The Rawness

T, i’m glad you’re trying to tackle such a contentious topic in your usual dispassionate manner. points i take issue with you on:

1) My problem is, I don?t think it?s as important as many people think it is. If blacks have lower IQ averages than other races, now what? Say we all accept that fact, where do we go from here? How do we change our policies?

i think you are unfair in ssuggesting there are no practical policy implications. for one, adopt race neutral policies to encourage high skilled immigration versus the current immigration policy that favors mexicans and low skilled immigrants. second, it may be more beneficial to society to funnel more lower iq people into vocational careers instead of having some of those same individuals who are NAMs go to college via AA. note, i’m not disputing jason malloy’s recent assertion that acquisition of a bachelor’s is beneficial for income for the individual over trade schools- just that society might benefit more from having them go to vocational careers. both of these measures could be pushed in a race neutral way so that they do not seem suspicious for targeting any particular group and will still achieve the same effect.

i suspect you are probably correct in intimating that (as a group) NAM’s will not accept any idea that they are, on average, going to have IQ limitations relative to whites/asians. jason malloy has rendered the same opinion on GNXP.COM recently. i suspect that if this assumption is correct, it severely limits our abilities to use information about race and IQ in a cogent manner at this time in american society, which leads me to my next point i take issue with you on:

2. The other route you can take is eugenics, or genetic cleansing.

come on dude. i know you’ve been a long time reader of half sigma and steve sailer. you probably have been reading GNXP.COM a long time as well. you can’t tell me that every time this issue came up you have assumed that the commenters on these sites were talking about involuntary eugenics. that’s akin to what sweden and the nazi’s did. nobody who is taken seriously on those sites has ever pushed for that idea. there is a huge philosphical gap between voluntary and involuntary eugenics, and people like gc take pains to point this out on occasion. i’m for voluntary eugenics to improve the human species. a real reason to accept hbd and race realism is because probably within this century there is a strong possibility that humans will be able to modify the human genome (probably at the zygotic or pre- zygotic level) to create more competitive humans. a lot fo the inequalities that race realism implies will be able to be mitigated without any blood shed by such a scenario. this is nothing like the holocaust or what happened in sweden.

other than that, a great job.

freakshow

Great response. Some points I wanted to tackle:

i think you are unfair in ssuggesting there are no practical policy implications. for one, adopt race neutral policies to encourage high skilled immigration versus the current immigration policy that favors mexicans and low skilled immigrants.

Yes, but for this you don’t need to focus on IQ ranking by race. You can just focus on the skill level of a profession, academic credentials, the applicant’s resume and level of accomplishment in their field and that would have the exact same result without having to focus on race and IQ results. The results would naturally skew in favor of more qualified applicants, many of whom will be white and Asian and away from less qualified applicants, many of whom will be brown and black. Of course another problem is that credentials mean less than they used to because of Affirmative Action, hiring quotas, etc. so many people end up assuming that blacks with lots of credentials benefited from some entitlement. I have a Nigerian friend who was a black engineer with straight A’s all the way through school, yet everyone automatically assumes he is only where he is due to affirmative action. That’s why I think affirmative action and other entitlement programs need to end, so that when a black person has a certain amount of credentials people can be sure he is equally qualified as a white or Asian with similar credentials. Doing these steps will naturally skew the immigration numbers over time in the same way you describe, is more politically viable and is easier to sell because it offends much less people than IQ and race arguments. Same result, much more practical path. Never have to even touch the political third rail of race and IQ.

second, it may be more beneficial to society to funnel more lower iq people into vocational careers instead of having some of those same individuals who are NAMs go to college via AA. note, i?m not disputing jason malloy?s recent assertion that acquisition of a bachelor?s is beneficial for income for the individual over trade schools- just that society might benefit more from having them go to vocational careers.

My solution for this, eliminate guaranteed student loans and race-based college admission quotas and affirmative action. Vastly increase merit-based scholarships. Now the only route for black people to enter elite universities, even if poor, will be through hard work and academic results. Make need-based admissions color-blind and don’t lower the academic standards for people who receive them. Everything will then fall to its natural level. The ones who are half-ass about academics will be weeded out in the admissions process. The minorities who do make it into these elite schools are the ones who want it the most because they were busting their asses to get the great grades all along or they performed great in sports and won athletic scholarships. They will have an incentive to keep their grades up or risk losing their scholarships. People who can’t afford college will have to find a way to be able to afford it on their own or choose an alternative that is more within their means. For those who choose to raise the money for elite schools on their own through work, family, etc., will value school more because they are not attending based on money that feels like free money, they actually feel the sacrifice involved and will take it more seriously. If they do take out loans, it will be based on creditworthiness and assets/collateral, just like a regular loan, so there will be an incentive to be financially responsible or at least for their parents to be financially responsible. If they don’t have creditworthiness to get a loan, their parents lack assets and creditworthiness to get a loan, they can’t get a job that allows them to pay for tuition and their grades aren’t good enough to get merit-based scholarships to elite schools, then maybe $20,000 to attend an elite school they may drop out of or underperform in is not the best option for them right now, and trade school or community college is better for now. Picture a guy that just signed a guaranteed student loan paper and POOF! got $20,000 to attend a college that is academically out of his league and another guy who had to work for two years part time, work throughout college at night and have his parents take out a second mortgage in order to attend a college that is not out of his range academically. Which one is more likely to take school seriously? Once again, you can get many of the same practical results without ever touching race and IQ rankings.

The other benefit of this will be less bachelor’s degrees out there, meaning that bachelor’s degrees will actually gain value again rather than being considered a glorified high school diploma. And also, the bachelor’s degrees held by blacks will also gain more value because people will know they weren’t achieved through any charity but purely on credentials. In addition, with less guaranteed financial aid money floating around out there, universities will be forced to compete more on tuition prices. Right now, with all the students flush with guaranteed student loan money, universities know that most students don’t really evaluate prices in relation to value like they should. If there is less free money floating around out there, and more students are using hard earned money they worked for to pay for college, you can bet they will be way more picky about price than they are now, and more concerned if what they’re getting for their money is worth it. Being concerned about value and returns on your tuition money will also make people more wary of liberal arts degrees that don’t pay. All these things can be achieved simply through studying human nature, economics and the free market rather than quibbling over genetics and race tables.

come on dude. i know you?ve been a long time reader of half sigma and steve sailer. you probably have been reading GNXP.COM a long time as well. you can?t tell me that every time this issue came up you have assumed that the commenters on these sites were talking about involuntary eugenics.

I’ve actually only recently discovered Half Sigma and GNXP through Roissy’s blog. I’ve been a longtime reader of Sailer though. The eugenics thing did not come up at any of those sites though. The eugenics thing was brought up in response to a comment someone made a few days ago at Roissy’s blog (although I’m sure it was half-serious, half-jest). And of course some of the white power sites advocate for it as well. It wasn’t meant to slander the whole community of people who obsess over race and IQ but there is a segment of that crowd that does subscribe to the idea of eugenics, at least when they make anonymous comments.

T,
1) your idea of how we would tailor a new immigration policy favoring the highly skilled is basically similar to mine.
2) i strongly doubt we are going to be able to elminate race based scholarships or AA anytime soon, which leads me to my next point:
3) there is real evidence AA is probably beneficial to NAM’s even if it hurts society as a whole:
http://findarticles.com/p/arti.....i_54348518
this is a link jason malloy referred to on GNXP in support of this assertion. i have not had time to read the article as yet. also, i realize people like sander (for legal education), mcwhorter, and sowell have argued the opposite.
4) when people on the sites you mentioned talk about eugenics, they are almost always talking about voluntary eugenics- again, this is a great deal different than involuntary procedures so please make sure you specify which one you are referring to or it makes the entire topic sound unnecessarily ominous.

just read the link to nathan glazer’s fascinating piece. an interesting quote about the blacks in the undergrad institutions they assessed:
In the absence of such preferences, these institutions, on the basis of various calculations and assumptions, would have less than a third of the black students they now admit.
so, more than 2 out of 3 blacks at the elite schools studied wouldn’t be there without AA. the article also states how at EVERY gradient of the SAT scores, proportionately more blacks will get admitted to the select institutions studied versus whites, even though the SAT scores of blacks overpredicts their performance at school.

wow.

i’m gonna be upfront and tell all y’all that i’ve been drinkin’ whiskey neat for the last 3 hrs.

That being said, this is still the most ignorants hit i’ve read from this site.

Forget about the unfair portrayal of blacks.
Again, i’m not the defender of anything black, nor do i disagree with the basic assertion that Black IQs tend ot be lower on average.
That is a simple statistical fact.

But the most relevant point of this argument has yet to be mentioned, and that is that IQ is a HIGHLY IRRELEVANT CONSTRUCT when used for…really…anything!

I’ve studied psychology for almost a decade. The longest running joke in psychometrics is that IQ tests are only good at finding who would score best on IQ tests.

The main thrust of most cutting edge pedagogical psychometric study is the search for tests that can account for the myriad of intelligences (there are at LEAST 7 according to Gould) that are required for both academic and practical application.

That’s academia, and often what happens there doesn’t find time to get off its loft and make itself practical. To wit, the fact is too many schools, colleges and even jobs use standardized testing to assess various abilities than can’t accurately be assessed by the given tool.

But the fact remains that IT IS A FACT THAT THESE PSYCHOMETRICS FAIL THE MOST ADVANCED STANDARDS OF TEST RELIABILITY!!

I’m not saying that SATs, or Regents, or APs or ACTs are pointless.
The fact is they test what they test and they’re good at testing for what they test.

But to claim that the SAT is the best measure of future collegiate success is to accept mediocrity in terms of psychometric reliabilty.

To claim that “IQ Testing” is the best measure of general, applicable and/or comprehensive intelligence is to accept a very mediocre and limited standard of psychometric validity and reliabilty.

So any talk of applying these measure towards a social, economic or political end must cease until the validity and reliability question is addressed.

As practical I conservatives claim to be, this is one place where the science just does NOT support them.

It reads like a bleeding liberal cause, ie: “Overhaul the Education System!”
But the fact is you can’t legislate on false foundations, regardless of your political leanings.

(and i’m now officially plastered!)

First, Eugenics is a failure, since there is no way to know what genes can be useful in a new environment. For example, new foodstuffs or diseases. Genetic bottlenecks are usually a disaster, which eugenics tends to produce. You can’t improve on Natural Selection. Eugenics simply substitutes a temporary, bound-to-one-time, subjective judgment about what constitutes “fitness” which could well change.

It might well be good for example to subtract a few IQ points for resistance to horrible new viruses that could mutate out of livestock and infect humanity.

Second, Sweden had no colonies, relatively little Eugenics (compared to say, California and the progressives such as Hiram Johnson, Margaret Sanger — founder of Planned Parenthood and a major, big time racist, Leland Stanford, Upton Sinclair — yes HIM! and most other progressive/liberals in the late teens and early 1920′s). California’s laws formed the basis for Hitler’s laws, and remained in force until the 1970s. With a much bigger scope of operation.

Sweden is no different from every other major Western nation, including many that are blameless, relatively speaking: New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and so on. Infected with the noxious diseases of PC and Multiculturalism which is the natural result of women forming the demographic majority through longer lives. Women love that stuff, they can’t get enough of it, and WANT all that stuff including inviting in lots of poverty stricken Third World people with attitudes directly opposed to theirs. Since women’s real enemies are male ordinary guys, which nearly all Western Politics are directed against.

Next, I don’t think that IQ is the “thing that is wrong” with Black culture in the US. Rather it is larger changes in how people in the West relate to each other. Look at the Black AND the White community over time, particularly with illegitimacy rates. While Whites moved from 4% in 1965 to 41% now, Blacks moved from 24% (still high) in 1965 to 70% nationally. A full 90% in the urban core. I submit that suddenly, Blacks and Whites did not get a whole lot stupider over forty years.

You can see it all over: R&B guys like the IMMORTAL Marvin Gaye used to sing sensitive, yearning songs about the women they loved, that would have been perfectly understandable to any Medieval bard singing about his beloved or for that matter, any Romantic poet in the 1820′s. Now you have women compared in Rap Music to pieces of meat. You can see the same thing from the Beatles “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” to say, Nine Inch Nails “I Want to F— You Like an Animal.”

If Whites caught a cold, in terms of cultural bad things that affect crime rates, illegitimacy, attitudes towards women, and general slackerdom, apathy, idiocy, and other ills, Black America (the Canary in the Coal Mine) caught Pneumonia.

I think it stems from the same thing. The Pill being available to married women in all states in 1965 (Griswold v Connecticut) and to all women in 1972 (Eisenstadt v. Baird). The pill plus the condom plus urban anonymity enabled women to chase without consequence the bad boy and share him too, since they had their own money.

American (and European) culture is still dealing with that Earthquake of how women changed the type of guys they select. Nice and decent guys lose, which is why Rap and Rock both changed. Why Black men in various ghettos as you’ve noted play hyper-masculine roles, with no older men around to knock some sense into them. Why White guys tend to Mo Rocca hip-nerdiness or “Flatbiller” “bro” type truck macho-ness or slacker gaming isolation.

IMHO when people talk of the social problems associated with the Black urban core, they are merely looking at one aspect of the larger huge social changes brought on by the Pill and Condom and women’s improved social/financial status. The hipster ironic nerd who fumes about why he can’t get women, and indulges in casual misogyny predictably, is the same aspect.

I lived in New Orleans, pre-Katrina, for three years. Old-time residents would lament the total passing of the Benevolent societies that sheltered Black New Orleans residents from racism and connected each other to a larger civil society. New Orleans was still rough, but not what it was when I first drove in: past a guy getting arrested for beating his crack smoking buddy to death with an iron pipe right on Carrolton Ave.

[There is a map, somewhere, of sexual partners and diseases, by nation. It's pretty shocking, and seems to correlate well with social ills of the type we are discussing. I don't think humans are well adapted for widespread sexual partners in large numbers in large groups because of the tensions between winners and losers.]

whiskeys last blog post..Why the Culture War Has Re-ignited

As a follow-up, I don’t think Affirmative Action is politically sustainable. As whites decline in numbers, they have more pain, politically, spread out on a smaller population. Particularly in things that are limited by nature and create winners and losers, such as College admission and financial aid.

Already there is predictably another of the perennial lawsuits by Asian and White students against UC who they allege, quite probably correctly, have been discriminated against in favor of Blacks and Hispanics.

As whites decline in numbers the pain of that forgone opportunity is larger, which is why you see anti-Affirmative action stuff winning in California and other “diverse” states.

Politically, I don’t think that Affirmative Action can be sustained much longer, and socially, Black leaders are over-reaching with things like “reparations” for Slavery (paid in full by the Civil War dead). Demographically speaking, the 2000 Census had 75% White, 12% Black, and 13% Hispanic. White guilt applies to wealthy latte-sipping yuppies, and there are not that many of them. Rev. Wright and Obama’s “explanations” have left most Whites in no mood to hear lectures on their past sins of racism, given that very few of them have any living connection to it in the first place, and those doing the lecturing live in mansions (Wright, Whoopi).

Besides, AA does nothing to combat the big problem. Which is not racism. But rather the Earthquake of women’s changing choices that has turned societies all over the West upside down. It’s everywhere: Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, Norway! Denmark, Canada, everywhere.

whiskeys last blog post..Why the Culture War Has Re-ignited

First, Eugenics is a failure, since there is no way to know what genes can be useful in a new environment. For example, new foodstuffs or diseases. Genetic bottlenecks are usually a disaster, which eugenics tends to produce. You can?t improve on Natural Selection. Eugenics simply substitutes a temporary, bound-to-one-time, subjective judgment about what constitutes ?fitness? which could well change.

whiskey, you are assuming that voluntary eugenics will first be tried in the anglosphere since that is the area that will most likely be as conservative about novel applications of technology as this. it may or may not. but, there is a very good chance that it could be tried in places that don’t have the same ethical values, like india, china, or certain areas of the pacific rim. all such areas may be willing to be more adventurous about applying this technology for humans and willing to risk the potential catastrophes that you allude to. having said that, i really think you are being way too doomsdayish in your assessment. if we have the tech to cause poor genotypes/phenotypes, we will surely have the tech to reverse or modify the process, so to speak, until we achieve the desired state for the desired time.

Besides, AA does nothing to combat the big problem. Which is not racism. But rather the Earthquake of women?s changing choices that has turned societies all over the West upside down. It?s everywhere: Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, Norway! Denmark, Canada, everywhere.

whiskey, maybe you’re on to something here. i need more data to see which has more far ranging consequences for society, multi- culturalism or feminism. you have a novel way of thinking, to say the least!

whiskey, maybe that last comment of yours is worthy of a blog post to expound your complete thoughts on the matter for the rest of us…

“How do we change our policies?”

There is only one major policy implication that is remotely reasonable. Currently, the consensus view is that racial disparities are a problem to be remedied and most likely caused by discrimination. If all groups were statistically identical in every way, then that would be a logical conclusion.

If we accept racial distinctions in IQ, then we would simply accept the fact that the under-representation of african americans among, e.g., physics professors might be be caused by a smaller portion of sufficiently intelligent african americans.

I.e., this just means that disparate impact is not (by itself) evidence of disparate treatment.

Creating “slow tracks” for african americans specifically (rather than low intelligence people generally) is a terrible idea. There are certainly some smart african americans (whatever their fraction is), and you’d be wasting their talents. Sort by IQ/self discipline/similar factors, let the chips fall where they may.

If we went back to the idea of “color blindness” (which was never really tried, except for a very brief period in the late 1950′s – early 1960′s) we wouldn’t need to have this discussion at all, which would suit me just fine. Besides, there is at least some evidence that blacks did better economically under those policies anyway. Personally, I don’t care if the guy living next to me is Einstein or an idiot; all I care about is that he obey the law, keep his yard mowed, and keep his kids and pets in line. As for AA, well, I’ll leave it to Mencken; “When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel”.

whiskey:

You can?t improve on Natural Selection.

Natural selection no longer exists the way it used to.

First, I agree that IQ tests may not reveal anything other than your ability to take IQ tests. Intelligence is captured at many levels that IQ tests may miss.

Second, even assuming that IQ tests exhaustively encompass all of human intelligence, there is the possibility that blacks don’t score as high for certain sociocultural and psychological reasons. In other words, they are not innate poor performers but rather conditioned to be poor performers. The conditions may include poverty, a culture that somehow grew to shun white activities like reading, a psychological stigma about poor intelligence that may lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy (and many psychological studies confirm this), etc.

The problem is that many liberals (and I consider myself a liberal) are so caught up in the politically correct game of avoiding any talk of comparing races (especially when it puts blacks in a negative light) that we never have an honest discussion of race and policy implications. People want to avoid the scary discussions of eugenics and Brave New World-ish categorizations of Alphas and Omegas.

The irony about the difference between liberals and conservatives is that they are both aiming for the same ultimate goal. Both want fairness and justice. In the context of education, both want to see success based solely on merit and effort rather than race. But conservatives can’t seem to understand that it is rarely a fair contest for blacks — MLK once said that you can’t put a man who has been shackled his entire life on the starting line and expect him to run a fair race. And liberals can’t seem to get beyond political correctness to talk honestly about controversial issues without getting defensive (e.g., Richard Sander at UCLA proposed using California Bar exam data to see whether affirmative action was actually hurting black law students but the California Bar refuses to even provide this data).

That’s why I’m really intrigued by Barack Obama (actually, a huge supporter). He seems to know how to speak on both sides and reflect their fears and hopes. He embodies in disposition, physical appearance, and cultural background what this country needs to have an honest discussion about race and politics.

And the sooner that this country resolves the black-white issues, the sooner that Asian people like me, who don’t fit into this neat dichotomy, will have our own issues addressed!

What is this gibberish about a “slow track” for blacks? Blacks are not dumber than whites. There are dumb whites and smart blacks; the ability range is the same. It’s the distribution of intellect across that range which differs.

What that means is: to the extent that intellectual ability leads to social and economic success, blacks will have proportionately less success than whites. It looks like the result of racial discrimination – which infested America for generations.

What that leads to today is the equivalent of perceiving certain conditions as symptoms of a particular disease, and using powerful medicines to treat that disease, even though those conditions have other non-pathological causes.

I am afraid that the only long-term solution may be a form of eugenics: discourage dumb people from having children, and insure that they have easy, highly effective and reliable contraception.

I am not at all impressed by the stress that whites place on IQ. While it is true that Whites have a higher IQ than blacks, this doesn’t have much in the grand scheme of things.

This is because the type of intelligence lauded by whites – and measurable in IQ – is not the highest form of intelligence, and can be used for both positive and negative results, the latter including high IQ wall street types nearly causing a global financial meltdown with their intricate and cleverly intelligent banking schemes.

and Whiskey

-the article you are looking for on sexual habits for different countries is in the Economist.

T,
I too have been following the Race & IQ debate for sometime now, and find the whole thing to be quite interesting.

My only problem is with the conclusions drawn from the evidence as we now have it.

Many of those who puch hard for this sort of thing do so because they seem to be aggreived about Affirmative Action, being used to take away college spots, contracts and job/promotions from deserving White guys and given to Blacks and Browns who clearly don’t deserve it. I could go along with that were it not for the simple fact that Affirmative Action’s biggest beneficiary is and has been WHITE WOMEN, and that the same White Males who rail on against AA suddenly seem to go quiet when anyone brings up the White Wmen angle. And that, in my view, is not by accident.

I mean, c’mon, let’s be serious here. Everyone knows that the chances of some Black or Brown guy bumping a high level executive, contractor or surgeon is slim to none. But, the chances of a WHITE WOMAN bumping him isn’t implausible in the least. It certainly is possible. In some cases, maybe even probably or likely.

If the argument is about harful public policies that threaten to undermine readiness, competition and competence, then one is hardpressed to think up a bigger impactful group in this regard, wrt AA, than WHITE WOMEN. Case in point: Larry Summers.

Think about it-what percentage of Harvard’s student body, faculty and alums, are Black? What major incident(s) are comparable to what happened to Summers? I think we all know the answer, and that is simply that we all know that Black folk can’t influence things on that scale. But WHITE WOMEN can and have, and will do so again if any man-or woman, as Sarah Palin shows us-even fixes their mouth to suggest that maybe women on the whole simpl ain’t cut out for certain areas of human endeavor, and that those spots they’re taking might be better suited for men.

So, while I find the Race & IQ thing to be very interesting, and while on principle I’m against AA, I really can’t take seriously anyone attempting to use the former as a way of discrediting the latter, because in so doing they ignore the gorilla in the room-WHITE WOMEN.

And until they take that one on, and the ridiculously massive influence of the Feminist Lobby, I can’t hear a thing they’re saying, and neither can the vast majority of Black folks.

Salaam
Mu

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/c.....amp;coll=1

I suggest everyone take the time to click “the’s” link in the comment above this one.

Mu: “What major incident(s) are comparable to what happened to Summers?”

James Watson.

Mu: “because in so doing they ignore the gorilla in the room-WHITE WOMEN. ”

Women typically only receive affirmative action in science and engineering. I oppose this just as strongly as I oppose racial affirmative action.

Fascinating post, T. I look forward to reading your later ones.

Just a brief comment about why Special Ed tracking for blacks won’t work (not just the reason you cited): blacks do on average score lower than whites on IQ tests. Problem: while whites with IQs at the black average (85) often come across as dull, blacks at that average range do not. This phenomenon has been commented on many times by scientists all over the political spectrum. While many conclusions have been drawn from this fact, the fundamental issue remains: even if blacks have lower IQs than whites, black are not just low IQ whites with darker skin. There appear to be distributions of abilities that differ between races, with whites appearing to have higher levels of some abilities (IQ) than blacks, but vice versa for others.

And these other abilities are probably impossible to capture in standardized tests. Sailer has pointed out that blacks may have on average superior ability to improvise (broadly speaking, not just musically in bebop jazz combos). The ability to improvise is a) real; b) important in certain contexts; c) bloody well impossible to measure. Which means that a trait on which blacks would outscore whites (maybe, I think probably) can’t be captured on any kind of standardized test, certainly not on IQ tests.

So if blacks were streamed into Spec Ed classes with whites whose IQ scores they matched, you would actually be trapping a population (blacks) with higher abilities in key areas with a population of considerably less ability. This would be a disaster for blacks.

I have come, very reluctantly, to believe that for many blacks, a different kind of schooling is needed. I have no real idea of what that schooling would consist, but it wouldn’t be like Special Ed, that’s for sure.

Blacks almost certainly have lower IQs on average than whites. But say it again, and say it loud: that DOES NOT MEAN blacks are just low-IQ whites with darker skin. Not at all.

And these other abilities are probably impossible to capture in standardized tests. Sailer has pointed out that blacks may have on average superior ability to improvise (broadly speaking, not just musically in bebop jazz combos). The ability to improvise is a) real; b) important in certain contexts; c) bloody well impossible to measure. Which means that a trait on which blacks would outscore whites (maybe, I think probably) can?t be captured on any kind of standardized test, certainly not on IQ tests

Good point about the improvisation thing. You see it in hip-hop too. I need to Google “Sailer blacks improvisation” and see if I can find that article.

[...] Blacks and IQ, Part 1 [...]

[...] Blacks and IQ, Part 1 [...]

Your first paragraph is wrong, so I don’t see much point in reading further. Conservatives and liberals alike seek out “concepts that sound reassuring and nice and politically correct” after their own version of political correctness, because that is what people do. You just don’t notice it because you’ve already biased yourself to believe conservatives are not biased.

Cases in point: advocacy of creationism and intelligent design, bashing of environmentalism, denial of anthropogenic global warming, and professing that George Bush has been a good President – all of these are pet behaviors of conservatives in which they indulge only because they sound reassuring and nice and politically correct. The beliefs underlying these behaviors are adopted because conservatives find them comforting, regardless of the facts.