This statement is far from 'black people are genetically inferior'. He's trying to debate about what can be done about it, not use it as some sort of marker of final evolutionary form. It's selective quoting from a larger discussion. I'm not going to sit through (half of) another long debate. Also, this is a tangent in a thread about CoronAIDS. I'd suggest that if you want to continue, you post in a more relevant thread, such as the one about diversity monitoring.
The rest of the quote certainly boils down to that though: Let's break it down: "a person's intelligence is in large measure due to his or her genes" 'Bad genes' = less intelligent. "there seems to be very little we can do environmentally to increase that person's intelligence" People with 'bad genes' are stuck with lower intelligence regardless of education. "they certainly don't want to hear that average IQ differs across races and ethnic groups" 'Ethnic groups' are genetically less intelligent due to their 'bad genes', and cannot be educated to change this. You can paint spots on it and stand behind making mooing noises, but on even the most cursory inspection it's clearly a horse.
I disagree. It's pointing out that disparity exists between ethic groups. Now to find out WHY. Nobody's saying anyone's genes are 'bad'. IQ is a single measure of one attribute that makes up the complex form of a human being. It does not measure conscientiousness, lifespan, athletic ability etc.
Yeah, it's a slippery slope, that. As soon as you start arguing that ethnic groups vary in intelligence, you're basically arguing that some ethnic groups are smarter than others. And that comes with a lot of values and meanings attached, about which ethnic group has the better leadership abilities, the opinion of which ethnic group is more valid, which is basically superior. People don't do nuance --they're pigeon-holers. As such, ethnicity is also a coarse and often fallacious concept. There are often no meaningful genetic lines of distinction between groups arbitrarily divided on skin colour, physiognomy or geography. On our NHS ethnicity forms we talk about White English, White Irish, White other, African-Carribean and African, Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani, with Chinese all on their own (no Japanese or Korean, or Aboriginal Australian or Native American for some reason) --like these distinctions are actually meaningful and valid. They are not --they're BS. You can divide people perhaps very roughly in big European, African, Asian, Native American and Aboriginal groups, but you will find a massively wide spectrum of genetic variability in each (especially in African). Ethnicity is mostly an arbitrary construct. Psychological tests are so culture-biased that there is no single one that can be reliably used across the world (Bushmen in Africa for instance didn't get the maze test at first because black lines on paper representing walls you have to go around is a fairly abstract idea for a tribe unfamiliar with line drawings and insurmountable walls, living as they do on the African plains). They are very much a Western construct and even language differences can have a massive impact. In the US, a very reliable screen of depression is the simple question: "Are you depressed?". In the UK, much less so. The concept means something different here. Even people's colour perception is affected by their language (this is weird, but true). Intelligence manifests as adaptability to the environment it has to function in. An IQ of, say, 130 looks very different in a Westerner in the UK than it does in an Amazonian rainforest tribesman. You'd need a very different test for each. So there is really no meaningful, valid way of genetically categorising ethnic groups, nor of testing which one has the highest IQ. And when we get to the nature/nurture debate, again it's way more complex than that...
Completely agree @Nexxo . I suppose what I like to see is the following: 1) Try to find ways of quantifying disparities - using multiple assessment methods 2) If disparities are found, investigate potential reasons 3) Develop strategies that address the route cause(s) that can be deployed in a morally responsible way.
There's also the angle of questioning why we're trying to test IQ based on 'ethnicity'. Often think something like that has the potential to cause a lot of issues, with very few (none actually from a quick think) benefits. Borders are arbitrary, along with most (all?) concepts of 'ethnicity', even more so as there is more and more travel around the world.
Not even to mention that trying to sum that stuff up in a single number is "problematic" at best as explained here: https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(12)00584-3 (sciency link, can't be arsed to look for a BoJo version)
Is this what we're using now? "Explain like I'm Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson," instead of "explain like I'm five?" Because I am absolutely here for that.
Indeed. Why do we need to assess people grouped by arbitrary criteria? Doesn't it make more sense to assess the individual, for the individual's benefit, to meet that individual's specific needs? Given that we're all unique? ("I'm not...")
There was a time when it was funny, now it's just frightening. Ratings, Ratings, Ratings his own narcissism takes precedence over everything else.
Meanwhile, this side of the Atlantic, self-obsessed liar turns into self-obsessed, lieing prime minister.
I found both of these anecdotes interesting. Yeah, I can say that the "Blackmouth Incident" my one got entangled in after sucking on a felt-tip probably demonstrates the opposite here. Took a looooong time to get that out of little teeth. EDIT: I did try uploading a photo from my phone, but even a 1.6MB file is meeting with the "file too large" error... [/QUOTE] Just had the biggest laugh in days at that, specifically the bit about a sideways tin of beans and chopping off your own d*ck. Brilliant.
