This Explains So Much...

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Someone's close to being a cop! lol

Well, I guess this is one way of helping to get a greater proportion of blacks and hispanics into the police service.

Are you a fan of the Bell Curve?

I own a copy of the book, but I've never bothered reading it. Real-world experience is enough to persuade me that the supposedly most controversial conclusions of the book are accurate.

Unfortunately, real-world experience also suggests to me that no matter how many facts and statistics one recites from such books, it still won't make a difference in the minds of most people.

The premise of the book is that intelligence is both inherited and influenced by environmental factors, though it emphasizes the genetic stuff with statements like "people in the underclass are in that condition through no fault of their own but because of inherent shortcomings about which little can be done". The authors assert that the cognitive elite should rule over those with a lower intellect. The irony is that they explain away the higher IQ score of Asians compared to whites by explaining it as a cultural and parenting difference while Blacks and Hispanics are inherently stupid. Obviously they can't afford to be logically consistent because otherwise it would mean Asians should be the cognitive elite ruling over everyone and it would s**t all over white supremacy.

So are Asians superior to whites? Or are Blacks and Hispanics inherently stupid while Asians only score higher because of differences in culture and parenting?

This must be why the FDA now proposes "Preparation H" comes with cartoon-illustrated instructions, instead of the complex purple-prose of "UNWRAP it, and stick it in your A-Hole, NOT your mouth, idiot".

Tadzio

(DAMN!! ! Now the KKK turned inside-out at the bottom of their racist fancy-ass "Bell-Curve", and got it in their own face anyways).

You have jogged my memory, and I agree your characterization of Murray and Herrnstein as cognitive elitists is probably accurate.

I am not a cognitive elitist myself, so I must correct myself and point out I do not agree with the authors' conclusions on that subject. Even if the earth were governed by 300 IQ Martians I would still ask "is this good for me and my kind?"



Cognitive elitism does not imply that the race with the highest average IQ should rule, but that the individuals with the highest IQs (regardless of race) should rule. And cognitive elitism is not the same as white supremacism, so I don't see why (if the authors were true cognitive elitists) they should be afraid of being consistent. Besides, the number of Asians in the US is small enough that an elite selected by IQ alone would still contain plenty of Whites.

In addition to this, Charles Murray has two half-Asian children, and Richard Herrnstein was Jewish, so I'd hardly characterise them as white supremacists.



Questions of "superiority" depend on which criteria you use.

On the subject of IQ: East Asians (Japanese, Chinese, Korean) seem to have a higher average IQ than Europeans, and I believe the explanation is largely biological.

Just to reiterate - unlike the authors of The Bell Curve, I am not a cognitive elitist.

Whites outnumber Asians on the extreme right hand tail of the bell curve. Asians tend to cluster around the mean. If you gave an IQ test to a random sample of 1000 East Asians, you'd get few scores deviating beyond 90-130. Maybe one or two would score higher than 140. IQ scores of caucasians, OTOH, tend to be more widely dispersed. If there were as many East Asians in America as there are whites, the cognitive elite would still be mostly white. And let's be clear about something: it is only East Asians who have a higher mean IQ than whites (due to greater visuospatial ability). Southeast and subcontinental Asians score lower, on the whole, than whites. Further, Hernstein and Murray make positive claims about a cognitive elite, concluding that one will rule society, not that one should rule society. The question of who should rule over society is normative and is not touched on by the authors.

As someone who tends to write somewhere below the quality standard expected on this board, not because I'm not intelligent but because it's just my style, I'm finding the discussion on posting styles amusing.

Writing is about communication, I have to agree with that. I don't dumb down words in the effort to communicate to people I find less intelligent; I dumb down words because I am a horrible speller and I prefer to be embarrassed as infrequently as possible. But I still have the IQ tests to prove I'm smart (and, apparently, WAY too smart to join the police force!).

I also skim over almost everyone's posts, just looking for the things that jump out at me. It's called not having the luxury of lots of time when I'm here.

Dox, you could have admitted you skimmed without saying much else. We all skim, for a variety of reasons; there is no need to explain further. IMHO.

Tadzio, I haven't read you much mostly because I haven't been on this board much, but I would suggest that if I have trouble following your writing it has nothing to do with the big words, and a lot more to do with the way you choose to string them together. Or, at least, that is what I saw in the one post in this thread. There is an art in learning to communicate effectively, and there is value in that art that makes it worth practicing. Both my husband and I work in professions where we deal in highly technical language, but also have to be able to take those complex concepts and explain them to clients. I worked hard to develop a professional writing style capable of doing that, of staying true to the complexities of the content, while simplifying it in a way that allows those without my training to access the core of it. My clients are usually smart people, they just are not people trained in what they've hired me to do for them. I'm not dumbing anything down, but I am making it accessible so that it is useful to those who need to understand it. When you are able to do that successfully, that is when those you are talking to become truly impressed with how smart you are, in my experience.

Now. That police test. I think it's foolish. Just because someone has a high IQ does not mean they cannot be motivated and driven by the same things someone with a lower IQ is. Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not, but to make that assumption for someone else based only on their IQ seems unfair. Certainly a minimum intelligence is needed to do the work, but a maximum? That is a false assumption, if you ask me.

Hi DW a mom,

More than a decade of lawsuits with federal agencies has tilted my writing towards the "legalese". Some of my paragraphs are full plagiarizations from federal court decisions/records, with citations to the general names and numbers.

This thread started with the copied story from: http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=95836 ... wAo_zXOxQ0
with only Dox47's added statement: "OK, this case and the policy isn't exactly news to me, but it's still pretty mind-blowing as a policy."

I was already cited the case decision in late 2000, which is now available at: http://www.aele.org/apa/jordan-newlondon.html

The main point of interest to me was: "In the fall of 1996, Jordan learned that the city of New London was interviewing candidates. Upon further inquiry, however, he learned from assistant city manager Keith Harrigan that he would not be interviewed because he 'didn’t fit the profile.' Plaintiff, who was 46 years old, suspected age discrimination and filed an administrative complaint with the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities. The city responded that it removed Jordan from consideration because he scored a 33 on the WPT, and that to prevent frequent job turnover caused by hiring overqualified applicants the city only interviewed candidates who scored between 20 and 27." (WPT = Wonderlic Personnel Test, which is a type of modified IQ test).

My interest was from the fact that California's Rehabilitation Department ruled that I was beyond any hope for rehabilitation partly because of my perfect score on an IQ test they administered, and when they made their final decision, I filed suit against them for discrimination under the Rehabilitation Act. Their line of reasoning was I had no room for improving my score on the test by using their programs.

Much of the "Legal Logic" I prepared in my case was nearly repeated in the article "Too Intelligent For the Job? The validity of upper-limit cognitive ability test scores in selection." by Thomas R. Miller, Published on AllBusiness.com, Source:
http://www.allbusiness.com/human-resour ... z1iHCIbYgo
especially pages 6-9, on the drawbacks versus benefits of "over-qualified" employees, as I was already in the outstanding scholar program with the FDIC for a career as a Bank Examiner, and I wished for Rehab's support with the stipend stipulations.

I believe that Dox47's response was more from another thread over sports health safety evolving to hospital safety/mistakes costing 100,000 lifes each year in the USA:
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp4286045.html#4286045
Most of my post there was from the subject matter in the book I cited there as the source, which has the chapter "Darkling Plain English" by Richard Mitchell, who was "Canonical" in the late-20th century, at least at SJSU & UCSC, as the "Underground Grammarian" who frequently cited the "worm-in-the-brain" of America's illiteracy. I have the added benefit/drawback of epilepsy & Geschwind's Syndrome, Asperger's Syndrome, and now, brain damage from a frontal subdural hematoma. Geschwind's Syndrome from TLE is often labeled "Dostoevsky's Epilepsy".

Tadzio

Ah, all the context I miss by jumping around and skimming.

That was a clear post, for the most part, but not being interested in the other debate you started getting into, I skimmed that part.

Last edited by DW_a_mom on 02 Jan 2012, 12:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

just another jejune thought, but- what kind of world would it be, if the bulk of the cops were as highly intelligent as the bulk of the doctors and lawyers?

More crimes would be solved.

ruveyn

No one would be able to pay their tickets because you wouldn't be able to read them. Then they might suggest a medication to help you with that.

Or would they over think them ?

OK, mostly kidding on that.

The truth is, in my opinion, that intelligence is but one factor in how a person processes and interprets data, and being smart is far from a guarantee that a person has the practical instincts required for certain jobs. Law enforcement requires, in my opinion, solid social intelligence, about how a broad range of types of personalities and neurologies act and why. I think it also requires a strong social memory, so that you carry a solid data base of people, places, and instances in your mind. None of that gets measured in an IQ test.

Goodness, this is ridiculous! It is appalling that one can be too intelligent to be in law enforcement; what is next, barring ethicists from becoming judges for having knowledge that will get in the way of their handling the legal status quo?!