Math is White Privilege...

Jan Panteltje wrote on 10/24/2017 1:12 PM:

Yes, I think you are right. You seem to have an amazing insight into these matters.

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Rick C 

Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms, 
on the centerline of totality since 1998

Good! I think that's the big point in the Bell curve. after the Bell curve go read 'coming apart'. You won't like the end /conclusion/ preachy bit. But the rest is very clear. Well to me, at least, I live in Trumpland after all. This is not meant as a put down, just an observation, you're living in a bubble.

You keep losing me... it seems to me you are making all these assumputions about me, what I think, or whatever. (that happens a lot on SED.)

George H.

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What's uncomfortable about intelligence being 50% heritable? Bright parents have bright kids, but not all the kids of bright parents are clever. There 's no single gene for being clever, and no single way of being clever.

Reversion to the mean means that there's no point in investing extra educat ional resources on the education of kids of bright parents - that mostly wo rks out as coaching the less bright kids to get into universities in place of brighter kids whose parents didn't have the money to pay for extra coach ing.

The US spends more - on average - than any other country on educating it's kids, and doesn't seem to get the performance it's paying for, probably bec ause that average reflects extravagant expenditure on the less bright kids of well off parents, while the US median expenditure is probably rather bel ow the median for advanced industrial countries.

I can't find any statistics to support this suspicion, which is - in itself - deeply suspect. You can find figures that show that the average expendit ure per kid in New York State (the most extravagant state) is three times t hat in Utah and Idaho, but since US education spending is regulated by scho ol districts rather than states the real dispersion is probably rather larg er.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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ber that while Blacks may have a lower mean IQ , there are a lot of very hi gh IQ blacks. It other words you have to judge individuals.

The Bell curve had one telling statistic that Herrnstein and Murray reporte d but didn't make anything of - which was that while bastard children of Bl ack US servicemen in Germany looked exactly like everybody else on IQ tests , the legitimate kids of the same servicemen in the US had lower IQ scores, and those scores got lower as they got older (and presumably better educat ed in not appearing uppity).

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Bill Sloamn, Sydney

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ember that while Blacks may have a lower mean IQ , there are a lot of very high IQ blacks. It other words you have to judge individuals.

The left doesn't want to believe that it's all nuture.

Steve Pinker is an academic rather than a leftist philosopher, but that boo k does nail that particular delusion.

I'm sure that you can find leftists with silly ideas almost as easily as yo u can find rightists with silly idea (the latter group posts here in large numbers, which does make them excessively accessible) but the left is about the rational approach, and "all nuture" isn't remotely rational.

What makes you think that they haven't?

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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They didn't. They misused some data (which they hadn't collected themselves ) to construct a narrative that sold well to rich Republicans.

written in response - because the Bell Curve flew in the face conventional academic thinking - explored the same data set as Herrnstein and Murray had exploited, and demonstrated that Herrnstein and Murray hadn't actually loo ked at the data in detail, and had missed what it actually said.

Black kids did poorly on IQ tests because they walked out early, which whit e kids didn't - which was obvious from the data, and Herrnstein and Murray had missed that completely. There's a lot more in the book - it's a substan tial demolition job.

One of the nicer bits is the demolition of Herrnstein and Murrya's claim th at IQ is the best single predictor of social success. Herrstein and Murray compared it with a single socio-economic standing index thye'd generated, w hich was mostly parental income.

Fischer et al recognised that where you live had almost as much effect as p arental income, and separated socio-economic status into two separate facto rs (money and location - which are correlated, but not all that strongly), both of which were more strongly correlated with "social success" than IQ.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

The left can't admit that there are differences between men and women beyond the pronouns.

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any more.

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That sort of missis the point of what Statistics is all about.

-- Kevin Aylward

- SuperSpice

Its completely naive and ludicrous to believe that Sam Harris is suggesting anything of the sort.

-- Kevin Aylward

- SuperSpice

Well, that was a bit of a Sir Humphries.

-- Kevin Aylward

- SuperSpice

Not if it is actually true.

If there are actually a huge number of universes, all with different laws of physics, its just tough shit that that limits predictions.

A theory is true if it is true, whether or not it is usable to predict something or not is not relevant to its truth.

Many scientists don't seem to understand that point. Maybe because it might put them out of a job :-)

It doesn't matter whether or not it is "science". What matters is whether or not it is true.

I agree with the Anthropic principle. It works.

Well, actually, yes... it is all about "a theory of nothing".

Either there is a reason for all that we observe, or there is not. If there is a reason, then what is the reason for that reason?

The only reason that does not lead to the infinite turtles on top of each other, is that there is no reason for any of this, i.e. random.

So, you either believe in a god, non conscious or conscious, or you believe that everything has, ultimately, been generated from a random process.

I believe the latter, as I don't observe any rational alternative :-)

- "Something from nothing"

One can "derive" conservation laws:

The summary is, if one really does stand back and look at the big picture, there are only two options. Either there is a God, or at the core, its all due to a random process. Its pretty much that simple.

-- Kevin Aylward

- SuperSpice

Oh yeah....

Once you realise that you don't have an answer as to *why* this big bang universe *must* be unique, i .e. what is the reason that there is only *one* big bang event, it will make sense why, even without proof, that, rationally, there must be more than one. One off off events, by definition, are extremely rare, to wit, very unlikely :-)

-- Kevin Aylward

- SuperSpice

But it would be nice to be able to demonstrate the point. There's a big gap between plausible and demonstrable.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Fair enough, I'm not intimately familiar with the guy. I know he's an atheist who doesn't like Islam very much. I found a couple quotes of his like:

"We cannot let our qualms over collateral damage paralyze us because our enemies know no such qualms. Theirs is a kill-the-children-first approach to war, and we ignore the fundamental difference between their violence and our own at our peril. Given the proliferation of weaponry in our world, we no longer have the option of waging this war with swords. It seems certain that collateral damage, of various sorts, will be a part of our future for many years to come."

Sounds like he rationalizes the West's ruthlessness as a "necessary evil" because, well, they'd do the same to us. But we still hold the moral high ground because we do it for "good reasons" and they do it for "bad reasons." Okay.

Come on man, this is not exactly revolutionary stuff. And there's honestly nothing more morally repulsive than twee academics and bookish never-serveds going on about "collateral damage" and bombing kids from the comfort of their safe luxury homes.

On a sunny day (Sat, 28 Oct 2017 11:48:07 +0100) it happened "Kevin Aylward" wrote in :

Of course there are more that one (if there was one), was there not a professor who showed remnants of other bangs in the current one a few years back? Very well known name it was.

Careful, that could be construed as racist! :-)

Mikek

Godel, essentially, tells that there must be true conditions, that are not provable. At some point, one bites the bullet and decides to take something as if true, until proven otherwise. We do that every time we get into a car. We believe that we won't get killed in a crash, otherwise we wouldn't do it.

-- Kevin Aylward

- SuperSpice

On Oct 27, 2017, George Herold wrote (in article):

According to Twin Studies, the heritability of IQ is 75% (some reports say

80%) in adults (it?s lower when the same people are children - nobody know why):.

There is a large literature on Twin Studies: .

Some more information on the issue of relative rates of geniuses in populations may be found in Smart Fraction Theory:.

This theory is quite controversial. There is an analysis by Clinger claiming that Griffe?s math is wrong because the variance of IQ isn?t known, which is just not so. The IQ distribution is a gaussian of mean 100 with standard deviation of 15 or 16. (Variance is the square of standard deviation.) This has been known for at least a century.

Joe Gwinn

Sure, we *all* justify our own particular moral compass. That's life.

Islam (Sharia) says that a woman's word is half that of a mans, A Muslim's word is 15 times more valid than an infidel.

The 14th Amendment of the Constitution Of the USA states that "no state shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

So, I don't personally care a toss that those that support Islam claim a higher moral ground due to their belief system. The don't.

So, you believe that its morally superior for those that support western freedom to say nothing at all because they, like me, don't have the guts to fight in Syria?

The reality is, anyone that says anything negative about Islam, is open to a higher probability of negative consequences from such a position. People lose their jobs, and in some cases, their lives.

There is a determined effort by lefties to equate repugnance of Islam as if it is on the same level as race and gay discrimination. Islam is not a race, its a belief system. This is despite that fact that the ECHR has actually ruled that Islam (via Sharia) is repugnant to western democracy, equality and freedom.

Why is there nothing in the media accusing those ECHR judges of Islamophobia?

Expressing dislike for a political ideology is simply not, in general, subterfuge for dislike of individual alleged followers of that ideology.

-- Kevin Aylward

- SuperSpice