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by pessimizer·15y ago·view on hn ↗
I feel that these results only transform into "politically incorrect truth" when observed through a racist lens. African-Americans also seem to have an aptitude for terrible cancer outcomes, living in food deserts, low school district funding, and higher mortgage interest rates. The Latin American countries that Hispanic-Americans were compared to, and the Sub-Saharan African countries that African-Americans were imagined to have been compared to each seem to have national aptitudes for harsh Western colonialism followed up by dictators installed and supported by Western powers, with all of their wealth filtered through tiny elites and directed back to the West.

I don't have anything against the idea of different concentrations of intelligence distributing amongst different groups of people just like heights or colorations do. The experiment just hasn't been done, and may not be possible. The idea that you could compare the test results of African-Americans and European-Americans and come up with a complete enough set of controls to discover some sort of distribution of intrinsic aptitude is absurd; you have to settle for parental income and educational attainment and ignore the fact that the two groups are facing a radically different environment filled with pervasive beliefs about their potential which are often based on race, and are easily visually distinguishable. For example, you also find correlations between attractiveness or height and intelligence - and similarly, IMO, misguided theorists postulating some sort of Eloi superiority while ignoring any possible effect of the discrimination that unattractive or short people face, even with multiple studies verifying the Pygmalion Effect (the effect that instructor expectations have on student performance) such as:

Pygmalion in the Classroom (Rosenthal and Jacobson, 1968) http://www.springerlink.com/content/9u01hn7865v7387r/

or

Pygmalion goes to boot camp: Expectancy, leadership, and trainee performance (Eden and Shani, 1982) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6WY3-4NNF8B3-D...

Said simply, the cultural environment is simply too messy to jump to conclusions about intrinsic ability distributions about disadvantaged groups, and the temptation has always been irresistible for some to use unsurprising statistics to confirm previously held biases.