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Hey! First time poster here. Please be critical.
I saw this article last week and am not sure how to think about it. https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-increase-equity-school-districts-eliminate-honors-classes-d5985dee
The TL;DR is that honors classes in this subset of all honors classes had a clear bias in terms of racial makeup relative to baseline. So they stopped offering honors classes.
On the one hand this seems super effective— with a strategy like this maybe in a generation or so when they start offering honors classes again there might be less bias.
On the other hand my intuition says that in general it’s okay to allow students to self-select (or students and whoever is telling them what to do) and decide how much schoolwork they want to do.
It seems relevant to the school-flavor culture war stuff.
Any links to previous threads on similar topics would be appreciated.
Curious to know more.
Edit: not bait, genuine curiosity. Got some good criticism about low-effort top-level-posting, would appreciate suggestions/pointers to excellent top-level posts.
Continued edit: Also curious what about this post codes it as bait? A few people saw it that way.
There’s always going to be racial disparities because there are racial disparities in academic skill as evidenced by testing. Getting rid of honor’s classes because black and latino students do poorly is like getting rid of swimming competitions because short guys do poorly or getting rid of beauty models because fat women feel offended. It is the exact wrong way of looking at the world. The black and latino students, instead of narcissistically believing they are morally harmed, should feel gratitude that they live in a nation where smarter people live and should feel blessed that they have more capable competitors to inspire them. If there is any moral harm occurring, it is that smart students will grow up to have to subsidize the problems of dumb students. In no way do the dumb students possess moral victimhood status, IMHO.
You're essentially arguing that black and Latino students should just accept the reality that they aren't as smart as white people, and be grateful that there are white people around to serve as role models.
Even if this were true, our society is not constructed such that we can assert a modern-day Great Chain of Being and expect the people born into the bottom rungs to accept it.
That's basically how white people relate to Asian students and it seems basically fine to me. I don't actually find it all that degrading to know that my ethnic group doesn't have the highest average IQ and I don't actually think it says much of anything about me individually.
I could agree with this in the abstract. Intelligence does not equate to moral worth, right?
Except our society very much does equate intelligence to moral worth, and more importantly, equates intelligence to success in life. As a practical matter, very few white people aspire to be professional basketball players or think that their lives are made worse because they are genetically disadvantaged in their basketball potential. But intelligence affects basically everything. And the hard HBD proponents don't just say "Well, black people have lower IQs, but that's okay."
I often see the "Well, Asians score better than whites on IQ tests and that doesn't bother me" argument, but very clearly, whites are doing fine despite perhaps not being the highest IQ race on the planet. If there is a real, genetically-determined IQ gap between whites and Asians, it's small enough as to make little or no difference, whereas the gaps between whites and blacks are stark and significant.
Note that none of this is me claiming that these gaps can't be real. I'm just saying that if you were a black person seeing how poorly your fellow black people are doing in the world and told "Sorry, it's just your bad luck to be born the race whose dump stat is Intelligence," you would probably have a problem accepting this with equanimity.
Which society? TheMotte?
Adolescent Self-Esteem: Differences by Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Age
How likely do you suppose it is that in a society where intelligence is equated to moral worth, the stereotypically most intelligent and most socially conformist, and objectively the highest-scoring major group has the lowest self-esteem, and vice versa?
Insofar as we define whites on the planet in a convenient enough manner. Ukrainians aren't white, I guess – and Appalachians should be proud that Episcopalans and Judeo-Hapas in private schools of New York and New England who hate them and politically oppose them have a skin tone close to theirs and get honors on their behalf.
Not to be crass, but it's not just basketball.
Social media, porn sites, ads and all sorts of American, and now not only American entertainment are bursting with black-male-white-female content, with «muh BBC» mockery of «white boys», «once you go black» memes, with even Effective Altruists wringing their hands that they treat black men as irresistible «sex toys» in their polyamorous rings (what racism!) in the wake of Bostromgate. You really don't need to look hard for it. American society is very conscious about interracial stuff and in denial about fetishizing it (e.g. here's a 8chan board). It's an elephant in the room, don't even try to snarkily spin this into a me issue, as is the custom. I guess I've first realized this when reading Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! book one, the uncomfortable chapter dedicated to, I assume, nursing insecurities of intelligent elderly Jews:
Granted, the trilogy including this chapter is replete with all other sorts of sex – sign of the times. And I know that accurate tinder/dating/marriage statistics do not support the implied pattern. The question is of social impressions and beliefs.
Sex is right at the foundation of human sociality. Do you suppose there are very few white people who think their lives are made worse because they are not seen as impressively masculine?
I think you’re not quite getting at how white versus black masculinity is seen. Yes, blacks are viewed as bigger, stronger, tougher, and sexually bolder, but Americans do still have a concept of men needing to do the right thing, which black men are very definitely not stereotyped as doing.
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Yes, I do suppose that.
+1 for citing one of my favorite books, though.
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This isn't the message, though. Being born to a particular race certainly can be bad luck depending on the race and society based on the discrimination that goes on in that society. But the average IQ - and more broadly the average of any trait - of your race has no real bearing on your lot in life. It's your own personal intelligence that has the bearing on your life. And that personal intelligence isn't influenced by the average intelligence of your race - it's the other way around, where the average intelligence of your race is influenced by the personal intelligence of you and everyone else in your race, because that's literally how one would calculate that.
In theory, yes. But people aren't just individuals, they are also members of communities - familial, ethnic, racial, national, etc.
"Even if your people are naturally less intelligent, you might not be" doesn't seem like it would be much consolation. Especially if it turns out you aren't one of the lucky ones at the favorable end of the bell curve.
So, given a choice between "The lives of you and yours are unfortunate because you are intellectually inferior and there isn't much that can be done about that," and "The lives of you and yours are unfortunate because of historical discrimination and institutional racism, and we can fix that," which one do you think most people are going to choose? How easy would it be for you to accept option a?
See, I agree with everything you’re saying here, and have argued the same things multiple times in this space. That’s what’s so odd to me about how hostile you get towards me and other users here who have advocated a formalized geographic and/or cultural separation of blacks from other higher-performing racial groups in this country. I believe it would be a genuine act of care and would drastically improve the lived experience of most black people, for precisely the reasons you’ve outlined. Yet you continue to (usually by implication but occasionally explicitly) accuse me of having other, more malicious motives.
I understand why you might have other concerns which would stop you from carrying through the argument you’re making to (what I believe is) its most appropriate conclusion, but I ask that you take this opportunity to at least reflect on why someone would conclude from the argument you’re making that maybe the best solution is to engineer a future in which black people will not have to live every single day of their lives being forced to unfavorably compare themselves to whites and Asians.
Honestly, I don't think I've ever been particularly hostile to you. Obviously I disagree with your ideology, but I don't recall ever being uncivil to you.
I accept that you are sincere in wanting a peaceful separation where we all just get along on our respective sides of the fence.
I just don't believe most white nationalists are so benevolent. Sure, they might not all want a race war if there is a less violent alternative, but they don't actually care about the well-being of black people; they just hate and resent black people because they perceive blacks to be making their own lives worse.
Let's say that's true. I think even you must know that your project of the US setting aside a chunk of the country for African-America and subsidizing them for a few generations is about as likely as AIs turning into benevolent overlords who give us Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism. So I don't see white nationalism leading to anything but a race war, whatever your personal intentions might be.
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Again, I don't think this is the message. There are plenty of things that can be done about lower intellect to give people better lives - just as many as can be done to effectively improve people's lives by countering historical discrimination or institutional racism, by my lights - and plenty of people specifically push for policies designed to do just that. I do think the message gets negativity attached to them because of the lionization of "intelligence" as the indicator of worth or value in a person, but then the solution is clearly to get rid of that lionization. I'm pretty sure concepts like physical strength or martial prowess used to be a far greater indicator of someone's worth as a human being (at least among males) in the past, but that association is mostly gone now in modern society. I think we can do the same for intelligence. And, frankly, I think we must if we are to create at all a functional society going forward.
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IQ gap is a very abstract concept. I doubt regular people are going around correlating how they interact with people, with what that person's race's average IQ is compared to theirs.
What isn't abstract is how often you are harrassed, abused, or otherwise victimized, and what tribe that person comes from. When you are openly discriminated against during job interviews, and what the open racial preferences of the company were. When you are in groups, and which people are openly racially hostile towards you.
Never, have I ever, had a naturalized Asian-American do any of those things to me, or anyone I know. To whatever degree there are abstract, market dominant minority effects at play between European-Americans and Asian-Americans, they have manifested zero immediate negative consequences in my life. Only the most terminally online person would resort to nonchalantly claiming that some IQ different between whites and asians doesn't bother them. Whatever the differences between whites and asians, asian people have likely never bothered him. And not in the "Ugh, that bothers me" sense but the "I think that might be a felony, or at least a misdemeanor" sense.
The same cannot be said about how many equity policies have forced me into contact with groups that hate me and seem eager to victimize my family. Or worse, have the state do it for them.
Never, have I ever, had a naturalized Asian-American do any of those things to me, or anyone I know. To whatever degree there are abstract, market dominant minority effects at play between European-Americans and Asian-Americans, they have manifested zero immediate negative consequences in my life.
It's not commonly noted, but these things do happen in small ways. The self-segregation of asian students from white ones does happen in some schools - particularly at ones with large asian populations like Cal. Also, I've seen cases of anti-white discrimination crop up in professional contexts; cases of Indian caste-bias, or of the marginalization of whites in some east-asian companies operating branches in CA.
People keeping to themselves doesn't bother me. But RE: Indians hiring discriminately, I really wasn't talking about Indians. I know they are technically Asian, but the Indian Subcontinent is it's own thing for a reason. My wife was actually told point blank during an interview she wasn't going to get the job because she wasn't Indian once. She has an ethnic sounding last name (nobody knows why), so maybe they didn't realize she was white when they offered to interview her.
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Okay. But you're grinding an entirely different axe. We're talking (based on my original response) about whether it's reasonable to expect that blacks (and Latinos) should just accept that white people are smarter and be happy.
Well, Jews and some Asian ethnicities are smarter on average than white people. I, a white person, hold no ill will towards them.
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Why shouldn’t they? You have to accept that on an individual level which is the level that really matters. I care if Terence Tao beats me on the job application, but I have to accept that just the same
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I donno man. I just don't know.
I mean, going back to my previously mentioned, white suburban, not a minority in sight, upbringing, dumb white kids were just dumb. And they often grumbled that life wasn't fair. The speeding tickets they got for going 100 in a 45 weren't fair. The F's they got on tests weren't fair. Getting fired from the jobs they struggled to show up for wasn't fair. And no amount of pointing out them that these things were the consequences of their actions made a dent in their conviction. Even that they were the easily foreseeable consequence! Well, maybe for normal people. Not for them.
I'm not sure how many of them ever articulated that they even perceived it to be an IQ problem. I mean, naturally everyone around them knew they were dumb as a box of rocks. But they always thought they were as smart as everyone else, and that life wasn't fair.
Luckily nobody gave a fuck, because they were all white. There was no "Dumb ass white person" political action group. There was no equity program for those utterly incapable of not making a bad decision.
If IQ test data between Blacks and Whites is accurate, you've got a truly staggering proportion of the African American population that are just dumb. And if they are like the dumb white people I've known, they don't think they are. They will never believe they are. And, like the dumb white people around me growing up, society serves itself best when it doesn't take their complaints about "fairness" seriously.
As for how they cope with it, ideally, that would be on them. Alas...
Agreed - dumb people are dumb, and one characteristic of dumb people is an inability to accept cause and effect, that actions have consequences, to take responsibility, etc. As well as suffering from Dunning-Kruger Syndrome. (I've known a few dumb people who knew they were less than bright and more or less accepted it, but most... don't.) Obviously this is equally true of dumb white people and dumb black people.
Yeah, that is the crux of it. My argument is not that IQ tests imply unfortunate things so we should not believe them, or that we should pretend things that aren't true because it makes dumb people feel bad. My argument is a purely practical one: given that dumb people demonstrably can't accept this, then if it's true that blacks and Latinos are dumb at much higher rates, why would you think they should just "cope" and be happy? That's not a reasonable expectation of human behavior.
What is the solution? I don't know.
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