Or Dan?
This has to be one of the sillier popularity contests around.
The problem is that roughly half our posters only take people seriously if they agree with them, which isn't a prescription for getting better-educated and winkling the misconceptions out of your world-view.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Don't be silly: what you really DO know, is that I take YOU seriously, and am having difficulty maintaining that. Your reply doesn't include any reassurances.
Proof accepted.
It's like a lot of other rural places. The smart kids go off to college and don't come back.
I married into a Cajun family once. They weren't academics, but they weren't dumb either.
Stereotyping millions of people by region is just another flavor of racism and sexism. Most everything is normally distributed.
"All of California" ranges from San Diego to the Sierras to Shasta, huge variations along both axes.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
Texas was slave as heck. I dunno what "obligate" means. FWIW, Sam Houston warned Texas not to join the Confederacy and was run out of office for it.
Turns out he was right.
So it was about slavery. The events leading to war slid on the legal muck created by an inability to come to grips with "half slave half free".
Nobody could ever be smart enough to figure that out.
It was about the brittle Compromises failing.
The slave *trade* was outlawed in 1807. Cotton was just a deeper hell than other forms.
That's good.
No. "Poor white sharecroppers" are a Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction artifact. Yeoman farmers in the South were reasonably middle-class for the time, depending. Source: "Time On The Cross".
Enslavement is enslavement, no matter how materially comfortable.
The fact remains that the Institution was built on a rather larger item of cognitive dissonance - that people of color are not human. The corollary is that somehow, the elite are put there by ...Providence.
it's *far* too much nonsense to swallow.
-- Les Cargill
Very true, and frequently worth remembering.
However, it is normal about a mean, and there may be different mean values. Usually the difference in means is small compared to the standard deviation.
"The race does not always go to the fastest horse, but that's the way to bet."
Murray's much-maligned book The Bell Curve is really interesting. He makes a good case that the real privilige is intelligence (exactly what IQ tests measure) and not race or family wealth.
And classes have different means, but the distribution is wide enough that everyone should give individuals their own evaluation. Some backwoods podunk place in West Virginia, or some farm village in India, will occasionally produce a genius.
And there are some real duds in New York City.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
I'll ignore what IQ actually measures, because that's a boring discussion.
Apart from that I strongly agree about treating people on their own merits; to me a meritocracy is a good objective[1].
I've occasionally told women they are not and never will be my equal - and then smile and looke them in the eye. Younger ones are often taken aback and don't know what to say, given my non-malevolent intentions and demeanour. Eventually they realise I'm correct, and they are glad to acknowledge it.
OTOH, older women quickly jump to the key points that they don't want to be like me and are better than I am in many ways.
[1] Ignoring what merits should be be the basis for selection; capitalism seems to favour sociopaths!
Well, you do have parts that they don't have. And they have parts that you don't have. Not equal.
Not counting me, there are five engineers in my company; two are women. Women do all the business and financial and marketing stuff. Seems to work.
Sociopaths are often successful in business. Less so in engineering.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
Truckee. Dutch Flat. Murphys. Eureka. Auburn. Carmel. Mill Valley. Santa Barbara. There are many beautiful, friendly small towns. I like San Francisco for the physical beauty and the weather and the food and the (mostly) great people, especially the women. I live in a neighborhood that is essentially a small town... that tourists aren't aware of.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
Just so, but too many swallow the slogan "men and women are equal" without /thinking/.
Just so. That's my experience as well.
This group to the contrary :(
He makes a better case that IQ tests probably aren't all that they seem. It's almost done in strawman form.
The original Stanford-Binet was used to determine who should carry the radio in a fire team. The SAT predicts which freshmen are most likely to graduate or survive the first year.
Those are quite different things, yet we treat them as somehow the same. We ignore all the noise from the measurements and slog on anyway.
Any story about a "genius" is just a story. Some are more valid than others; Micheal Burry[1] is probably a genius but he mainly just read *everything* and digested it.
[1] protagonist of "The Big Short"-- Les Cargill
Measuring things is hard. measuring merit is probably too hard to actually be achieved. And measuring capitalism-noncapitalism isn't remotely possible.
Actual sociopaths don't get return customers. Sociopaths have a slight advantage in organizational infighting. For a while.
But the winners for "sociopath of the century" for the 20th generally weren't capitalists. I think of Beria spitting on Stalin's corpse.
-- Les Cargill
"The Bell Curve" is justly maligned. As is pointed out on the - much better - counter blast
Murray and Herrnstein had made intelligence the best predictor of social su ccess by ineptly comparing it with a single measure of "social status" that they had dreamed up which was dominated by the parents income.
The academics who wrote "Inequality by Design" used the same data a Murray and Herrnstein, but extracted the social status information into three inde pendent - if correlated - factors. Parental income was one of them, but nei ghbourhood was another and school attended was a third.
A sociologists had known for decades, social background trumped IQ score ha ndily.
All true. New York state spends almost twice as much per head on secondary education ($21,206 in 2015) as West Virginia ($11,359) so that the chance t hat a West Virginian genius will get noticed are rather lower.
Not an argument for not looking out for them, of course. And Australian stu dy showed that the number of books in the parental home was the best single predictor of success at university, closely followed by having a near rela tive who had gone to university, rather reinforcing the "Inequality by Desi gn" point (though the Australian work was done in the 1950's - I knew about it when I started at university in 1960, and found it comforting, since bo th my parents, one aunt and one uncle were all graduates, and my parents ho use was crawling with books).
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.