Evil Finn?

[mrmitchell]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


That's an inane comparison. There's no similarity between the two cases.

It is a bit of a stretch but I think Japher was emphasizing the percieved absurdity of this quote:

Finland’s minority Ombudsman Mikko Puumalainen hopes that a police investigation will be launched. He says that although freedom of expression is a fundamental right in Finland, the right is not unlimited.

Namely that a "fundamental right" can be limited. Well, of course it can. We do it in the United States.

[Kuciwalker]

There's a difference between qualified absolutism and "it has exceptions therefore we can ignore it completely."

And it wasn't a "stretch," it was a comparison as absurd as the statement the professor made. In your example, someone is deliberately lying with intent to cause harm to others.

[Japher]

The "race as science" baloney has been pushed for over 100 years now, and it continues to produce no respectable results, for many reasons but starting with that there is no biological definition of race to begin with, no single trait that every person of a certain group has or doesn't have.

Actually, it hasn't been pushed properly so it can't produce results.

Once that is established it is a lot easier for people to (correctly) consider that the achievement gap, crime rates, etc. are better correlated with income and social status.

I agree completely, and as the old codger says "Differences in intelligence are the most significant factor in explaining poverty". Do you deny this? Do you deny that the poorest of countries in Africa are those under self rule? Why is this? Will I say race? No, but in a similar fashion that it takes money to make money, it also takes poor people to keep people poor.

It's also not an absurd observation to make in Finland or other 1st world countries that the more poverish neighborhoods tend to have a certain ethnic make-up, and this, IMO, has highly to do with level of assimilation that this "racist" is pushing for. Similarly, poor white trash cultures tend to be charlitans.

If you don't think the claim that Europeans are just naturally smarter than Africans is racist or hateful, I guess you are too removed from racism. Remember that claims like this were used throughout the 1900s to justify the socially-caused inequalities between groups, especially in the US.

Sorry if it's racist to point out the evolution has also made the black man taller, stronger and faster and thus a better athlete... in general. I think I could argue the IQ test as a measure for demonstrating this "intellegence" better than I can argue why all the poor people seem to be of a specific minority despite advantages given to them to do better. I think that he would been better to state something along the lines that the communities which are poorer tend to put less weight/emphais on education than do other communties and that we ought to do something about that... which is pretty much what he did, with one additional correlation.

Perhaps we should address the problem that he pointed out instead of crying over the fact that we think he is a racist... but will probably not get past all the whinning and name calling in order to fix or do anything.

[Caligastia]

Originally posted by mrmitchell
The "race as science" baloney has been pushed for over 100 years now, and it continues to produce no respectable results, for many reasons but starting with that there is no biological definition of race to begin with, no single trait that every person of a certain group has or doesn't have.

You're submitting a false definition of race. There doesn't have to be a single trait that is exclusive to one group for there to be a race. Races are made up of people who tend to have several traits in common, and of course there is some overlap of those traits into other groups.

Once that is established it is a lot easier for people to (correctly) consider that the achievement gap, crime rates, etc. are better correlated with income and social status.

Ah, so once people accept a false definition of race, they will no longer believe what their lying eyes tell them?

If you don't think the claim that Europeans are just naturally smarter than Africans is racist or hateful, I guess you are too removed from racism. Remember that claims like this were used throughout the 1900s to justify the socially-caused inequalities between groups, especially in the US.

Can you show me an intelligence test in which all races score equally?

[Caligastia]

Originally posted by Japher
It's also not an absurd observation to make in Finland or other 1st world countries that the more poverish neighborhoods tend to have a certain ethnic make-up, and this, IMO, has highly to do with level of assimilation that this "racist" is pushing for. Similarly, poor white trash cultures tend to be charlitans.

I have no doubt that an improvement in the environment of these groups would yield results, but expecting equal results from all groups is a pipe dream IMO. Mother nature is not egalitarian.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Originally posted by Japher
Sorry if it's racist to point out the evolution has also made the black man taller, stronger and faster and thus a better athlete... in general.

Got figures to back those up?

[Japher]

nope... you should know better of me

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

If anyone's interested, here's a site giving advice on how to improve the IQ of children with Down Syndrome.

http://www.cdadc.com/ds/cognitiv.htm

[Caligastia]

Are you trying to make a point?

[Julian Delphiki]

Notice that story is almost 3 years old (12.8.2004 - TODAY), i'm not 100% certain but IIRC nothing much really came out of it.

[VetLegion]

Professor Tatu Vanhanen is the coauthor of an important book, "IQ and the Wealth of Nations". I've acquired the book, but haven't read it yet.

His theory is very plausible. There are big anomalies (for example: Argentine IQ predicts a much higher GDP/capita than is the case) but in general there is a high correlation between average IQ and GDP/capita of a country.

As always, that doesn't prove the direction of the causation. It could be that IQ -> Wealth. It could also be Wealth -> IQ or Something Else -> (both Wealth and IQ).

I don't doubt that that is covered in more length in the book, but as I said I haven't read it yet.

As for the comments made by prof. Vanhanen. They do not show him as evil nor as dumb. The affair simply demonstrates that Finland is a thoroughly politically-correctized country.

[VetLegion]

And I think that this is not the first time he got in trouble in Finland because of his views on intelligence. Maybe our Finnish friends can confirm that.

[Kassiopeia]

Originally posted by JulianD
Notice that story is almost 3 years old (12.8.2004 - TODAY), i'm not 100% certain but IIRC nothing much really came out of it.

Yeah, I was wondering whether this was a new development or something, but it was the same story. Nothing happened to Professor Vanhanen and the hassle died out in a week or two, and his son continued as the PM after the 2007 election.

[mrmitchell]

I agree completely, and as the old codger says "Differences in intelligence are the most significant factor in explaining poverty". Do you deny this? Do you deny that the poorest of countries in Africa are those under self rule? Why is this? Will I say race? No, but in a similar fashion that it takes money to make money, it also takes poor people to keep people poor.

Could you define self rule? Democracy? Rule by Africans? A lot of the poorest countries in Africa are war-torn hellholes or dictatorial enclaves, too.

Vanhanen would be right if he reversed his statement, and said poverty is a significant factor in explaining intelligence. And yes, if it were the only statement he had made, he would be right the other way around: dumber people are more likely to be poor. But he went and correlated intelligence with race.

I don't know what you're trying to say by the last sentence, unless you're getting at a "self-perpetuating cycle" kind of thing, which is agreeable.

It's also not an absurd observation to make in Finland or other 1st world countries that the more poverish neighborhoods tend to have a certain ethnic make-up, and this, IMO, has highly to do with level of assimilation that this "racist" is pushing for. Similarly, poor white trash cultures tend to be charlitans.

The impoverished neighborhoods are also often made up of immigrants, families that have been impoverished for generations, and/or -- yes -- ethnic groups that until 50 years ago were openly and freely regarded as inferior. There are perfectly sound explanations for the poverty of all these groups that does not rely on some innate, inherited inferiority due to the color of their skin.

The assimilation theory reeks of old-style "breed the black out" thinking in new, friendlier words. But it's not really clear what Vanhanen means, and I think both of us will agree that interracial marriage for the purpose of making black parents have white children is a Bad Thing, so I would be happy to end the assimilation discussion here. (Plus I keep misspelling it as assimialation.)

Sorry if it's racist to point out the evolution has also made the black man taller, stronger and faster and thus a better athlete... in general[1]. I think I could argue the IQ test as a measure for demonstrating this "intellegence" better than I can argue why all the poor people seem to be of a specific minority despite advantages given to them to do better[2]. I think that he would been better to state something along the lines that the communities which are poorer tend to put less weight/emphais on education than do other communties and that we ought to do something about that... which is pretty much what he did, with one additional correlation[3].

[1]It's not racist to point out that blacks are naturally better athletes, but it is repeating an urban legend. There is no biology that makes blacks taller or stronger, but there is an immense societal influence to drive blacks away from academics (due to their own impoverished circumstances or the prejudices of school administrators) and towards athletics. We tell ourselves myths like this as a society to, again, rationalize the achievement gap, and to discredit black athletes and swipe their hard work out from under them.

Noone believed in black athletic superiority before the 1930's. Observers of the day looked at the average black family, which lived in desperate, poverty-stricken squalor, and reasoned from the black's short life expectancy, high infant mortality rate, and other factors that blacks must be genetically predisposed to this kind of physical inferiority. Sports mirrored the conclusion that blacks were physically ill; successful teams in early sports were almost always all white. The best basketball teams in the early 1930's were Jewish. Then as well as now people turned to old stereotypes to explain away the disparity: Jews were said to be good at basketball because of their crafty dodginess.

As segregation started to ebb and color barriers were broken, and the situation of blacks improved dramatically from the post-Civil War period, blacks started becoming more successful in sports. Now if all other factors were equal it would seem as if an unexplainable number of blacks were at the top of their game in just about any sport you would look at, but as I mentioned earlier, blacks are often purposely driven to sports. The book Friday Night Lights has a chapter or two that touches on this phenomenon, but you don't need to go any further than your own post to know that society pushes blacks into sports, because you're repeating the tale that athletics is what they are better at. We as a society invent these tales to help ourselves and easily explain away that no, we are not equal, that's why there are more whites in banking and more blacks in basketball, because that is much easier to swallow than the idea that a supposedly equal opportunity society is still subtly guiding people down different paths due to their skin color.

If that was tl;dr, short, genetic story has two points: We have far more genetic diversity between members of the same race than between race to race. There isn't just one gene that sparks talent, it is a combination of several working together. The probability of having those genes is random and equally likely for those from any ethnic group.

Humans started leaving Africa about 80,000 years ago, which is not enough time for significant evolutionary divergence to occur. All we got are these shallow differences like color.

[2]They're not given any advantages in IQ tests. I doubt there are any IQ tests out there that say "If you are black, add 15 points to your score." Testing is culturally biased toward affluent white males (the infamous oarsman-regatta question on the SAT), and most tests do nothing to correct for environmental factors such as income level, available health care, etc. when they report scores. So it's a post hoc, ergo propter hoc line of reasoning, when the real causes lay largely in poverty.

[3]I see nothing in the article about emphasis on education.

Perhaps we should address the problem that he pointed out instead of crying over the fact that we think he is a racist... but will probably not get past all the whinning and name calling in order to fix or do anything.

Red herring and a loaded statement that tries to force upon us the conclusion that Mr. Vanhanen's beliefs are accurate in the first place. Come on, Japher, you're much better than this.

Caligastia

You're submitting a false definition of race. There doesn't have to be a single trait that is exclusive to one group for there to be a race. Races are made up of people who tend to have several traits in common, and of course there is some overlap of those traits into other groups.

So in other words race is subjective? If not:

What are the concrete definitions? How many races are there? How far down do we divide people? What basis in science do the definitions have? And then prove to me that at least some stereotypes of each race are encoded in its and only its DNA.

And, why historically have people from different backgrounds, when asked this question, decided upon different traits (groups of traits if you prefer) and different boundary lines between races?

Boundary lines brings up one more question. How many black characteristics do I have to have before I become black? Where does this cut-off number come from?

Or, avoiding all these questions and making life much easier, race is subjective.

Can you show me an intelligence test in which all races score equally?

Yes: one that removes all cultural bias and when reporting results corrects for all the non-race factors of the tested subjects.

That will be hard to come up with. However, the Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes experiment proved something: whichever group thought they were on top scored better on their tests that day, even when discrimination is based on something so ludicrous as eye color. The group that was on the bottom scored worse than they usually did. So for starters, as long as we keep telling ourselves whites are smarter than blacks, in large-sample, long-term testing in rigorous studies, we might find our expectations to be true by means of self-fulfilling prophecy.

[VetLegion]

mrmitchell, it is simply incredible how much nonsense you were able to condense into post #29. I doubt that there is a single thing in it you got right.

I salute you.