I grew up indoctrinated by political correctness. Like a large part of citizens in Western countries I was brainwashed: Races do not exist, all are equal. Saying anything different, saying that there are racial differences, is racism, a crime.
In school I heard disparaging remarks about Artur Jensen and other “unscientific” “dishonest” “cheating” scientists doing faulty research about race differences.
The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray actually looked fairly convincing to me, but if even President Bill Clinton denounced it, there must be something wrong about it.
There always was some complex theory to explain away the IQ differences:
– different culture
– parental expectation
– mother’s malnourishment
– IQ measurements are racially and culturally biased
My opinion changed when I read about trans-racial adoption studies. That was the last drop that really disproved all these desperate attempts to explain away racial differences in intelligence.
“The best evidence for the genetic basis of race-IQ differences comes from trans-racial adoption studies of Oriental children, Black children, and Mixed-Race children. All these children have been adopted by White parents at an early age and have grown up in middle-class White homes.”
Chart 9 summarizes the results for Oriental children adopted into White middle-class homes.
Korean and Vietnamese babies from poor backgrounds, many of whom were malnourished, were adopted by White American and Belgian families. When they grew up, they excelled in school. The IQs of the adopted Oriental children were 10 or more points higher than the national average for the country they grew up in. Trans-racial adoption does not increase or decrease IQ. The three-way pattern of race differences in IQ remains.”
In plain English: adopted Asian babies grew up to be very bright, adopted black babies grew up to have low intelligence.
One more desperate argument that was posed to save the “racial equality” dogma:
They claimed “expectancy effects,” not genes, explained the pattern. They argued that the Black and White children were not treated the same. Even if parents took good care of their children, the schools, classmates, and society as a whole discriminated against Black children and this hurt their IQs. Because we expected Black children to do poorly in school, they lived up to our low expectations.”
Even that argument got promptly destroyed. Rushton:
A special analysis of the Scarr study compared parents who believed that they had adopted a Black baby but, really, had adopted a Mixed-Race (Black-White) child. The average IQ for these Mixed-Race children was just about the same as for other Mixed-Race children and above that for adopted Black children. This was true even though the parents who adopted these Mixed-Race children thought their babies really had two Black parents.
That did it for me. It destroyed my ingrained indoctrinated beliefs that all races must be equal. It opened up my mind to the possibility that there could be racial differences.
Before we go on, may I stress a few more points
– I have no axe to grind against blacks. I am not interested in proving that blacks are stupid or inferior. I am not a white supremacist
– I have an axe to grind against dogmatism, blindness, stupidity. I have an axe to grind against the catholic church for repressing Galileo’s truth about the moving and revolving earth. And I have an axe to grind about political correctness repressing the truth, repressing research.
– This site is about human stupidity versus truth and consciousness
– Rushton, though much maligned, is not some crazy cook but one of the most prestigious research scientists to date: Rushton holds two doctorates from the University of London (Ph.D. and D.Sc) and is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American, British, and Canadian Psychological Associations. He is also a member of the Behavior Genetics Association, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and the Society for Neuroscience. Rushton has published six books and nearly 200 articles. In 1992 the Institute for Scientific Information ranked him the 22nd most published psychologist and the 11th most cited. Professor Rushton is listed in Who. Some of Rushtons scientific publications can be found on his University.
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For anyone who’s curious: IQs by country
Race is not everything, but it’s not nothing either.
So tell us are you USA 98 or Ukraine 96?
Understand the Bell Curve when applied to any
results has mean, media, and mode. And results
occur outside the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd standard
deviation.
While it is possible to have an IQ of 0[zero] the
lower limit of test, it also is possible to have a I.Q.
higher than 200.
And while I. Q. measure an ability to take a test, it
does not evaluate other abilities such as mechanical,
artistic, musical, speed of recall and latent problem
solving.
Most important it does not evaluate “drive”, or
“persistence” or “perserverence”.
An illustration of such occurred in Ukraine during
Holodomor. Some survived and some of those who
survived are our forebearers.
How do you measure that desire to live with an
I. Q. test? You cannot.
And have you applied this to Hayek’s works? And
compared with ancient dwellers of eastern Europe?
As to your comment about Catholic Church. It does
have some good teachings. You just have to have
courage to be electic. Courage to seek the truth or
best answer.
I am at a loss why you did not achieve these thoughts
when you were 18? Slow learner or willingness to
accept bullshit?
Here is comment from Obama’s first campaign:
Someone called a politician a ‘freaking genius’.
Some people can not distinguish between ability
and a slick double talking con man. The sayer
of the term needs to listen to one of these tent
filling evangelist one of these days. Just to
compare what is said how it is said and the
audience response. Verbal eloquence is neither
a guarantee of intellect nor understanding of
complex situations. It indicates the ability to
stand before a crowd and talk glibly. A
subsequent analysis of the spoken words and
the words meaning in current language understood
by ‘all’ would be the appropriate test.
“Bullshit”, as Harry Frankfurt writes in his recent
book “On Bullshit”, is a communication that
pretends to be genuinely informative but really
is not. The person who talks bullshit, Frankfurt
holds, is unconcerned with whether what he says
is true, but is very concerned with how he is
thought of by the listener. In this paper, I discuss
Frankfurt’s theory of bullshit, making specific
reference to the requirement for deceptive intent
on the part of the bullshitter and to whether
bullshitting must involve conscious dishonesty.
I hold that the really disturbing feature of much
bullshit is that people often “believe their own bullshit”
and that this requires making room for believing
one’s own bullshit as a form of self-deception.
“Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection”
by Neil Postman
(Delivered at the National Convention for
the Teachers of English [NCTE], November 28, 1969, Washington, D.C.)
With a title like this, I think I ought to dispense
with the rhetorical amenities and come straight
to the point. For those of you who do not know,
it may be worth saying that the phrase, “crap-
detecting,” originated with Ernest Hemingway
who when asked if there were one quality needed,
above all others, to be a good writer, replied,
“Yes, a built-in, shock-proof, crap detector.”
As I see it, the best things schools can do for
kids is to help them learn how to distinguish
useful talk from bullshit. I will ask only that
you agree that every day in almost every way
people are exposed to more bullshit than it is
healthy for them to endure, and that if we can
help them to recognize this fact, they might
turn away from it and toward language that
might do them some earthly good.
There are so many varieties of bullshit I
couldn’t hope to mention but a few, and
elaborate on even fewer. I will, therefore,
select those varieties that have some
transcendent significance.
Now, that last sentence is a perfectly good
example of bullshit, since I have no idea
what the words “transcendent significance”
might mean and neither do you. I needed
something to end that sentence with and
since I did not have any clear criteria by
which to select my examples, I figured this
was the place for some big-time words.
Pomposity:
Pomposity is not an especially venal form of
bullshit, although it is by no means harmless.
There are plenty of people who are daily
victimized by pomposity in that they are made
to feel less worthy than they have a right to
feel by people who use fancy titles, words,
phrases, and sentences to obscure their own
insufficiencies.
Fanaticism:
A much more malignant form of bullshit
than pomposity is what some people call
fanaticism. Now, there is one type of fanaticism
of which I will say very little, because it is
so vulgar and obvious — bigotry. But there
are other forms of fanaticism that are not so
obvious, and therefore perhaps more
dangerous than bigotry
Eichmannism is a relatively new form of
fanaticism, and perhaps it should be given
its own special place among the great and
near-great varieties of bullshit. The essence
of fanaticism is that it has almost no tolerance
for any data that do not confirm its own point
of view.
Eichmannism is especially dangerous because
it is so utterly banal. Some of the nicest people
turn out to be mini-Eichmanns. When Eichmann
was in the dock in Jerusalem, he actually said
that some of his best friends were Jews. And
the horror of it is that he was probably telling
the truth, for there is nothing personal about
Eichmannism. It is the language of regulations,
and includes such logical sentences as, “If we do
it for one, we have to do it for all.” Can you
imagine some wretched Jew pleading to have
his children spared from the gas chamber? What
could be more fair, more neutral, than for some
administrator to reply, “If we do it for one, we
have to do it for all.”
Inanity:
This is a form of talk which pays a large but,
I would think, relatively harmless role in our
personal lives. But with the development of the
mass media, inanity has suddenly emerged as
a major form of language in public matters. The
invention of new and various kinds of
communication has given a voice and an
audience to many people whose opinions would
otherwise not be solicited, and who, in fact, have
little else but verbal excrement to contribute to
public issues. Many of these people are entertainers.
The press and air waves are filled with the featured
and prime-time statements from people who are in
no position to render informed judgments on what
they are talking about and yet render them with
elan and, above all, sincerity. Inanity, then, is
ignorance presented in the cloak of sincerity.
Superstition:
Superstition is ignorance presented in the cloak
of authority. A superstition is a belief, usually
expressed in authoritative terms for which there
is no factual or scientific basis. Like, for instance,
that the country in which you live is a finer place,
all things considered, than other countries. Or that
the religion into which you were born confers upon
you some special standing with the cosmos that is
denied other people. I will refrain from commenting
further on that, except to say that when I hear such
talk by own crap-detector achieves unparalleled
spasms of activity.
If teachers were to take an enthusiastic
interest in what language is about, each
teacher would have fairly serious problems
to resolve. For instance, you can’t identify
bullshit the way you identify phonemes. That is
why I have called crap-detecting an art. Although
subjects like semantics, rhetoric, or logic seem
to provide techniques for crap-detecting, we
are not dealing here, for the most part, with
a technical problem.
Each person’s crap-detector is embedded
in their value system; if you want to teach
the art of crap-detecting, you must help
students become aware of their values.
After all, Vice President, Spiro Agnew, or
his writers, know as much about semantics
as anyone in this room. What he is lacking
has very little to do with technique, and almost
everything to do with values.
Now, I realize that what I just said sounds
fairly pompous in itself, if not arrogant, but
there is no escaping from saying what
attitudes you value if you want to talk about
crap-detecting.
In other words, bullshit is what you call
language that treats people in ways you do
not approve of.
So any teacher who is interested in crap-
detecting must acknowledge that one man’s
bullshit is another man’s catechism. Students
should be taught to learn how to recognize
bullshit, including their own.
It seems to me one needs, first and foremost,
to have a keen sense of the ridiculous. Maybe
I mean to say, a sense of our impending death.
About the only advantage that comes from our
knowledge of the inevitability of death is that
we know that whatever is happening is going to
go away. Most of us try to put this thought out
of our minds, but I am saying that it ought to
be kept firmly there, so that we can fully
appreciate how ridiculous most of our
enthusiasms and even depressions are.
Reflections on one’s mortality curiously
makes one come alive to the incredible
amounts of inanity and fanaticism that
surround us, much of which is inflicted
on us by ourselves. Which brings me to
the next point, best stated as Postman’s
Third Law:
“At any given time, the chief source of
bullshit with which you have to contend
is yourself.”
The reason for this is explained in Postman’s
Fourth Law, which is;
“Almost nothing is about what you think
it is about–including you.”
With the possible exception of those human
encounters that Fritz Peris calls “intimacy,”
all human communications have deeply embedded
and profound hidden agendas. Most of the
conversation at the top can be assumed to be
bullshit of one variety or another.
An idealist usually cannot acknowledge
his own bullshit, because it is in the nature
of his “ism” that he must pretend it does
not exist. In fact, I should say that anyone
who is devoted to an “ism”–Fascism,
Communism, Capital-ism–probably has
a seriously defective crap-detector. This is
especially true of those devoted to “patriotism.”
Santha Rama Rau has called patriotism a
squalid emotion. I agree. Mainly because I
find it hard to escape the conclusion that those
most enmeshed in it hear no bullshit whatever
in its rhetoric, and as a consequence are
extremely dangerous to other people. If you
doubt this, I want to remind you that murder
for murder, General Westmoreland makes Vito
Genovese look like a Flower Child.
Another way of saying this is that all
ideologies are saturated with bullshit,
and a wise man will observe Herbert
Read’s advice: “Never trust any group
larger than a squad.”
So you see, when it comes right down to it,
crap-detection is something one does when
he starts to become a certain type of person.
Sensitivity to the phony uses of language
requires, to some extent, knowledge of how
to ask questions, how to validate answers,
and certainly, how to assess meanings.
I said at the beginning that I thought
there is nothing more important than for
kids to learn how to identify fake communication.
You, therefore, probably assume that I
know something about now to achieve this.
Well, I don’t. At least not very much. I know that
our present curricula do not even touch on the
matter. Neither do our present methods of training
teachers. I am not even sure that classrooms and
schools can be reformed enough so that critical and
lively people can be nurtured there.
Nonetheless, I persist in believing that it is not
beyond your profession to invent ways to educate
youth along these lines. (Because) there is no
more precious environment than our language
environment. And even if you know you will be
dead soon, that’s worth protecting.
IQ isn’t everything, but the correlation between it and success, income, law abiding-ness , and many other virtues is pretty strong.
Me? I am the 1%. :)