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California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

(www.latimes.com)
412 points tafda | 7 comments | 26 Nov 24 16:53 UTC | HN request time: 0.634s | source | bottom
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Animats ◴[26 Nov 24 19:47 UTC] No.42249258[source]▶
> But others said the admissions exam and additional application requirements are inherently unfair to students of color who face socioeconomic disadvantages. Elaine Waldman, whose daughter is enrolled in Reed’s IHP, said the test is “elitist and exclusionary,” and hoped dropping it would improve the diversity of the program.

Recognizing gifted students is inherently discriminatory. Because these are the numbers:

Average IQ [1]

- Ashkenazi Jews - 107-115

- East Asians - 110

- White Americans - 102

- Black Americans - 90

There are other numbers from other sources, but they all rank in that order. There's a huge amount of denial about this. There are more articles trying to explain this away than ones that report the results.

(Average US Black IQ has been rising over the last few decades, but the US definition of "Black" includes mixed race. That may be a consequence of intermarriage producing more brown people, causing reversion to the mean. IQ vs 23 and Me data would be interesting. Does anyone collect that?)

Gladwell's new book, "The Revenge of The Tipping Point" goes into this at length. The Ivy League is struggling to avoid becoming majority-Asian. Caltech, which has no legacy admissions, is majority-Asian. So is UC Berkeley.[3]

Of course, this may become less significant once AI gets smarter and human intelligence becomes less necessary in bulk. Hiring criteria for railroads and manufacturing up to WWII favored physically robust men with moderate intelligence. Until technology really got rolling, the demand for smart people was lower than their prevalence in the population.

We may be headed back in that direction. Consider Uber, Doordash, Amazon, and fast food. Machines think and plan, most humans carry out the orders of the machines. A small number of humans direct.

[1] https://iqinternational.org/insights/understanding-average-i...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-white-test-scor...

[3] https://opa.berkeley.edu/campus-data/uc-berkeley-quick-facts

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1. Workaccount2 ◴[26 Nov 24 19:51 UTC] No.42249293[source]▶
You are not supposed to talk about this.
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2. Animats ◴[26 Nov 24 20:04 UTC] No.42249454[source]▶
Exactly. Which is why it is a problem.

In the 1950s, gifted education was pushed hard, because the US seemed to be losing against Russia. Sputnik was a big wake-up call for the US.

Today, the US seems to be losing against China. Maybe it's time for a wake-up call again.

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3. PessimalDecimal ◴[26 Nov 24 20:32 UTC] No.42249744[source]▶
The US is a _very_ different country now from how it was in the 1950s. Things that were possible then may not be possible now.
4. thrance ◴[26 Nov 24 20:48 UTC] No.42249910[source]▶
In the 50s minorities and women were refused accessed to higher education. How many gifted kids were left on the sidewalk back then? Also not to speak of the disastrous understanding (or lack thereof) of neurodiversity.
5. pessimizer ◴[26 Nov 24 21:58 UTC] No.42250517[source]▶
You're not supposed to talk about it because the people who talk about it don't want to talk about slavery and Jim Crow. There were laws prescribing the death penalty for white people caught teaching black people how to read. Slaves were released into debt peonage while their owners were paid reparations. Control things for wealth, and the wealth of relatives, and all of the statistics start to favor the descendants of slaves.

Slaves never discovered the philosopher's stone, so they never managed to turn lead into gold, but since nobody cared about entertaining us, we had to entertain ourselves. How did that turn out?

IQ is an obsession of low-IQ people. Smart people understand that you can become smarter by learning rules that allow you to process the information you receive in a better way, and that this process is endless. Dumb people think that smart people are magical, and were born with special powers that you can measure by looking at them really hard.

If the race IQ people were serious, they'd be making arguments that the low-IQ races should have disproportionate interventions. Instead, they're just trying to retroactively justify the selfish brutality of their disgusting ancestors.

worthless addition: I have to mention that I got into Mensa, or else people think comments like this are sour grapes. They love speculating about people's internal states over a good argument, as much as they love a simple scalar over a complex nonlinear process.

6. suzzer99 ◴[26 Nov 24 22:13 UTC] No.42250641[source]▶
There are ways to talk about it without dividing human beings into tranches by race. Once you do that, you give ignorant people fodder to see out-groups as inferior and even subhuman, which opens the door to all kinds of horrible outcomes. See: history.
7. driverdan ◴[27 Nov 24 00:53 UTC] No.42251798[source]▶
Says who? Race is an arbitrary social concept and IQ tests have biases that explain the differences.