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

(www.latimes.com)
412 points tafda | 5 comments | 26 Nov 24 16:53 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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. thrance ◴[26 Nov 24 20:43 UTC] No.42249869[source]▶
I'd argue the parent's socioeconomic status is a much better predictor of IQ than "race".
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2. tick_tock_tick ◴[26 Nov 24 21:59 UTC] No.42250521[source]▶
But that never shows up in the data? Seriously, people always like to bring this idea up like it's not been studied to hell and back. Socioeconomic is not a stronger factor.
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3. pessimizer ◴[26 Nov 24 22:12 UTC] No.42250635[source]▶
The main predictor is early childhood reading for pleasure. A suspicion is that the early start gives a lead that is almost impossible to make up, as life gets more busy, not less, when people get older.

Early childhood pleasure reading requires parents that have enough reading skill themselves and the free time to teach you how to read, and childhood access to a wide variety of interesting books at a range of levels. Those are things that are going to be correlated with your parents' wealth. And your grandparents' wealth. As a slave descendant, my parents were the first people in the history of my family who were able to read easily. One still had to pick cotton as a child to get spending money.

4. belkala ◴[27 Nov 24 08:22 UTC] No.42254090[source]▶
Your data shows one of two things:

1. IQ scores differ between race because of inherent differences in intelligence.

2. IQ scores differ due to outside factors such as racism and socio-economic factors.

Point 1 is racist, you provide no proof for it, and all studies I can find indicate that this is not the case.

So that leaves us with point 2, which is precisely the point the article is making.

P.S: Literally the first result when searching for "socio economic factors iq": https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4641149/ It probably does not explain the full difference because there are more disadvantages such as racism, cultural factors.

5. thrance ◴[27 Nov 24 10:38 UTC] No.42254885[source]▶
Then why do you suppose IQ is correlated to race? Are black people's brains really different from jewish people's?

Or is it that black people are on average raised in poorer communities, with poorer schools, less educated parents and less access to cultural material?

The issue with you presenting that data as is, like there is a natural hierarchy of races, is that you are omitting the real reason we observe those discrepancies. Socioeconomic status, or place of birth or whatever else.

Seeing how a lot of people in the country are resurrecting some terrible ideologies of the past to justify mass deportation, I really don't see how that helps anything.