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

(www.latimes.com)
412 points tafda | 2 comments | 26 Nov 24 16:53 UTC | HN request time: 0.412s | 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. maronato ◴[27 Nov 24 02:42 UTC] No.42252410[source]▶
Let’s say I have a set of newborn white rats and another of gray rats.

The gray rats get nutritious meals at periodic intervals, have access to their rat mamas, and are allowed to roam free in a large, comfortable and safe environment. As they grow, I give them intellectual challenges in exchange for food, incentivize them to exercise and continue giving them all nutrients they need. The white rats, however, are kept isolated in small cages and are fed every two days with the scraps of the gray rats. I don’t give them intellectual challenges or the opportunity to properly exercise.

After a couple of years, I administer a test on them. The test is very similar to the intellectual challenges I was giving before to the gray rats.

To my surprise, the gray rats do a lot better than the white rats.

Obvious conclusion: Gray rats have higher IQ than white rats on average.

——

This is obviously an exaggeration, but I hope it helps people understand how similar things can and do happen in the real world with real humans.

It’s the environment they are raised in, their relationships, the incentives, the adult examples they encounter, their access to good and empathetic education, role models they can relate to and aspire towards.

Those, I assure you, are much better indicators of intelligence and education than their physical appearance or genetics.

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2. lelanthran ◴[27 Nov 24 07:05 UTC] No.42253681[source]▶
> Obvious conclusion: Gray rats have higher IQ than white rats on average.

Well, they did, didn't they?

The wrong conclusion would be "This is the limit of what white rats can do", which is not how I interpreted GP's comment.

TBH, this is not an easily solved problem: some cultures are better at producing superior students and productive people than other cultures. Those superior individuals are not superior due to inherent traits, but due to environment (culture).

How on earth do you change those under-performing cultures? Any attempt to do so will be met with cries of racism or similar.

[As an aside, my general observation with the the GP's list of IQ is that those cultures who prioritize sport less do better. While GP showed a correlation between race-groups and IQ, I observe the same correlation, but inverse, between sports-focused-cultures and IQ. Removing pro-sports-tracks programs from schools is probably going to do wonders for the bottom 10% of performers in a school]