> 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
It's worth pointing out that childhood malnutrition has a significant negative impact on IQ that persists into adulthood.
See: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3796166/
Black children are far more likely to live in poverty than the other three groups presented in the parent comment. I'm really curious what the numbers would be were that not the case. I also wonder how much the rise in black IQ over the decades can be attributed to school lunch programs.
For 2023-2024, among SFUSD students who are 'Economically Disadvantaged':
70% of Asian 3rd graders met or exceeded state standards for math.
18% of Black or African American 3rd graders met or exceeded state standards for math.
The difference is similar for all grade levels (3 to 11) and for all years for which I've seen the data.
California provides lunch for all children who attend public schools. SFUSD gives first choice of school to those who live in the very poorest areas of the city.
https://caaspp-elpac.ets.org/caaspp/ViewReportSB?ps=true&lst...
In that data set
Compare 2023–24 Detailed Test Results Results by Ethnicity for Economically Disadvantaged - Asian
with
2023–24 Detailed Test Results Results by Ethnicity for Non Economically Disadvantaged - Black
Comparing poor Asians against non-poor Blacks, the Asians do about 3x better. It's a huge difference.
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.
> 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]
You are not supposed to talk about this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Says who? Race is an arbitrary social concept and IQ tests have biases that explain the differences.
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.
Recognizing gifted students should not be just measuring IQ (which is known to be a flawed metric)
Good luck finding a metric that isn't highly correlated with IQ.
I'd argue the parent's socioeconomic status is a much better predictor of IQ than "race".
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.
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.
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.
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.
IQ is a horribly biased way to measure "gifted". EQ is far more predictive of success and, honestly, more valuable to society. I have known a few very high IQ people and those with high IQ and low EQ can be difficult to collaborate with.