I didn't miss the point. I consider it deeply offensive and am baffled that anyone would consider it germane in 2010.
You mention "inequality of opportunity." The linked PDF overviews didn't ignore race; they (like I) indicated that in the U.S., race and poverty are tightly correlated. They also indicate (without touching the third rail of racial politics in the U.S.) that "racial" performance differences exist even within broader socioeconomic groups. This is also unsurprising, as there's a lot of subconscious racism in the U.S. (there's documented bias toward picking white or lighter coloured children to answer questions in class, even when the teacher tries to avoid it, as well as many other examples such as [1][2][3][4]).
Go back to Gladwell for a moment: advantages multiply. Whether you agree with his approach or not, on this part he's right. Canadian hockey players born in January are substantially more successful than those born in December because of the way that junior and senior hockey leagues are organized. This is because they are bigger, play better, have better coordination, etc. and then better coaches become more interested. They get more advantage because they started with a birth advantage. The inverse is also true: disadvantages multiply.
You also mention "measured performance"; many of these measures are unconsciously biased toward a middle-class to upper-class experience. In my wife's teaching experience, she has had students who are raised without religion who don't get (Christian) religious allusions that are present in some of the books that they read. If one doesn't have a particular experience, then one cannot be meaningfully tested on that experience. If your measure of "success" is based on those experiences, then your measure of success is by definition biased. That bias may be good or not, but the exposure to those experiences must be measured and controlled for before you start making sweeping (and wrong) statements as Hilbert Spaces was doing.
In 2010, Hilbert Spaces suggestion that ethnicity is the primary factor involved here is as nonsensical as the idea that girls should think that "math is hard." It's stupid, it's racist, and it's offensive.
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[1] "One of the more upsetting discoveries is that children as young as three-years-old will associate positive traits with white people and negative traits with black people regardless of the race of the child or the attitudes of the children's parents and teachers." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-samuels/unconscious-racism...
[2] "But inequalities extend beyond UD's African-American students and onto other campus minorities. An American born and raised student, junior Ed Hazboun, has faced discrimination multiple times due to his Arabic ethnicity. 'At one time my advisor for three years was going over my schedule and made a comment about the paper work I would have to fill out. You would think that after three years, that advisor would realize that I was a current student and not a foreign exchange student,' he said. 'Another time my philosophy teacher asked me if the Muslim religion viewed the topic we were discussing about ethics differently. Being born and raised Catholic, I was unable to answer.'" http://flyernews.com/articles/volume/57/issue/36/id/5718
[3] "A 2008 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology took Norton’s research a step further, examining the effects that whites’ attempts at colorblindness had on black participants. Ironically, the negative nonverbal behaviors exhibited by “colorblind” whites were interpreted by blacks as signs of prejudice, making them suspicious of their partners. It is hardly surprising that racial tensions increased among participants." http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_perils_of_c...
[4] "In many situations, from either the dominant or the oppressed, simple unconscious associations may drastically change outcomes. An example is Steele and Aaronson's (1995) work on stereotype threat, in which the performance of African-American students in a testing situation was cut in half by asking them to identify their race at the start of the test. This simple act unconsciously reminded students of the stereotypes connected with their race. Moreover, when asked at the end of the test, the students who were primed to remember their race were unable to identify the reminder as a factor in their poorer test score (Steele 1997)." http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k_v90/k0901mou.htm
Digging further into your link on [4] we find the following:
> To acquire such evidence, Joshua Aronson and I (following a procedure developed with Steven Spencer) designed an experiment to test whether the stereotype threat that black students might experience when taking a difficult standardized test could depress their performance on the test to a statistically reliable degree. In this experiment we asked black and white Stanford students into our laboratory and gave them, one at a time, a thirty-minute verbal test made up of items from the advanced Graduate Record Examination in literature. Most of these students were sophomores, which meant that the test was particularly hard for them—precisely the feature, we reasoned, that would make this simple testing situation different for our black participants than for our white participants.
Right, so the test was in literature and administered verbally. Gee, I wonder why these researchers hoping to find a causal link would want to choose such an easily gamed format for the test? Why do you think they didn't choose a paper-based multiple choice math test?
As for your response to my other post, your attempt to label the questioning of a possible link between race and intellect as "eugenics" is laughable. The person with the burden of proof in a given situation is the person making the claim. The claim being made in the original article is that US schools are falling behind. HilbertSpace pointed out that simply partitioning that data according to race paints a very different picture. If you want to make a claim about what this data means, then you're the one with the burden of proof.
> I consider it deeply offensive and am baffled that anyone would consider it germane in 2010.
What exactly do you find "deeply offensive"? Because I think your tone isn't helping your cause. If you wish to argue that race and/or genetics are not significantly correlated with innate ability, please feel free to do so. If this is an established fact that you can document, I would love to see links to research supporting that position (your citations establishing certain biases are much weaker). Your righteous indignation that someone would even bring this up (in 2010!!) is anti-intellectual and needs to go.
In my opinion, based mostly on common sense (and racism, no doubt you will claim), I don't think any of the assorted biases you cite are a major cause of performance differences. My intuition is that the major causes are much less subtle: genetics and family life (particularly early family life). I do agree that there is likely a snowball effect that causes early labels of "not good at school" to compound.
BTW. Your citation [4] looks deeply suspicious. Asking them to check which race they are cut performance in half? HALF? As in, they were able to, on average, supply 50% fewer correct answers if asked to check a box indicating their race?
I find it deeply offensive that anyone would take what amounts to eugenic nonsense seriously. If we've learned anything about genetics in the last decade of having the genome decoded, it's that we don't understand squat about how intelligence comes from genetic factors.
I don't have a cause here, by the way. I am not arguing a negative; it is up to the folks who which to establish a significant correlation to make their case. So far, all of the indicators are against them (genetics per se seems not to play a major role in success later in life).
You may think that the biases that I cite aren't major causes of performance differences, but that's no different than you saying that you think that green tea tastes good. I may think that they're major causes, but that's no different than me saying that black tea is better. What I know is that there are studies out there that indicate that there are many factors much stronger than genetics will ever be for success.
The top of these is, by the way, family life. These are measurable more in the negative than the positive: children of alcoholics and drug addicts tend to do worse in school than those with non-addicted parents; children of broken homes tend to do worse in school than those with unified families. One of the major positive correlations is reading: children whose family reads, even if they don't read together, tend to perform better in school than those who don't. What families read, especially together? Those who don't have to spend a lot of time working to make ends meet and put food on the table.
You may think that [4] is suspicious, but I've heard about this study a few times and I believe that it has been corroborated by other studies. Yeah, it's surprising, but that doesn't make it wrong. Again, step to Gladwell for a second and look at what Korean Air found out. When the subconscious social status indicators happened in language, accidents were more likely to happen. As soon as the entire cockpit switched to an informal English, accident rates dropped dramatically. So yes, reminding someone of their "social place" can significantly reduce their performance.
You mention "inequality of opportunity." The linked PDF overviews didn't ignore race; they (like I) indicated that in the U.S., race and poverty are tightly correlated. They also indicate (without touching the third rail of racial politics in the U.S.) that "racial" performance differences exist even within broader socioeconomic groups. This is also unsurprising, as there's a lot of subconscious racism in the U.S. (there's documented bias toward picking white or lighter coloured children to answer questions in class, even when the teacher tries to avoid it, as well as many other examples such as [1][2][3][4]).
Go back to Gladwell for a moment: advantages multiply. Whether you agree with his approach or not, on this part he's right. Canadian hockey players born in January are substantially more successful than those born in December because of the way that junior and senior hockey leagues are organized. This is because they are bigger, play better, have better coordination, etc. and then better coaches become more interested. They get more advantage because they started with a birth advantage. The inverse is also true: disadvantages multiply.
You also mention "measured performance"; many of these measures are unconsciously biased toward a middle-class to upper-class experience. In my wife's teaching experience, she has had students who are raised without religion who don't get (Christian) religious allusions that are present in some of the books that they read. If one doesn't have a particular experience, then one cannot be meaningfully tested on that experience. If your measure of "success" is based on those experiences, then your measure of success is by definition biased. That bias may be good or not, but the exposure to those experiences must be measured and controlled for before you start making sweeping (and wrong) statements as Hilbert Spaces was doing.
In 2010, Hilbert Spaces suggestion that ethnicity is the primary factor involved here is as nonsensical as the idea that girls should think that "math is hard." It's stupid, it's racist, and it's offensive.
--
[1] "One of the more upsetting discoveries is that children as young as three-years-old will associate positive traits with white people and negative traits with black people regardless of the race of the child or the attitudes of the children's parents and teachers." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-samuels/unconscious-racism...
[2] "But inequalities extend beyond UD's African-American students and onto other campus minorities. An American born and raised student, junior Ed Hazboun, has faced discrimination multiple times due to his Arabic ethnicity. 'At one time my advisor for three years was going over my schedule and made a comment about the paper work I would have to fill out. You would think that after three years, that advisor would realize that I was a current student and not a foreign exchange student,' he said. 'Another time my philosophy teacher asked me if the Muslim religion viewed the topic we were discussing about ethics differently. Being born and raised Catholic, I was unable to answer.'" http://flyernews.com/articles/volume/57/issue/36/id/5718
[3] "A 2008 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology took Norton’s research a step further, examining the effects that whites’ attempts at colorblindness had on black participants. Ironically, the negative nonverbal behaviors exhibited by “colorblind” whites were interpreted by blacks as signs of prejudice, making them suspicious of their partners. It is hardly surprising that racial tensions increased among participants." http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_perils_of_c...
[4] "In many situations, from either the dominant or the oppressed, simple unconscious associations may drastically change outcomes. An example is Steele and Aaronson's (1995) work on stereotype threat, in which the performance of African-American students in a testing situation was cut in half by asking them to identify their race at the start of the test. This simple act unconsciously reminded students of the stereotypes connected with their race. Moreover, when asked at the end of the test, the students who were primed to remember their race were unable to identify the reminder as a factor in their poorer test score (Steele 1997)." http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k_v90/k0901mou.htm