Totally unrelated, but I chuckled when I read this. AP reports on the Obamas' search for a pet dog:

    "Because Malia, 10, has allergies, the family wants a low-allergy dog. But Obama said they also want to adopt a puppy from an animal shelter, which could make it harder to find a breed that wouldn't aggravate his daughter's problem.

    "Obviously, a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me," Obama said with a smile. "So whether we're going to be able to balance those two things, I think, is a pressing issue on the Obama household."

    So let me get this straight, one of the useful traits that pure-breed dogs were bred to possess is a relative lack of alleregens? I'm not a dog owner, so I wouldn't know, but this is what he seems to imply. And mutts lack such painstakingly selected-for traits, and are therefore unsuitable for his home? Oh my. Is he saying that they have no breeding? Random chance, lack of intelligent planning (try to imagine what a dog's IQ would be), and, dare I say it, lust, played too much of a role in the process that made mutts what they are? Too much for his taste, anyway?

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  34. Steve should also look at the Dallas Independent School District. It has one of the finest math and science magnet schools in the country. http://www.semagnetschool.org/about_us/profile.jsp?rn=1627562

    I worked with a guy who's son attended the school. When I asked him how many blacks and browns attended the school, he replied, "That's how many blacks and Hispanics applied."

    He held up his index finger and thumb; the fingers were about an inch apart.

    When I asked him how many whites applied, he responded by holding two fingers about three inches apart.

    The school district is about 5% white in total.

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  35. Any of you went to a university lately?

    Go there.

    On a friday night.

    No, not to party.

    Go to the university library - main floor.

    You will see hundreds of Asian students - cramming.

    Stay for saturday night.

    Go into the library again...


    Now, the interesting thing is that these Asian kids WILL get into gifted programs, honors programs, get awesome GPA...

    And then join the workforce, and be stumped by the simplest of tasks.

    Intelligence <> Wisdom.

    Heck, memorizing by rote <> Intelligence.

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  36. I am reminded of the old anecdote about Harry Truman, who was outraged when told that, according to standardized testing, half of all Americans were below average.

    Which is more important: to have a meritocratic school, or a school that "reflects the community"? It might be nice to have both, but that doesn't seem likely.

    I'd be willing to bet that even if other factors were included, as long as those factors measured excellence in scholastically-related fields, even things like music and theater, the meritocratic system would still be 'racially unbalanced'. You'd have to break the blind evaluations and actively consider the race of the children in order to make the distributions match the community.

    And that's probably what will end up happening.

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  37. Who says the neocons and mainstream media reject the concept of race? Here is the Wall St Journal pumping Alon Ziv's mulatto master race in America.

    Obama's Triumph Is America's Too Like the senator, we are stronger for our diversity. By ELIZABETH WURTZEL

    "Mr. Obama's appeal comes down to some form of hybrid vigor. Most of the multiracial people I know seem more beautiful and talented than those of us boring folks who are just one dull thing."

    Breeding Between the Lines: Why Interracial People are Healthier and More Attractive by Alon Ziv

    "This book combines sex, race, health and genetics in a daring new theory. Written with accessible, direct prose, anecdotes, analogies, and examples from human and animal studies, it is sure to spark debate in a massive way."

    Who cares if mulatto master race theory is based on lies and contradicted by facts. This is just the beginning of a massive new push to get white women to have non-white babies.

    Remember their motto: "We create our own reality"

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  38. Sure the social sciences are sciences -- but they are soft sciences: they don't test hypotheses with controlled experiments.

    Inability to apply common sense is functional brain damage.

    Now, how does it come about that in the hard sciences we are not only able to utilize common sense where appropriate, but appropriately override common sense?

    The answer, again, is experimental control.

    Soft sciences are prone to creating functional brain damage because there are evolutionary arms races afoot to cause functional brain damage in competitors, and the lack of experimental controls offers no good, scientific, anchors for common sense.

    The firewall here must be more ethical soft scientists -- soft scientists who will demand that governments not apply their theories to humans not consenting to the associated experimental treatments. Indeed, it requires scientist statesmen like Thomas Jefferson who demand that people be allowed to form new human ecologies by consent as experimental controls -- a laboratory of the human ecologies.

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  39. josh wrote:

    "...when Asians choose and are chosen to come here,do they tend to be above their nations average in IQ and occ. status."

    This is definitely true of East Indians. From what I've been told, college admissions in India are governed by an affirmative action system. A certain percentage of places at universities are reserved for the lower castes. This encourages higher caste parents to send their kids abroad to study.

    This isn't true of East Asian immigration though. From what I understand, the average IQ of Chinese-Americans, for example, is almost the same as the Avergae IQ of Chinese in China.

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  40. "Soft sciences are prone to creating functional brain damage because there are evolutionary arms races afoot to cause functional brain damage in competitors..."

    I think that this is both true and very elegantly worded. You've identified the cause of so much that's wrong with the world.

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  41. American Goy said...

    "Any of you went to a university lately?"

    Yeah I'm in one. Most university libraries close early on Friday and Sat. nights so it sounds like you are making stuff up.

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  42. "Oh, screw you, Steve"

    --Anon

    We need to cleanse this website. It's a high quality site full of open minded and intelligent commenters but attracts a sizable share of fearful dumbs.

    My advice to people like anon: Go back to SF where you can pour your racial anxieties and leave the smart social science to us.

    You can always tell their presence by:

    --gleeful bashing of blacks (remember how posts about Bolt turned into a discussion on black crime?)
    --jealousy over Jewish achievement, conspiracy ideas
    --bogus claims about Asian creativity, attempts to reassure themselves whites are still better

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  43. "Sure the social sciences are sciences -- but they are soft sciences: they don't test hypotheses with controlled experiments."

    is this guy for real?

    i mean seriously. an undergrad in psychology is sick of experimental design by year 3.

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  44. I studied social sciences in college, so I have long had enough familiarity to understand how bad they are. However, very recently, I realised how simple the explanation is: all scientific disciplines are self-selecting groups, which means that people choosing to join will tend to reinforce the group's ideas. Hard sciences, however, are kept honest by the constraints of physical reality. Soft scientists have no such constraint.

    Ironically, this thought ocurred to me while I was reading the section of the talk page for the Wikipedia article on "white privilege" which discusses whether or not to include a quote from Steve Sailer. One of the editors commented that all academics who study white privilege have concluded that white privilege is a valid concept. Then, a lightbulb went on above my head and I thought, "duh".

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  45. master_of_americans,
    Good point. As an engineer I can testify to that. Even physicists are not as constrained by reality. Exhibit A: Hawking. He can spout off the most ridiculous shit until somebody is cheeky enough to try and measure it. Since the stuff he spouts off is so hard to measure, he gets a few years of headway. See the nervousness of many particle physicists w.r.t. the LHC in Geneva, now that some of their fancy theories are actually being measured. I bet that many of them are going to be sent back to the drawing board with their tails between their legs.

    The more esoteric the ideas of physicists, the more you know they are ducking reality. Mechanical engineers for instance don't have that luxury. The machine either works or it is kaput. And if it costs too much, nobody is buying it, even if it is made in Japan or Germany. Period.

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  46. One of the anons said: In the minds of the parents clamoring to get their kids into gifted programs, they are being rational. Their view of intelligence is that it's a function of exposure to education. Exposure to better education causes higher intelligence. Gifted programs represent the best education -- obviously a scarce resource -- and thus are something to to sought after by everyone.

    Im sure there is something that but also its about socialization. You want your kid to hang around with the other nice kids, just as the other parents want the same. If peer group pressure is important, try and make sure you get your kids to mix with the right peer group.

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  47. Jody, the reason "psychology" is so often called a "soft science" isn't because there are no "psychologists" engaging in controlled experimentation. It is because there are so many "psychologists" who engage in treatment without anything resembling medical ethics including, of course, experimental validation of those treatments.

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  48. Joshua N. Feinman, an economist who graduated from Stuyvesant and is the parent of a Bronx Science junior, recently released a study challenging the validity of the test,...

    I guess political correctness makes even those genius Jews stupid.

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  49. concerned,

    Michelle Rhee is making the standard opening move: making the "adults in the school system" responsible for test score results. She's doomed from the start, of course, but the school system is such a complex phenomenon, with so many diverging interests, that it's hard to say how it will play out. Community leaders demanding more a more Afrocentric curriculum? Teachers' unions blaming the failed outcomes on insufficient funding? (Well, that's a given.) Her lack of whiteness may check the obligatory racism charges for a while, but only for a while.

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  50. Things must have changed greatly; attended Brooklyn Tech in the early 80's and I would say the school was AT LEAST 1/3 black.

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  51. a new doctorate in psychology has done hundreds to thousands of hours of experimental design, data collection, and number crunching.

    psychology is absolutely, positively real science. it is experiment, experiment, experiment, and then experiment some more. it is far more advanced than economics. it does real science on a continuous basis, digging into the nervous system with trial after trial, and then publishing the results in peer reviewed journals so other scientists can either tear the work to shreds or concur that it is valid.

    the amount of information that psychologists have discovered about the mind and brain in the last 100 years is huge. for things that are fairly well understood, like memory and learning, psychology can predict what people will do with a high degree of reliability.

    by far the greatest failure of psychology is not that it is not real science. it is so totally real science that it is not funny - it is slow, methodical, and boring. no, the greatest failure is psychology is it's inability to get the message out that freud was wrong. so utterly and mind blowingly wrong about everything. and yet, freud is what the average person thinks about when they think of psychology.

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  52. One of the things I love about these kinds of articles is they bring out the anti-Asian whites, although that is not the intent. The intent is to point out that efforts to raise black and hispanic achievement relative to whites and NAMs are futile due to inherent differences, and the powers that be look like idiots for failing to recognize it. But inevitably, some white nationalist (like anonymous post #5 above) puts on his white victim hat and tries to rationalize how "Asians aren't really that smart" when most empirical evidence suggests the contrary. Empirical evidence which I'm guessing Mr. White Nationalist would have no problem using to compare whites to hispanics and blacks.

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  53. jody said:


    "...the greatest failure is psychology is it's inability to get the message out that freud was wrong. so utterly and mind blowingly wrong about everything. and yet, freud is what the average person thinks about when they think of psychology."

    I have discussed Freud with several psychologists. All defended him. I took Psych 101 in college 15 years ago. Our prof spoke glowingly of Freud. Jody, are you involved in psychology professionally? If so, you would be the first such person I'm aware of who thinks that Freud was a fraud. Of course he WAS a fraud, but that's not the point. The point is that your views on him, while correct, seem to be out of step with what seem to be prevailing views in your field. How come no one is defrocking (so to speak) psychoanalists, for example? Why is Freudiansim tolerated in every major university's psychology department? Here I quote the Wikipedia's article on psychoanalysis: "Some psychoanalytic training has been set up as a post-doctoral fellowship in university settings, such as at Duke University, Yale University, New York University, Adelphi University, and Columbia University."

    And the problems in psychology go far beyond Freud. Once, out of curiosity, I perused a book titled "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders". It is full of pseudo-science of the worst kind. No rigorous definitions of any terms, constant attempts to portray vaguely-described and mostly-harmless personality traits as deseases. Allusions to the "treatment" of such "deseases".


    "...the amount of information that psychologists have discovered about the mind and brain in the last 100 years is huge. for things that are fairly well understood, like memory and learning, psychology can predict what people will do with a high degree of reliability."

    I find that so hard to believe, Jody. It is my impression that almost nothing definite and non-trivial is known about the workings of the mind. I suspect that you're simply exaggerating here out of defensiveness. I don't have immediate access to the DSM, but I suspect that an overly defensive attitude of this type would be classified there as a desease in urgent need of treatment. ;-)

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  54. Jody wrote: the greatest failure is psychology is it's inability to get the message out that freud was wrong. so utterly and mind blowingly wrong about everything. and yet, freud is what the average person thinks about when they think of psychology.

    Agreed, and if we look at areas of social science most relevant to education policy, disputes are over hypotheses involving human groups -- human ecologies -- sociology, political science and economics. For example, it is frequently and authoritatively asserted that one cannot pay attention to an individual's IQ because social, political and economic influences on that individual wash out any significance of IQ. If one points to mere correlations and natural as opposed to controlled experiments, the cavalcade of sophistic critiques available to them to "poke holes" in IQ-as-causal is virtually unlimited -- and they will avail themselves of them all with the full force of the Supreme Court and the 14th Amendment.

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  55. "One of the things I love about these kinds of articles is they bring out the anti-Asian whites, although that is not the intent. "

    Oh, please, you mean the anti-White Asians. I knew something was dodgy with the blog as if it weren't dodgy enough already. So it's not that a group of children have taken charge but rather a group of Asians with their half-psycho solaris ways have assumed control.

    Asians who send their children to Harvard law school so that they can become Constitution "experts", finding ways to prove the document allows for all kinds of authoritarian government intervention. Cause Asians have the authoritarian gene that won't be eradicated by any amount of education.

    Kill yourselves now, whitey. The first thing those Asians do is outlaw fun.

    "psychology is absolutely, positively real science. it is experiment, experiment, experiment, and then experiment some more. it is far more advanced than economics. it does real science on a continuous basis, digging into the nervous system with trial after trial, and then publishing the results in peer reviewed journals so other scientists can either tear the work to shreds or concur that it is valid."

    Emphatic as your pro-psychology riffs have been over the past 24 hours, you've said absolutely nothing. I doubt you've had Psych 101 or even know the different branches of psychology or that a PhD in psychology would likely be a PhD in ___________ psychology or else not a PhD at all.

    Smart as you think you are, Jody, you need more details & for that you will have to do some reading other than this blog.

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  56. Empirical evidence which I'm guessing Mr. White Nationalist would have no problem using to compare whites to hispanics and blacks.

    Don't pretend you can handle an informed WN in an argument. If you can, get a nick and sidle on over to majorityrights.com.

    WNs don't want their family replaced with stupid blacks or brilliant yellows. What's so hard to understand about that? You don't want your family replaced either, you just have a different radius of family; gee, what a monumental distinction!

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  57. Neurochemistry and molecular biology are hard sciences. Psychology is not. The difference is that the first is based on measurable physical phenomenon. The second is not. Psychology can become a real science once the neurochemistry of the brain is understood and can then be linked to specific psychological states. This is only starting to occur. I expect psychology to become a real science by, say, 2030 or 2040. But it certainly is not right now.

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  58. I agree. The science is pretty clear now that East Asians have an IQ of about 4 points above the white average. However, most East Asian families are raised in such competitive and nurturing environments that they perform way above their IQs and go into field such as engineering, computer science, etc. That is a wonderful thing! In contrast, high IQ whites are now raised to be "creative" and go into field such as advertising, creative design and urban planning and move to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This seems to be happening in Western Europe as well.....

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  59. If drivel like this is what passes for "science" with your friend Half Sigma, it would seem that there's been some self-delusional confusion of "science" with snobbery. Citing someone who can't tell the difference between personal bias and objective evaluation rather undermines your claims about the social sciences being "scientific."

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  60. "One of the things I love about these kinds of articles is they bring out the anti-Asian whites, although that is not the intent. The intent is to point out that efforts to raise black and hispanic achievement relative to whites and NAMs are futile due to inherent differences, and the powers that be look like idiots for failing to recognize it. But inevitably, some white nationalist (like anonymous post #5 above) puts on his white victim hat and tries to rationalize how "Asians aren't really that smart" when most empirical evidence suggests the contrary. Empirical evidence which I'm guessing Mr. White Nationalist would have no problem using to compare whites to hispanics and blacks."

    While I diagree with #5's tone("screw you Steve"), I don't think what he was saying was that Asians weren't that smart. Rather, an Asian/Jewish dominated America would be different from a white one and some of these differences may not be diserable. To take a simple example, how much would an Asian dominated society value objective truth? What about the inherent disadvantages of diversity? And finally, is there any evidence that non-whites can be persuaded to think non-racially, a precondition for Sailer's "citizenism"?

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  61. Remember Columbus thought he was going to China, yet when he met the Caribean Indians he immediately recognized them as not being Chinese.

    The conventional theory of the origin of native Americans is that they are descended from Asiatics (Siberians) who migrated to the Western Hemispere about twelve thousand years ago. Presumably Han Chinese and Japanese are also descended from these same ancestral Asiatics.

    Yet today, as you point out, in NYC schools the genetic contribution from these Siberians to so called Hispanics (largely American Indian) seems to make them stupid, whereas the Asiatic contribution to Chinese and Japanese deems to make them smart.

    This suggests that what we now recognize as Asian IQ developed in the last ten thousand years or so in Asia. The Siberians who came to the Americas missed out on whatever was that transforming event.

    What could it have been? I have no idea but I'm convinced that something happened.

    Just as the evidence of classical writers like Vegetius suggests that the Jews were not always smart. So too the scores of those with a large measure of ancient Asiatic genes like Hispanics, suggests that Chinese and Japanese were not always smart.

    We should be able to figure this out. We should be able to identify Jew smarts and the quite different Chinese smarts. After that we should be able to control it.

    How much better would it be to pay off our guilt about the Indians by giving them Asian brains rather than gambling concessions?

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  62. In contrast, high IQ whites are now raised to be "creative" and go into field such as advertising, creative design and urban planning and move to Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

    http://newyork.craigslist.org/brk/adg/910101343.html

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  63. I wrote the #5 anon post and I apologize for being rude to Steve.

    Otherwise: I never said Asians were not intelligent. I said that their intelligence was different from whites.

    Asian elites are good for the Asian nations. But Asian and/or Jewish elites will obviously transmogrify white nations and eventually lead to the destruction of white nations.

    It all comes down to a question of whether white nations have the right to continued existence. And the answer from the alien elite is a resounding No! and the white nations are now to be repurposed according the whims of the Jewish/Asian elite.

    I say the white nations have a right to continued existence as white nations, and the idea that these nations can only compete in the modern world if they import an alien elite is the most vicious, genocidal, Big Lie to ever come along.

    And, because the scheme is a lie, it will ultimately fail, probably to the spectacular detriment of everyone all over the world.

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  64. "Yeah I'm in one. Most university libraries close early on Friday and Sat. nights so it sounds like you are making stuff up."

    I doubt American Goy is making anything up. I've known plenty of college libraries to be open late on Friday and Saturday nights, especially when there is cramming to be done (and a few that are open late the whole year). Libraries do sometimes respond to demand; if there are no Asian students may they're too empty those times to justify staying open. Many Asian students where you go?

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  65. "A few semi-informed comments:...Stuyvesant is just a part of Brooklyn where the black people are scary."

    Actually, your comments are heavy on the 'semi' and rather light on the 'informed'. Stuyvesant is located in upper-class Battery City Park Manhattan:

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  66. Svigor, I wrote the comment you are replying to. I don't have a problem with whites wanting to preserve the "whiteness" of America, just as long as they can tolerate a reasonably small minority of undisruptive, successful Asians. Which is in fact, what most of them are. Besides, Asians have a very high rate of intermarrying with Whites, and their offspring will be White in culture, if not necessarily in appearance (and in all likelihood, will probably end up marrying Whites themselves, further diluting the Asian genes). That, plus the fact that it will always be harder to immigrate from Asia than from Latin America, will always keep the number of Asians in the U.S. negligible. So I really think the few WN's who specifically seem to have a problem with Asians are wasting their time and energy.

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  67. Reading this from England is very interesting, since the whole premise of the original debate (ie 'gifted programs' in schools) is not applicable.
    You see, previous Labour administrations in England outlawed 'educational selection' in state schools on the grounds that it 'promoted class division'In the 1960s and 50s before large scale non-White immigration, 'class' was as 'race'is to England as America. (the fact that England's eltie expensive fee-paying school were not affected by this legislation simply failed to register).
    So therefore 90% of secodary education in England is done in 'mixed ability' classes with no streaming due to ability whatsoever - with dire consequences.
    Strangely enough a few dozen selective 'grammar schools' survived the purge.These are now by far the best performing schools and the available places are very hotly contested.

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  68. Anon, I agree with you. If trends continue, whites will be a minority by 2042. I take some solace from the fact that Asians will be 10% of the population by that time. This means that a majority of the population will still be from a culture that emphasizes hard work, education and middle-class values. I am less concerned about competition for my children getting in to Harvard than I am about them being victimized or seduced into joining the growing underclass of America.

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  69. prestopundit said

    This isn't "science" [...]Statistics isn't a form of science, it's a form of mathematical logic. Applying statistics to human phenomena isn't "science"[...]You're making a pun here using the word "science", if you're trying to say this is natural science going on here.

    That's true only if racial differences in intelligence are assumed not to be genetic. Genetics (in the widest sense) or eugenics are indeed sciences. The stats aren't random correlations, perhaps.

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  70. There is a science of psychology, and there is a "liberal art" of psychology.

    The science has been trapped by the liberal art in the same way that a fledgling bird might be trapped beneath a hippo.

    Psychiatry is mostly nonsense, and large parts of psychology are nonsense. But part of psychological are scientific.

    It's just that you can't speak of psychology as a whole as a science, because it contains too much incompatible with the scientific method.

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  71. Klein's name is now being floated for Education Sec. in the Obama administration.

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  72. Actually, your comments are heavy on the 'semi' and rather light on the 'informed'. Stuyvesant is located in upper-class Battery City Park Manhattan:

    Yep, the earlier poster was confusing Stuyvesant and Bed-Stuy. (Quite a howler.)

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  73. I'm inclined to agree with our host on this one. Social studies can be scientific as long as you don't try too hard (or at all) to explain facts that aren't true. For example, it's no good saying hate crimes give black people lower self-esteem than white people if (a) black people have higher self-esteem than white people and (b) whites suffer more interracial hate crime than blacks.

    You could, however, make a decent case that hate crimes give white people lower self-esteem than black people, also noting that (c) whenever white people are victimized in hate crimes they are called racists if they speak out about it. If I were a TENURED social science professor, this is exactly what I would be studying. (If I were a TENURE TRACK professor, I suppose I'd write at length about how anyone who even SUGGESTED that blacks could make it on their own before the Civil Rights era is a total racist jerkhead.)

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  74. "Yep, the earlier poster was confusing Stuyvesant and Bed-Stuy. (Quite a howler.)"

    New Yorkers are kind of funny about their town's microgeography. Like if you reveal that you don't know what borough something is in, they think you must be an idiot. This is true even if the conversation is taking place in, you know, Madagascar or something, and they know you've never been to New York, and you've just drawn a remarkably accurate freehand map of the world in a Mollweide Projection....

    I like to mess with them right back, referring to Manhattan as "New York County". They deny that it is. I ask them what county it's in. "It's The City" they say. So where is New York County? "There is none." Then I look it up and show them. "But nobody calls it that!" No, New Yorkers don't call it that. Encyclopedias do.

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