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Are you smarter than The Obama?

Are you smarter than The Obama?

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Thunder said:
but I should say that as far as affirmative action goes, I would have prefered we insured a free college tuition to all African-Americans to any state school, who graduate from high school. i think that would have been a great thing.
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You know what, I'm open to that. Let society strike a grand bargain with definite terms. Your side wants free college tuition for all African-Americans. OK, despite my distaste for wealth redistribution I'll go along with this. I'll even be generous with other people's money and say I'll support that program for 30 years. Then it stops. Cold. Never again. Finito. Fin.

Blacks are in a unique situation in the US due to slavery. If society was 7/8th white and 1/8th black, as it had been prior to 1965, then a limited wealth redistribution could have been a tolerable cost. Hispanics have no similar claim to blacks for preference under affirmative action. In the workforce, neither should Asians and other minorities. Everyone else came here knowing what the US was and how its society functioned, both in terms of good and bad. There should be no preference in these AA quota systems for voluntary immigrants and that should include the black children of African and Caribbean immigrants.

The reason that such a grand bargain isn't struck is because no one believes that liberals will ever live up to the condition of ending it.
 
Wake said:
How.... odd. What an interesting piece of ammo..

Thunder, why do you think this? How is that fair?
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it would have helped blacks get good jobs.

free tuition does not insure graduation or acceptance into the program or state school of their choice.

it only means that if you can get your ass through HS the govt. will make sure you can afford to pay for college.

that would have been GREAT affirmative action.
 
RiverDad said:
Really? Let's test your hypothesis:

The Racial Gap in Academic Achievement

by ABIGAIL THERNSTROM

The SATs, too, paint a dismal picture. In 1995, black students from families in the top income bracket—$70,000 and up—were a shade behind whites from families earning less than $10,000 on the verbal assessment and significantly behind them in math.​

Your hypothesis is falsified.
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You did not read the whole source did you? Just took the part that you wanted and didn't bother to read for comprehension. First, your source says the problem is with schools and not students, and in fact ends with a school that was having success in overcoming black educational woes.

Furthermore, there are several problems with her claims as she presents them. She does none of her own research but is using others, and it is inconsistent. It compares grade schoolers with high schoolers, and looks at test results that isolate out different variables. She downplays lots of small contributes, without seeming to realize that a bunch of small things add up.
 
RiverDad said:
You claimed "Black kids don't get the education they need due to being poor and the results, "

So, if my response has nothing to do with your claim, that is, if education funding, the quality of the teachers, the availability of resources within the school, are not what you're talking about, then your model must be putting a lot of weight on other factors associated with being poor causing the poor educational outcomes.

What are these other factors associated with being poor? Spell them out and let's see if we can test the validity of your model.

Upthread I've already dealt with the claim that it is a neighborhood effect.

Looking forward to the details on your model.
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Obstacles poor people face in getting a good education, in no particular order:

Lack of quality, supportive parenting
Lack of two parent household
More important concerns than education(like not getting shot)
Reduced access to thinks like computers
Too many negative role models
Too few positive role models
Persistent drug and gang issues near homes and among peers
Poor diet
Many many other things
 
RiverDad said:
You know what, I'm open to that. Let society strike a grand bargain with definite terms. Your side wants free college tuition for all African-Americans. OK, despite my distaste for wealth redistribution I'll go along with this. I'll even be generous with other people's money and say I'll support that program for 30 years. Then it stops. Cold. Never again. Finito. Fin.

Blacks are in a unique situation in the US due to slavery. If society was 7/8th white and 1/8th black, as it had been prior to 1965, then a limited wealth redistribution could have been a tolerable cost. Hispanics have no similar claim to blacks for preference under affirmative action. In the workforce, neither should Asians and other minorities. Everyone else came here knowing what the US was and how its society functioned, both in terms of good and bad. There should be no preference in these AA quota systems for voluntary immigrants and that should include the black children of African and Caribbean immigrants.

The reason that such a grand bargain isn't struck is because no one believes that liberals will ever live up to the condition of ending it.
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...and I am opposed to it by all means.

The sheer condition of race in this financial aid proposal is sufficient to deem this idea racist. It is already absurd that we allow scholarships with race requirements.

High school graduation is not a sufficient condition to measure whether college would be a reasonable investment for a student. I would support automatic financial aid, open to all, proportional to a student's GPA. This serves as a motivational factor and appropriately awards more to those who have worked harder and are more likely to succeed.
 
RiverDad said:
You know what, I'm open to that. Let society strike a grand bargain with definite terms. Your side wants free college tuition for all African-Americans. OK, despite my distaste for wealth redistribution I'll go along with this. I'll even be generous with other people's money and say I'll support that program for 30 years. Then it stops. Cold. Never again. Finito. Fin.

Blacks are in a unique situation in the US due to slavery. If society was 7/8th white and 1/8th black, as it had been prior to 1965, then a limited wealth redistribution could have been a tolerable cost. Hispanics have no similar claim to blacks for preference under affirmative action. In the workforce, neither should Asians and other minorities. Everyone else came here knowing what the US was and how its society functioned, both in terms of good and bad. There should be no preference in these AA quota systems for voluntary immigrants and that should include the black children of African and Caribbean immigrants.

The reason that such a grand bargain isn't struck is because no one believes that liberals will ever live up to the condition of ending it.
Click to expand...

We might be onto something here. What would you say to free college for everyone, not just African-Americans, and a retooling of the educational system so that each child's education was tailored to enhance their individual strengths and minimize their individual weaknesses, so as to insure each person was as prepared to compete upon entering adulthood as it was possible to prepare them? Allocate resources to advantage the most talented, no matter who they may be or where they came from. Create an atmosphere of cooperative competition, where the goal is to push each other so each person can reach their personal pinnacle of development - not to be the best but to find out who is the best, together. Then let them enter the competitive world and see what happens.

Such a system would relatively quickly eliminate all the current whining about who has a better chance than whom, and with it the need for a lot of social programs we have in place now that are meant to correct those imbalances (but admittedly don't really do a great job at it, though it is all we have, currently).

Keep that program up for 30 years, and I am strongly betting that the recipients of its benefits will see to it that it remains in place permanently.
 
digsbe said:
I think it's stupid to lower standards or manipulate results to favor people of a certain race. That is racism and it punishes those who work hard for their grades.
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I agree.

However, the fact that blacks may do less well than other races on tests is not a case of correlation=causation. They don't fail or do worse because they are black. If anything I think it may be due to lifestyles and a weaker drive to study and do well academically.
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You and I both have similar academic backgrounds, so let's approach this like a problem we'd face in the lab.

What do we know?

1.) Some factor, or some combination of factors, is causing outcome disparity between groups.

2.) Let's brainstorm and come up with all sorts of factors that we hypothesize have an influence on outcomes.

3.) Let's create a preliminary model and then isolate the factors. For instance, we can create a simple additive model, like this:

Low income + bad neighborhood + poor nutrition + bad teachers + violent schools + lack of educational resources + police harassment + overt discrimination + covert discrimination + X +Y +Z + Genetics = outcome disparity.

Isolate every factor and see how much influence it has on outcome disparity.

Every factor that is knocked out as showing no influence on outcome disparity will increase the influence of the the the factor set that consists of all of the remaining factors.

Rinse and repeat.

As factors have been knocked out over the last 40-50 years the case for genetics has gotten stronger and stronger. Now we're finding all sorts of race-related genetic disparity in health outcomes - different types of cancers have disproportionate influence on different racial groups, different tolerance to salt, different propensity to diabetes, different propensity to schizophrenia, different propensity towards cardiovascular disease, etc and that's with lifestyles, nutrition, age, socioeconomic status all controlled for.

We now know that all non-Africans on Earth are carrying genes from Neanderthal and Denisovan introgression. It is beyond dispute that Africans and Non-Africans are different on that basis alone.

There is absolutely no plausible reason why some liberal god, high up in heaven, has decreed that the brains of reproductively isolated groups who've lived in thousands of micro-environments over tens of thousands of years should have remained off-limits to mutation, selection pressures, and genetic drift while he allowed these evolutionary processes to play fast and loose with the rest of the genome. No reason at all. Liberal appeals to creationist precepts is a horrible way of going through life and of structuring society. What's even funnier is watching liberal creationists chastising religious creationists for believing in myths. That's side-splittingly funny to watch.
 
Redress said:
You did not read the whole source did you? Just took the part that you wanted and didn't bother to read for comprehension. First, your source says the problem is with schools and not students, and in fact ends with a school that was having success in overcoming black educational woes.

Furthermore, there are several problems with her claims as she presents them. She does none of her own research but is using others, and it is inconsistent. It compares grade schoolers with high schoolers, and looks at test results that isolate out different variables. She downplays lots of small contributes, without seeming to realize that a bunch of small things add up.
Click to expand...

What you're doing is smoke and mirrors. You're ignoring the referenced and footnoted data and instead focusing on Thernstrom's argument. I linked to her paper because of the data that she presented and because ETS (the SAT people) no longer breakdown their race data by income.

Deal with the data point I used to challenge your hypothesis instead of avoiding it and launching a red herring gambit.
 
Mathematician said:
...and I am opposed to it by all means.

The sheer condition of race in this financial aid proposal is sufficient to deem this idea racist. It is already absurd that we allow scholarships with race requirements.

High school graduation is not a sufficient condition to measure whether college would be a reasonable investment for a student. I would support automatic financial aid, open to all, proportional to a student's GPA. This serves as a motivational factor and appropriately awards more to those who have worked harder and are more likely to succeed.
Click to expand...

I agree with your criticism. I'm just saying that I'm willing to bend on my principles in order to give the other side what they think they need and so that at the end of 30 years they'll shut up.

As it stands, they'll never shut up because their is always some false hypothesis that they cling to. The Kansas City experiment which provided liberals with all that they wished in terms of resources made absolutely no difference to outcomes.

That's kind of why I'm also saying that such a grand deal would never actually fly - past experience with liberals show that they are quite adept at tuning out reality when the results don't conform to liberal notions of how reality SHOULD BE. Kansas City didn't work out. Oh well. Who cares. Outcome disparity is still the result of bad schools, bad teachers, bad neighborhoods, blah, blah, blah, damn all the evidence which refutes the liberal model of reality.

So don't worry. American liberals would never step up to the plate and live up to such a deal.
 
RiverDad said:
What you're doing is smoke and mirrors. You're ignoring the referenced and footnoted data and instead focusing on Thernstrom's argument. I linked to her paper because of the data that she presented and because ETS (the SAT people) no longer breakdown their race data by income.

Deal with the data point I used to challenge your hypothesis instead of avoiding it and launching a red herring gambit.
Click to expand...

You managed to entirely and completely ignore everything I said. How amusing.
 
RiverDad said:
What you're doing is smoke and mirrors. You're ignoring the referenced and footnoted data and instead focusing on Thernstrom's argument. I linked to her paper because of the data that she presented and because ETS (the SAT people) no longer breakdown their race data by income.

Deal with the data point I used to challenge your hypothesis instead of avoiding it and launching a red herring gambit.
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Owie. You do provide some interesting data points.
 
Redress said:
You managed to entirely and completely ignore everything I said. How amusing.
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Well to be fair, so did you competely ignore the data he provided.
 
RiverDad said:
I agree.



You and I both have similar academic backgrounds, so let's approach this like a problem we'd face in the lab.

What do we know?

1.) Some factor, or some combination of factors, is causing outcome disparity between groups.

2.) Let's brainstorm and come up with all sorts of factors that we hypothesize have an influence on outcomes.

3.) Let's create a preliminary model and then isolate the factors. For instance, we can create a simple additive model, like this:

Low income + bad neighborhood + poor nutrition + bad teachers + violent schools + lack of educational resources + police harassment + overt discrimination + covert discrimination + X +Y +Z + Genetics = outcome disparity.

Isolate every factor and see how much influence it has on outcome disparity.

Every factor that is knocked out as showing no influence on outcome disparity will increase the influence of the the the factor set that consists of all of the remaining factors.

Rinse and repeat.

As factors have been knocked out over the last 40-50 years the case for genetics has gotten stronger and stronger. Now we're finding all sorts of race-related genetic disparity in health outcomes - different types of cancers have disproportionate influence on different racial groups, different tolerance to salt, different propensity to diabetes, different propensity to schizophrenia, different propensity towards cardiovascular disease, etc and that's with lifestyles, nutrition, age, socioeconomic status all controlled for.

We now know that all non-Africans on Earth are carrying genes from Neanderthal and Denisovan introgression. It is beyond dispute that Africans and Non-Africans are different on that basis alone.

There is absolutely no plausible reason why some liberal god, high up in heaven, has decreed that the brains of reproductively isolated groups who've lived in thousands of micro-environments over tens of thousands of years should have remained off-limits to mutation, selection pressures, and genetic drift while he allowed these evolutionary processes to play fast and loose with the rest of the genome. No reason at all. Liberal appeals to creationist precepts is a horrible way of going through life and of structuring society. What's even funnier is watching liberal creationists chastising religious creationists for believing in myths. That's side-splittingly funny to watch.
Click to expand...

So what you are saying is that you can ignore cumulative factors, and god and evolution made black people stupid.
 
redress said:
obstacles poor people face in getting a good education, in no particular order:

Lack of quality, supportive parenting <<<<<< sound like a personal choice
lack of two parent household <<<<<<<<<<<<< sounds like a personal choice
more important concerns than education(like not getting shot) <<<<< only sometimes, the rest sounds like a personal choice
reduced access to thinks like computers <<<<<<< who reducing access, not me
too many negative role models <<<<<< who's picking the roll models?
Too few positive role models <<<<<<<<<<<<< ditto
persistent drug and gang issues near homes and among peers <<<<<<<< they sell drugs to themselves.
Poor diet <<<<<<<<<<<< sounds like a personal choice
many many other things
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see above

.
 
Ockham said:
Well to be fair, so did you competely ignore the data he provided.
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No, actually I presented problems with the data. When you are throwing out one factor because there is not present in testing of K grade students, and another because it is not present in high school students, and saying therefore neither can have an impact(which even the paper he linked did not say), this is a problem. Further, the paper he links refers to a school getting positive results by using different methods. That is exactly and 100 % addressing his source.
 
EarlzP said:
That is not true we are all different not only physically but mentally emotionally and intellectually, no one can run a mile faster then it's possible for them to run it and no one can reach an intellectual capacity that is past their potential. Genetics play a role both physically and intellectually
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Well true but I was strictly referring to intellect...not physical...and my point was no one is born a genius..we start learing from day one and what we are taught determines alot towards what we will grow up to be
 
RiverDad said:
Low income + bad neighborhood + poor nutrition + bad teachers + violent schools + lack of educational resources + police harassment + overt discrimination + covert discrimination + X +Y +Z + Genetics = outcome disparity.
Click to expand...

Let's not inappropriately assume our function is linear...
 
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Just1Voice said:
We might be onto something here. What would you say to free college for everyone, not just African-Americans, and a retooling of the educational system so that each child's education was tailored to enhance their individual strengths and minimize their individual weaknesses, so as to insure each person was as prepared to compete upon entering adulthood as it was possible to prepare them?
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That's a horrible idea, that's what I say. College is a waste of time for most people. College education has hardly any effect on income once you control for a person's IQ.

Tests of intelligence for employment screening are illegal thanks to liberals. Employers now rely on college education as a proxy measure for intelligence. In short, college is merely a waystation for most people so that they can gain a credential which tells employers that they're smart enough to finish college. Someone's degree in Elizabethan poetry is hardly ever useful when they begin their job as a market analyst at Procter and Gamble. Same too with degrees in sociology, psychology, political science, economics, art, theater, dance. The only degrees that are useful are the ones which actually impart knowledge that will be used in the person's profession - engineering degrees for engineers, law degrees for lawyers, medical degrees for physicians, computer science degrees for programmers and computer scientists.

Wasting 4+ years of a person's life on obtaining a credential is crazy. Society would be better off having people be hired at entry level jobs and being trained in their work and picking up courses on the side to improve their writing, their thinking, and to pick up specific knowledge that they need to either get ahead in their careers or that they want to pick up for the sake of enjoying learning.

Overturn Griggs v. Duke Power and rewrite the Civil Rights laws to allow intelligence testing as a part of the employment screening process and you'll make society, and the majority of its members, better off.

Allocate resources to advantage the most talented, no matter who they may be or where they came from. Create an atmosphere of cooperative competition, where the goal is to push each other so each person can reach their personal pinnacle of development - not to be the best but to find out who is the best, together. Then let them enter the competitive world and see what happens.
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I admire your idealism, but you telegraph that you're far removed from the world of education. Mission #1 in education is NOT to allow each individual to reach for their maximum potential. That is so last century. Mission #1 in education these days is to close the Achievement Gap and everything else is subordinate to that goal.

Think about it - if you provided resources so that every person could reach for their full potential what you'd end up doing is allowing gaps to grow.
 
Mathematician said:
Let's not inappropriately assume our function is linear...
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I noted that we start with a simple additive model. Feel free to modify and tailor it to any alternative hypothesis of your choice. The process still works in the same way.
 
Redress said:
Obstacles poor people face in getting a good education, in no particular order:

Lack of quality, supportive parenting
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This is not society causing the problem, so society shouldn't be blamed.

Lack of two parent household
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Again, it's not society that is imposing this condition on black families.

More important concerns than education(like not getting shot)
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1.) Increased police presence is often characterized as oppressing the community. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario. What's your solution? Heavy police presence in black underclass neighborhoods? You don't think that that's been tried before?

2.) The condition is removed from black middle class and black upper class neighborhoods. The root problem is still present. See the SAT data - black students from families with incomes above $70,000 (1995 dollars) scored below white students from families with incomes of $10,000 or less.

Reduced access to thinks like computers
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The Kansas City experiment gushed money on the entire city's poor schools. Look at the Abbott Schools decision in New Jersey. The NJ Supreme Court took control over school financing and mandated that poor schools be given huge equalization boosts. These poor school districts now spend more per student than do the school districts of the wealthy suburbs. No difference in outcomes.

Too many negative role models
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And this is society's fault? Now we need liberals in censorship positions imposing their ideological stamp of approval on cultural role models?

Too few positive role models
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Give me a break. This is total bull****. When you turn on the TV or go to movies, all you see are positive black role models. You see genius medical doctors who are heads of department, you see ERs filled with black physicians, all competent, admired, and very skilled at their jobs. You see wise and successful police chiefs, you see learned judges, you see brilliant scientists. Positive role models coming out of the wazoo and truth be told not supported by reality.

Persistent drug and gang issues near homes and among peers
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And society has caused this?

Poor diet
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Society has forced people to eat a poor diet?

Many many other things
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All of which have as much influence (none) as the ones you taken the time to specify.
 
I did not place blame on any one. Factors that contribute are factors that contribute, many of which don't actually have any one at fault.

By the way:

The Kansas City experiment gushed money on the entire city's poor schools. Look at the Abbott Schools decision in New Jersey. The NJ Supreme Court took control over school financing and mandated that poor schools be given huge equalization boosts. These poor school districts now spend more per student than do the school districts of the wealthy suburbs. No difference in outcomes.
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That has jack **** to do with what I said.
 
Redress said:
I did not place blame on any one. Factors that contribute are factors that contribute, many of which don't actually have any one at fault.
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Not "factors that contribute" but "factors that are thought to contribute." Huge difference. The latter is a more accurate description.

By the way:

That has jack **** to do with what I said.
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To the degree that schools provided access to computers, it's bang-on relevant. Those extravagant school funding schemes directly attacked the notion that student outcome disparity was a result of lack of school resources.

Incidentally, we know that access to computers does jack in terms of boosting academic performanc.
 
RiverDad said:
Not "factors that contribute" but "factors that are thought to contribute." Huge difference. The latter is a more accurate description.
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I can accept that.

To the degree that schools provided access to computers, it's bang-on relevant. Those extravagant school funding schemes directly attacked the notion that student outcome disparity was a result of lack of school resources.

Incidentally, we know that access to computers does jack in terms of boosting academic performanc.
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I had a computer at home from the time I was 16(admittedly it was a TI-99, but hey). Schools are not the only place computers are, and not the only access to computers. In fact, if schools are your primary source of access to computers, you probably have less access than many people...

Simple logic, it's good stuff.
 
RiverDad said:
That's a horrible idea, that's what I say. College is a waste of time for most people. College education has hardly any effect on income once you control for a person's IQ.

I admire your idealism, but you telegraph that you're far removed from the world of education. Mission #1 in education is NOT to allow each individual to reach for their maximum potential. That is so last century. Mission #1 in education these days is to close the Achievement Gap and everything else is subordinate to that goal.

Think about it - if you provided resources so that every person could reach for their full potential what you'd end up doing is allowing gaps to grow.
Click to expand...

Indeed, gaps would grow, but they would not be due to what you term the "Achievement Gap," as that is a function of race and class. I am advocating for something else entirely, which is to maximize individual potential regardless of race or class.

I realize that it's impossible under current conditions. I am advocating we change the conditions and reorient toward this new goal. Designing a new system that tracks every child's development, seeing to it that no need goes unmet. Removing or reducing to the extent we are able, the environmental factors that account for the current "Achievement Gap." Then, monitoring their development closely noting individual affinities, and tailoring their education accordingly to maximize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses.

Yes, it would be a huge project, and we would need to get the parents all on board even before the births of their kids, but surely a national campaign aimed at that will generate positive results. Who wouldn't want their kid to have the best chance to reach their own individual potential?
 
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