David Leonhardt writes in the NYT about how wonderful it is that Amherst, a super small liberal arts college, has increased its share of Pell Grant winners (bottom half of income distribution) from 13% to 22%.
Mr. Marx says Amherst does put a thumb on the scale to give poor students more credit for a given SAT score. Not everyone will love that policy. “Spots at these places are precious,” he notes. But I find it tough to argue that a 1,300 score for most graduates of Phillips Exeter Academy — or most children of Amherst alumni — is as impressive as a 1,250 for someone from McDowell County, W.Va., or the South Bronx.
My impression is that the thumb on the scale to get students from the South Bronx and to a somewhat lesser extent from a coal mining district of West Virginia is bigger normally than 50 points. A 1300 isn't likely to get you into Amherst. The reality is that there are very very few South Bronx kids with what it takes to be competitive at Amherst, so schools like Amherst get into bidding wars with each other over them already. The more Amherst tries to drive up its share of Pell Grant winners from the South Bronx, the more Swarthmore's goes does.
About a decade ago, the press got worked up over how Caltech had only zero or one black student in its freshman class. "Look how many blacks MIT has!" It never occurred to the pundits that if Caltech were harangued into getting more black students, they'd just wind up spending a fortune to take some away from MIT. Nobody ever gets that. The assumption is that Caltech should merely create more Caltech-type black high school seniors.
About a decade ago, the press got worked up over how Caltech had only zero or one black student in its freshman class. "Look how many blacks MIT has!" It never occurred to the pundits that if Caltech were harangued into getting more black students, they'd just wind up spending a fortune to take some away from MIT. Nobody ever gets that. The assumption is that Caltech should merely create more Caltech-type black high school seniors.
In contrast, I think the most underexploited center of potential talent are kids from broken families, especially boys, who don't have two parents to prod them to jump through all the hoops that the multi-year college admissions brownie-point collecting process requires.
Is it just me or do women from small liberal arts colleges tend to be unattractive?
ReplyDeleteTheir students are the future Jezebel writers and contributors.
"In contrast, I think the most underexploited center of potential talent are kids from broken families, especially boys, who don't have two parents to prod them to jump through all the hoops..."
ReplyDeleteHere you go, on this self-contradictory nonsense again. Steven, please stay in Goostep with us here:
You are an HBD man. IQ cannot be increased, decreased or changed past 3 years old.
Low scores mean that one is stupid, therefore there is no cadre of geniuses in rural Kentucky waiting to be discovered...Even if they are white!
These kids are stupid, low-achieving failures because their parents are stupid low-achieving failures. They worked in coal mines and on farms because that is what they were capable of.
Geez, never before have I had to spend so much time reminding a "scientist" of his own work!
I wanted to do a PhD at MIT, but the financing fell through when the old white government in South Africa shut down the research organization in anticipation of black takeover in South Africa. I then went to Germany and completed a PhD and 2 Masters degrees with very good grades. I have no more interest in studying in the US, even if they paid me to. I think that US institutions are over-hyped.
ReplyDeleteMaybe they should think of offering foreigners from the despised white diaspora bursaries, there are many of them and they have equivalent IQ's to the smarter students at elite US institutions. However the externally forced political changes (often from liberals in the US) in countries such as South Africa and Rhodesia are often overwhelming for these people who then take decades to reestablish their lives, often working in crummy jobs. There are probably many more such individuals from other races in Latin America and Asia.
Don't worry about the minorities at the elite schools who don't have the brains to master the material. When the grading isn't blind, as it is, for example, in law schools, the guilty white liberal academic mind goes out of its way to "pump" up the grade of a favored minority. I know.
ReplyDelete"all the hoops that the multi-year college admissions brownie-point collecting process requires": it might almost be designed to ensure that bright, sparky children - boys especially - lose interest in the whole fandango.
ReplyDeleteMy impression is that the thumb on the scale to get students from the South Bronx and to a somewhat lesser extent from a coal mining district of West Virginia is bigger normally than 50 points.
ReplyDeleteMore than a somewhat lesser extent.
Last year a study by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and his colleague Alexandria Radford showed that poor whites from rural areas, especially Christians, are as welcome as the clap at prestigious colleges. Leadership positions in organizations such as Future Farmers of America were the kiss of death. They're not the kind of diversity any institutions are looking for.
Try prisons. Especially minimum-
ReplyDeleteor medium-security prisons. And with a priority regard to female prisons. And start at age 30--not below. An IQ sweep, will move far over the heads of most internees, but a surprising number of gifted
people will be detected. BTW, they tend to know each other in such settings. And with competent screening, they'll all do very very
well with the opportunities put in their reach. This would be particularly true for the detection of what Hans Eysenck hypothesized were "high P" (toughminded) individuals. That dimension of personality (if it
exists ) involves those who are the early detectors that "the Emporer has no clothes" or in
Hemingway's terminology, those who have a keen "bull***" detecter. Of course, now I realize, it would be mutilation to subject such talent to what passes for a university edukashun. But the question was where we'd find them, not why we'd want to debase them.
This Amherst President is a douche.
ReplyDeleteYou can hear him on the radio program On Point repeatedly saying Amherst is the "most selective college" in the country about a dozen times (along with all the other nonsense).
when i applied to amherst and williams you needed to be in the 1500 range to be reasonably sure of getting in. if you were a european man, that is. this was before the SAT was recentered, too.
ReplyDeleteBest bet: White boys who are smart but perhaps wisely don't give a wrinkled rat's arse about the feminized world of school, but might like college if they could get into something they cared about, and didn't have to put up with too much meaningless crap.
ReplyDeleteI think the issue is that there's a white kid from a middle class or prole family, with a 1300 SAT the exact same as the Exeter kid, but his resume isn't loaded with the right leadership activities because his family isn't in the know and he attends a public school that doesn't understand the Ivy admissions game.
ReplyDeleteAnd the schools don't care about that white kid because he doesn't increase "diversity."
Grumpy Old Man & Half-Sigma are right.
ReplyDeleteAnother "problem" with the smart white kid from West Virginia is that he hardly knows that the Ivy League exists and is happy to go to the state university with all his friends.
ReplyDeleteMinorities, especially Asians, will feel lonely at State, but know that there will be more of their co-ethnics at an ivy league school where they all will apply. The same dynamic explains why there are just as many Asian as white *applicants* at the science magnet HS Thomas Jefferson in Fairfax, despite the fact that there are five times as many whites as Asians. The discrepancy cannot be explained by the usual differences in IQ.
Robert Hume
Truth,
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure nothing in mainstream research says that intelligence isn't environment affected at all, past years old.
Yes, public debate is dominated by pretty lies, wishful thinking and blank slatism. That doesn't mean the opposite kind of thinking - genes über allez - is the right way to go.
One angle that hasn't been touched on so far: Schools like Exeter have already gone looking for the kind of non-elite, nonwhite talent that Amherst itself is looking for. In other words, if we're talking about a gifted nonwhite kid from a non-advantaged background, a certain number of them are already at Exeter and other boarding schools. Exeter's got quite a scholarship program as well as a lot of recruiters, and they're as avid for diversity as any Ivy college is.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how this affects the admissions process at places like Amherst. What do they make of a nonwhite working-class kid with 1300 SATs who applies from Exeter, where he went on scholarship, for instance? Does the kid look better or worse than a similar kid who went to a public high school in nowheresville? But it's gotta be some kind of factor, no?
Yes, you are right that "prole" (keep beeming that love HS) whites are almost nonexistent at elite colleges. I'm exactly the type of white male you mentioned and happened to go to one of Amherst/Swarthmore's peer institutions. Of course I wasn't privy to everyone's circumstances, but my guess is that prole whites accounted for something like 1-2% of the student body.
ReplyDeleteTo a large extent smart lower-class whites simply don't apply to these colleges. It's just not on the radar at all. My guidance counselor actively tried to dissuade me from attending, never having heard of my choice, while my mother, though supportive of whatever I wanted to do, simply didn't have a clue. She had probably never even heard of the SAT, much less knowing how to prep me for it.
It's hard to say whether I was helped or not by my background since my grades and scores were actually above average anyway. The only other school I applied to, Yale, did reject me even though my scores were above their average as well, so they certainly weren't pressing a thumb too heavily in my po' favor. However, I did tell the bitchy lawyer alum chick who interviewed me that Yale wasn't really my first choice and I just wanted to keep my options open. Maybe that's the sort of thing that white trash kids should be coached against saying in interviews.
Slightly OT but interesting anyway ... Something I've never seen discussed publicly but that has struck me: going to a place like Exeter and excelling there is a big plus for kids eager to get into prestigious colleges. And the numbers places like Exeter put up are really impressive: dozens of kids in each graduating class going to each of the Ivies, etc.
ReplyDeleteBut how does going to Exeter work out for the rest of the students there? Answer: not so well.
Nearly every kid who goes to a place like Exeter was a star back wherever they came from. But once they're at Exeter ... Well, half of them will graduate in the bottom half of their PEA class.
For these kids, going to Exeter turns out to be a downright disadvantage where getting into the fancier colleges go. Harvard might have liked what it'd have seen had you stayed at North Tolucca High. After all, you'd have graduated near the top of your class, you'd have played a varsity sport or two, you'd have played first violin in the orchestra, and you'd have done whatever else it is high-achieving kids do these days. But instead you went to Exeter ... and you've wound up in the bottom half of the class, you weren't good enough to play varsity soccer (Exeter has a lot of students from Europe and South America), and you weren't able to keep up with the freaky musical prodigies who came to Exeter from all over the country.
Had you stayed back home, you'd have been a winner. But you went to Exeter (with stars in your eyes), and you wound up a loser instead.
jody said...
ReplyDelete"when i applied to amherst and williams you needed to be in the 1500 range to be reasonably sure of getting in. if you were a european man, that is. this was before the SAT was recentered, too."
You are not clear on which recentering -- it matters. On the original scale (the one when scores peaked in 60's) there were only 3 schools in the country with median math SATs over 700 and neither college you list was one of them. 1500-700 = 800 and no school had verbal SATs anywhere near 800.
"Low scores mean that one is stupid"
ReplyDeleteWho said anything about low scores, Whiskey?
Er, Truth. It's getting hard to tell you two apart lately.
Don't forget all the under-achieving non-conformists. Elite colleges are looking for future leaders who are also high-achievers. Or else super-high achievers who may not be future leaders.
ReplyDeleteHow about the absolutely poorest municipality in the entire United States (according to the most recent census), poorer than Detroit, anywhere in West Virginia, or anywhere else (as I've mentioned this place before).
ReplyDeleteGoogle:
"lands disctintion as nation's poorest place"
Come to think of it (I went to Exeter, and I'm remembering back 40 years ....), Exeter and Amherst used to have a kind of special understanding: If you were an Exeter student and wanted to go to Amherst, you had to apply (and be accepted, and then commit to Amherst) early decision. They wanted you to show a real commitment. The idea was that if Amherst waited for kids to apply on a normal-decision schedule, they'd wind up getting inconvenienced by kids who'd said they loved Amherst but who at the end of the day would opt for Harvard or Yale instead.
ReplyDeleteThey were serious about it, by the way. I was a good student with good SATs, and I thought I was a hot enough prospect to defy the early-decision demand. I applied to Amherst normal-decision ... and wound up getting wait-listed.
Anyway, I wonder what the current arrangements and understandings between selective schools and the prestigious boarding schools are these days.
White boys who are prone to call bullshit on their "holocaust/slavery" centric curriculumn have a hard time staying on the right track.
ReplyDeleteCritize the anti-white zeitgeist and you are banished from leadership track. I've seen it with my own eyes.
They're not looking for talent - they're looking for diversity. White boys from broken homes are the wrong kind of diversity.
ReplyDeleteI was a Merit finalist from Appalachia with perfect grades and valedictorian of my class. Plus on starting 11 of championship football team whose steady girlfriend was the captain of the cheerleaders. Then in my senior year something happened: an assembly was called for what turned out to be a democratic referendum on the question of whether or not to set aside an area on campus where students could smoke.
ReplyDeleteThe principal, after explaining the purpose of the assembly, which seemed very odd, then proceeded to give a long speech on all the reasons why this would be a very bad idea. At which point he put it to a vote to the entire student body. First he asked for a show of hands of those who agreed it would be a bad idea to have a designated smoking area. A sea of hands went up. Then he asked for a show of hands of those who favored the idea. I didn't personally favor the idea or disfavor it but was offended by faux democratic proceedure in which only one side of the issue was presented. So as a kind of instinctive protest on the spur of the moment I stuck up my hand together with three or four hoods in the back of the gymnasium.
Well, we were barely back in home room before there came a call for me to go to the principal's office. There I was met by the principal and the high school football coach, who demanded to know why I had raised my hand at the assembly, and I explained. When I showed no remorse they threatened to write an unfavorale letter of dis-recommendation to the only college I had applied to. (Regular letters of recommendation were already sent). I said fine, it was a matter of principle, and a few weeks later I got my rejection from Harvard explaining that based on my academic record I was likely to be only a B student at Harvard.
Looking back I think Harvard was correct. Not that I would have been a B student, as events were to prove, but that I was not Harvard material. There was a genetic flaw in my character -- looking back I think it was genetic, not a choice of free will -- and I was not the kind of student they were interested in.
In an unreflective moment I had made one of the biggest decisions of my life.
This is probably smart Steve, but will never ever happen. Because most College Admissions are dominated by women, and they choose the "sexiest" men most PC women.
ReplyDeleteYou cannot make a guy any sexier really than he already is, for the most part. Much of American policy domestically is driven by women's desire to optimize sexiness in men. A guy from South Central who did drugs and stabbed a guy is far sexier than a White Middle class kid who built his own robot for a robot competition.
The best source of talent would be the "undermatch" students. Those are the students with the grades and SATs to be admitted to top tier students but happen to come from middle class families and live in great plains and western states with mediocre state university. There have been studies that show that undermatch students massively underperform.
ReplyDeleteSuch students would be better off around other smart people who are ambitious than around people who are attending the second tier state universities.
and to a somewhat lesser extent from a coal mining district of West Virginia
ReplyDeleteOr to no extent at all:
At the private institutions in their study whites from lower-class backgrounds incurred a huge admissions disadvantage not only in comparison to lower-class minority students, but compared to whites from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds as well.
As Harry Baldwin mentioned, this study shows that being a rural white is the biggest kiss of death.
Espenshade and Radford also flat-out show that IQ 'weight classes' do indeed exist at top colleges:
To have the same chances of gaining admission as a black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550.
I imagine none of this is written down in admissions policy anywhere. But they're letting a certain number of 'lightweights' in the same ring with the 'middleweights' and 'heavyweights' every year, which as we know leads to very high black drop-out (and changing-of-major) rates.
Luke,
ReplyDeleteThanks. Fascinating story.
Our society has been creating ever more hoops for young people to jump through to succeed, which may help explain why they are so conformist.
Steve
Whiskey, "sexiness" has nothing to do with college admissions.
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot of pressure on college admissions boards to make their student bodies reflect the ethic demographics of the American society. The thinking is that giving NAMs special preferences in admissions will bring in a lot of bright disadvantaged kids from the South Bronx and Atlanta. What ends up happening is that a lot of mediocre children of wealthy NAMs end up getting into schools that, on the basis of test scores and grades, probably wouldn't have taken them.
Affirmative action in competitive universities is of interest to upper class NAMs, but the NAM masses don't see much benefit.
"But how does going to Exeter work out for the rest of the students there? Answer: not so well."
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to get into UCLA from Harvard-Westlake a couple of miles away because there's less grade inflation at H-W than almost anywhere else in SoCal.
all the hoops that the multi-year college admissions brownie-point collecting process requires.
ReplyDeleteBeh. It depends on a college. Both of my kids went to UW-Madison. +2SD SAT or ACT and decent GPA - then no brownie points needed. A bargain in comparison to private schools, too. The education (undergraduate) is every bit as good if not better than in Ivies. Sure, going to UW doesn't give off too many signals but if your kids' choices are in STEM fields where the signaling bullshit does not matter very much, a good state school is very hard to beat.
" Both of my kids went to UW-Madison. +2SD SAT or ACT"
ReplyDeleteIf your kids had been +3 or +4 they would have felt very isolated, even in Madison.
Don't fool yourself that UW gives the same education as MIT to a really talented kid.
Well, there is the old tool used to spot underutilized talent from the sticks: the SAT.
ReplyDelete"Well, there is the old tool used to spot underutilized talent from the sticks: the SAT."
ReplyDeleteNo one has any interest in that. Hence, Asians need higher scores than whites need higher scores than Latinos need higher scores than blacks, controlling for the other variables.
Which...was sort of the point of this entire discussion. How'd ya miss that?
This post reminds me of something. I started at a middling law school (Emory) where they calculated GPA to three decimal places and posted class rank by exam number so you could see exactly where you stood (but not who was above or below you). Places were sometimes a hundreth of a point. Blind grading by exam number too. After 1L I was one of the top five students and invited to Law Review, so I
ReplyDeletetransferred to Berkeley.
Berkeley has some clout so it does not humiliate its students by calculating a GPA or a class rank. It offers only three grades: High Honors for the top 10% of any exam, Honors for the next 30% (? memory) and Pass for the last 60%. Notice you can tell who is the cream but it is murky at 40% and down - everyone looks the same.
I swear I read an article in the placement office that said an earlier iteration of the grading system had HH top 10%, H next 80% and P last 10%. The theory was you were so smart to get into Berkeley that anything but horrible performance was perfectly OK (H). The P for the bottom 10% was because any admissions screening system could not weed out the smart kids who just had no law aptitude. And the HH was for law firms like Wachtell, Lipton or Sherman and Sterling that were rich, had the very best clients and wanted the best of the best - no questions asked.
That system HH-10% H-80% P-10% was canned after a year because affirmative action admits of whatever race or creed ended up in the bottom 10%. The new system made every grade under the top 40% (all P's) impossible to distinguish.
Don't fool yourself that UW gives the same education as MIT to a really talented kid.
ReplyDeleteMIT does not give better undergraduate education. It doesn't, period. (Graduate school is a different matter). What it does provide is peer environment that is conductive to competition, self-development and use of exceptional resources that MIT has.
"Berkeley has some clout so it does not humiliate its students by calculating a GPA or a class rank."
ReplyDeleteWhich, for the record, makes it really easy for firms to hire based on AA.
This system screws over high-achieving white males, just for the record. I know someone who graduated at the top of his class - he knows, because he's been carefully looking at the grading curves of his class through three years at law school. The law school itself, however, does not rank, so he can't officially put that on his resume. He's white and male. He's not getting hired.
Nice system we have here.
Doesn`t the distances matter in the USA at all? I believe they must matter, unless you`re a Beverly Hills kid going to the Harvard with your friends. I bet the Ivy league schools take a lot of their student`s quite near them and it`s not all about were the talent is.
ReplyDeleteBut when you are a young poor West Virginia kid, who is stepping in to a very different world, why not to take your undergrad education some good state school nearer to your home?
Except College Admissions do NOT reflect American society. Blacks are over-represented, at 12% (and declining 0.9% over the past decade) with far lower test scores, Asians over-represented due to much higher test scores, and White rural and suburban kids being pushed to micro-conformity (which is likely alien to the Borderer/Scots-Irish). Meanwhile illegal aliens get preferential AA admits over native White born.
ReplyDeleteIf we're treating the title non-rhetorically, one answer is the enlisted ranks of the military. From FY 2009 Non-Prior Service (NPS) Active Component Enlisted Accessions, almost 11,000 people joined who scored in the top AFQT category (93rd - 99th percentile). I'm going to bet few had attended 4-year-colleges and that most were poor or middle-class. The vast majority were male. The biggest group joined the Army, but as percent of their new enlistees, the Air Force got the highest, at about 8%.
ReplyDelete"There's a lot of pressure on college admissions boards to make their student bodies reflect the ethic demographics of the American society."
ReplyDeleteThe percentage of white gentiles at Ivy League schools is much lower than in American society.
I'd guess older students with good test scores, but insufficient self discipline at 14-18 to make perfect grades. Many people aren't really ready to work hard at school at 18, but are quite ready to do so at 22.
ReplyDeleteWouldn't it be nice if each ethnic/cultural group had their own nation-state and could educate from within the population of this group as they saw fit?
ReplyDeleteOr would that be grounds for war?
"Many people aren't really ready to work hard at school at 18, but are quite ready to do so at 22."
ReplyDeleteMy theory is that grade inflation along with being spoon fed the material in high school creates students who don't have much idea where their real strengths lie. I advocate more IQ testing early on with some kind of guidance about what fields of endeavor a person can expect to attain high achievement.
Some undiscovered talent might be out there among 20 year olds who didn't have enough information before entering college though I think in general it's time to be more flexible. Schools like University of Phoenix and LeTourneau focus on an adult population already working. You could do this with more competitive universities, as has probably already happened. Distance learning allows for many options not previously possible.
What if people didn't have to attend classes physically until they were in a graduate program which required time spent doing research in a lab or a special library?
And see this from Greg Mankiw. Turns out David Leonhardt's proposed hypothesis is the opposite of what the data shows.
ReplyDelete'... A guy from South Central who did drugs and stabbed a guy is far sexier than a White Middle class kid who built his own robot for a robot competition.'
ReplyDeletegod what insane garbage. sometimes i think people like this commenter should be held accountable for throwing poop pies in readers' faces. I mean if you're scrolling, you can't avoid him.
why doesn't he get a job in a university admissions office and see if he knows what he's talking about.
"In contrast, I think the most underexploited center of potential talent are kids from broken families, especially boys, who don't have two parents to prod them to jump through all the hoops that the multi-year college admissions brownie-point collecting process requires."
ReplyDelete100% agree. The smartest kid at math I knew growing up was a true genius who's father split when he was in about 8th grade. By 10th grade he started doing his homework wrong to be cool and fit in (he was half white/half asian in an all-white area). Anyway, he eventually graduated high school but never went to college and became a construction worker. Eventually, he became a successful guy and family man but what a waste of talent just to fit in.
I'd second the idea of looking to the military. Specifically, high-scoring enlistees who have completed an enlistment. They've shown they've got some self-discipline and the test results show they've got some smarts.
ReplyDeleteFrom a diversity standpoint it would be highly entertaining to have a couple dozen jarheads enter Harvard every year. It would shake up those student government dweebs to have some people who have interacted with the real world (if only by shooting at it.)
Luke Lea: That was a pretty blunt letter. I never heard of a rejection letter that went into that kind of detail. Do you mind if I ask how old you are and when this was?
ReplyDeleteWhiskey: You don't know what you're talking about. Minority status is a boost; disadvantaged background can be a boost; criminal record is not a boost. The ideal student Ivy League admissions people would like to find would be a cross between your two - a black kid from a poor neighborhood who had built a robot!
6:18 Anonymous: Good idea. There has been so much talk about how more Ivy League schools should have ROTC, but the reverse order - army first, Harvard afterwards - might actually be more useful.
ReplyDeleteTruth:
ReplyDeleteGeez, never before have I had to spend so much time reminding a "scientist" of his own work!
Yes, you have. Indeed, you do it so frequently that it's clear to anyone with half a brain that your straw man is never Steve's position in the first place.
The funniest thing about that article is how clueless both the college administrator and the journalist where. More high achieving poor kids assuming there as many as they say, would be overwhelmingly Asian and European in ancestry. This would reduce Amherst's diversity quotient considerably, since they make it clear in the article that having lots of Asians is like having lots of Europeans at a school like Amherst. My guess is that a lot of middle and lower class whites and Asians are going to State U. instead of Cornell and Northwestern precisely because a bunch of NAM rich kids are being admitted to elite colleges despite mediocre grades.
ReplyDelete"Indeed, you do it so frequently that it's clear to anyone with half a brain that your straw man is never Steve's position in the first place."
ReplyDeleteWhere, exactly am I mistaken?
Where, exactly am I mistaken?
ReplyDeleteHe never said that you were mistaken. He correctly pointed out that you use straw man arguments (in this case your blather about low scorers, when Steve was referring to smart kids from broken homes), a dishonest tactic.
Of course, you didn't pick up on the distinction.
Which means that you dishonest AND dumb.
Your coworkers must roll their eyes every time you open your mouth.
Truth,
ReplyDeleteIf I have to "remind" you that Obama is your divine idol every time you criticize him, which you do once a month, then soon enough it becomes clear that Obama is never your divine idol to begin with.
"army first, Harvard afterwards - might actually be more useful."
ReplyDeleteWhy would that be useful? People who hire Harvard grads don't care about army service. And people with theintellect for Harvard will hate hanging out with a bunch of prole enlisted people.
This idea is based out of jealousy rather than a sincere desire to help Harvard students.
Half isn't army first, school second the Israeli model.
ReplyDeleteGoatweed
"(in this case your blather about low scorers, when Steve was referring to smart kids from broken homes), a dishonest tactic."
ReplyDeleteActually, Ace, this gets to the heart of the HBD argument; you see, there are "smart kids from broken homes, or if there are, they are an anomaly to the point of statistical noise. Allow me to more finely elucidate:
HBD, as I've grown to understand it, means that intelligence is absolute, applicable to circumstance, and inherited.
Parents who make "broken homes", by this theory, do so for one reason;
They...are...stupid. Therefore the "smart kid from a broken home is a bit of a chimera, is it not.
You see, Bob and Tom, according to Sailer, the number one predictor of success is intelligence. If you are an asshole living in stereotypical Applachia, it is because you have low IQ, if you have low IQ, it can be fairly well assumed that your parents have low IQ, your grandparents, and so on. If you are Scots-Irish, all the better, most of you are, statistically dumb (compared to real white folks anyway.)
So again, I have to wonder where does Sailers "well the Ozarks are just teamin' with potential Nuclear Physicists" stance jibes with his greater purpose, that is proponent of Human BIOLOGICAL Difference?
Note, it's not called Human UPBRINGING Difference, now is it?
By the way, how'd the book turn out?
More straw man BS. Since nobody here's made that argument, there's no point in refuting it.
ReplyDeleteThat's exactly the problem, nobody here has EXPLICITLY made that argument, but it is a 600 pound gorilla in the closet.
ReplyDeleteYou see Tommy, Bobby, from where I sit, either HBD is applicable in ALL walks of life, or it is applicable in NONE.
Now, this is the part where you have your Eureka moment and say"OK truth, here it is, you forced me to say it:
Dumb, unaccomplished white people can benefit from factors such as education and mentorship, and go to Harvard with 2.8 GPAs,* dumb unaccomplished black people can not!"
Of course you sound like some weirdo, liberal, bleeding heart, racist, social worker, but hey, whatever floats your boat.
*half-white, half Asians, too, Tommy
If you consider the argument implicitly made, then I can consider it implicitly refuted.
ReplyDelete"If you consider the argument implicitly made, then I can consider it implicitly refuted."
ReplyDeleteAnd I get criticized for sophistry?
Wow, Truth got really beaten badly in this argument. Fun stuff!
ReplyDelete