Talk:Race and intelligence/Archive 56

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mi and savants

in terms of background, MI itself is barely relevant to this article. savants are not at all relevant for background. savants are about intelligence, but not race and intelligence. --W.R.N. 15:41, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

MI is very relevant to this article. One cannot have a discussion about intelligence without talking about MI. IQ is the only form of intelligence that can be measured. the very fact that it can be measured by humans is enough indication of its relative insignificance. ie how can a human be more intelligent that a human. Anyway I digress.

At the core of MI is that people who may not score well in IQ may actually do better in other areas, and those who score well in IQ may not do well in others. If we neglect a discussion on MI then we imply that humans can be graded solely by IQ alone.

A typical example is that those with high IQ ( Nerd or Geek stereotypes]] ) are seen as not the most social or affable people. Weird Al satirizes this in his parody White and Nerdy, about a trekkie who wants to "roll with the gangstas".Muntuwandi 16:07, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Are you implying that a higher percentage of whites are nerdlish? ;-)

More seriously, are there studies that compare across [races], e.g., the ability to simultaneously maintain several rhythmic patterns of great complexity? I heard recently the account of a famous musician, I think it was Wynton Marsalis, who spent weeks trying to learn the rhythm structure of music he was learning to play with musicians from another music culture. (He kept getting told he had it wrong.) I remember Ravi Shankar's group demonstrating how they handled communications about complex rhythms involved in their music. So it's not a simple operation, and it's not an ability that would get tested directly in a typical IQ test. So you might be able to find some actual research that you could cite for the purposes of this article. What if it turns out that people from India can do things with rhythms that people who come in square white boxes cannot handle? That would be really interesting. But you have to have some facts that relate [race] and something that can be compared in some objective way. P0M 16:52, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Another thing you might consider in looking for articles you could cite on the issue of multiple intelligences × [race] would branch off the well-known fact that different "intelligent" people have different strengths in different memory areas, e.g., visual memory, kinesthesic memory, memory for sound sequences (music, etc.), etc. People who have photographic memories have a much easier time learning to read and write Chinese, for instance. So if you're taking a test of reading competence in Chinese... P0M 17:38, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

different cultures emphasize different aspects. Certain cultures have historically had a greater emphasis on academia and thus they are expected to have a higher IQ. others may emphasize the qualities needed for survival. The san bushmen for instance live in the kalahari desert where there is hardly any rain. this is a place where an outsider would die of dehydration and hunger within two weeks, but the san have a body of knowledge that has enabled them to live there for thousands of years. I wouldn't expect a san straight from the desert, on his first IQ test to score high marks but how could someone say he is not intelligent. this is why we should have some detail on MI. see Steve Urkel.Muntuwandi 21:15, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree with you on the Bushman comparison 100%. Oh, and I took the liberty to change your post about only by removing the brackets from 'san' to 'bushman as San really goes nowhere, so your reference now points to the correct source. You can yell at me if you want for doing that. :) But, I don't think Urkel is proof of the fact that there are black nerds, if that was what you were trying to convey, that is, because he is just a TV character portraying a nerd. Not saying there are no black nerds, cuz I know a few. JSYK. Cheers. -- Jeeny 21:50, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

There is a man in the U.S. who came from a white family but was educated in tracking by an Apache scout. The white boy and his Apache friend learned together and they did equally well. Even so that doesn't prove anything since within any group there are big differences in "who is smart" and "who is slow." What I'm trying to get at is that the kinds of intelligence needed by the San and by the American blacksmith may be the same, but the things that they spend the first 20 years of their lives on may be entirely different.

I can't prove this observation with printed studies but my belief is that an adult is frequently dissuaded from beginning a long learning process at his/her adult age. So the American blacksmith transported to the Kalahari might not be willing to become a child again and absorb everything the "adults" told him without a fight. He also might just be too old to learn if learning desert skills is like learning to talk or to play go. Similarly, the San who goes to China to study with only a primary school ability at a foreign language (English), might never make it up to grad student reading level no matter how long he used the language. Maybe it's laziness, maybe it's lack of a singular focus on one language, or maybe something else is going on. Anyway, it is rare for somebody to learn something from the ground up when beginning it at a fairly advanced age. So I am not convinced by a Western guy's failure to learn the ways of the desert if he goes there after college. If you find that little white boys adoped into San families can never make it in the desert (even with lots of UV lotion), then you'd have research that, if published and peer-reviewed, could be used in this article.

If you have research papers, books, etc., that discuss these issues, please list them here. P0M 22:20, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

P.S. Here is an example of an adult from one culture having trouble accepting what a teacher from another culture says. The karate instructor tells you to take a posture that looks something like the letter "h", so actually most of your weight is on the leg pictured on the left side here, but the instructor tell you that the weight on each foot is equal. Any physics teacher will tell you that's impossible. Besides that, you can stand on two bathroom scales and test the idea for yourself. But you won't get anywhere good by arguing with the karate instructor. You've got to forget physics and try to make yourself feel as though the weights are equal. Even so there is some cognitive dissonance left over to interfere. A child would just take the words at face value and tailor his perceptions to his verbal picture, i.e., make them "come out even." If you go to a teacher and the teacher says, "The flower knows when and where the sun will come up," you've got to be able to accept the statement as would a child. If the teacher says, "Go ask the crow," you can't argue back with your teacher and tell him that crows can't talk. It's hard for adults. The minds of adults may automatically translate all tunings into some semblance of equal temperament, and if a note is obviously somewhere between a C and a C# they may insist that it is exactly half a semi-tone — regardless of what the frequency actually is. So in some ways adults may be closed-off from learning things that children could easily learn. P0M 22:51, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Hello, me again. As I understand it, there are no empirically verifiable measures of the Multiple Intelligences that are not measured by IQ Tests. Thus there is no data regarding any possible ‘race’ differences in the Multiple Intelligences that are not measured by IQ Tests. Therefore the issue of Multiple Intelligences theory in this regard only relates its value in emphasising that not everyone accepts IQ as being the be all and end all of intelligence. From this point of view, and given its status in psychometry this article well over emphasises Multiple Intelligences theory. Romper 02:55, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

physical ability, interpersonal, creative intelligences cannot be measured by IQ. If someone is a very good dancer, how can IQ be used to measure his dancing abilityMuntuwandi 04:09, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

But there could be innate abilities to process information that could relate to, e.g., dancing that would not get measured by an IQ test, no? Someone who is unable to "calculate" rhythms accurately in real time might be at a disadvantage in dancing or in music. If a culture valued that kind of thing it might find ways of objectively measuring it, and that measure could be used to project how good a candidate the individual might be for conservatory training.

Think about what might be considered essential abilities among dolphins. Which dolphin is best at echo-location, which is best at finding the disguised sound of some prey? Those questions might decide how dolphins related each other's ability to respond effectively to the environment. Humans would probably be way sub-normal on those measurements regardless of whether they were intelligent enough to invent calculus on their own. P0M 04:49, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

What about this?

Facial recognition ability has shown differences by race. Richard Ferraro writes that facial recognition is an example of a neuropsychological measure that can be used to assess cognitive abilities that are salient within African-American culture. In the US Blacks' performance is significantly better than that of whites', and blacks are better at recognizing faces of whites than whites are at recognizing blacks. A 1991 study found that white subjects performed significantly more poorly on trials involvingAfrican American faces than on trials involving White faces, whereas no such difference was obtained among African American subjects. One possibility is that expertise in perceiving faces of particular races is associated with increased ability to extract information about the spatial relationships between different features

futurebird 03:13, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

In the book making friends with black people [1], the author laments that his white neighbor can only recognize him when they meet in their apartment building. When they meet on the street his white neighbor fails to recognize himMuntuwandi 04:09, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

It's telling that low ability among whites in this area isn't automatically considered an indicator of low intelligence-- It shows how the definition of intelligence (used by some) is circular. ie. "If white people are bad at it it can't be a matter of intelligence." and "Those who are successful are intelligent, and those who are intelligent will be successful." futurebird 05:12, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

(edit conflict)

It would be easy to be cynical about this observation. However, it is known that some people have defects of brain structure (?) that make them incapable of recognizing faces. I'm pretty sure that there isn't simply an on-off switch for this ability. I'm weak on the ability to distinguish and remember faces myself. I hate it when I have two students who are similar in appearance in one of my classes. To me it is about as bad as for most people who have trouble distinguishing between identical twins. And yet I can have instant recall for people I knew years ago and 10,000 miles away. Is all of this stuff genetic? Is it cultural? Who knows.

One of the things that might make the author of the book feel a little better is that bad memory is a known symptom of neurosis. So maybe his white neighbors are neurotic. I mean that seriously because I believe that there are serious deficiencies in white culture. (Sometimes I saw that whites frequently have the nastiness gene, but I really mean there is something wrong with our culture.) P0M 05:29, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Um. But, these studies show that a large number of white people have the same problem. I think it's probably a matter of socialization. But it seems ...contrived... to just assume that it's something wrong with the brain when there are clearly problems between cultures that lead to this divide. This is scientific evidence that, to some people, people of other races really do "all look the same." futurebird 05:52, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

I tend to be cynical about what is going on when somebody recognizes somebody else only "in context" and the problem is noticed in regard to cross-race recognition. Besides, we've all heard the "they all look the same to me" comment. We would need some good studies to differentiate all the confounding factors. Clearly, if somebody only looks far enough to see that the other person has a different skin color, then it's like somebody who sees only two values of cards in a poker deck, not very bright and probably pathological at some level. The question would be, given serious motivation for distinguishing among black individuals, do the scores of these oblivious types improve? FWIW, I never had any trouble distinguishing among my 8th graders. On the other hand I once saw my old landlady in Taiwan, after an absence of 8 years. She recognized me immediately. I mis-recognized her as one of my favorite teachers, but I didn't know how to act because "my teacher" had a husband along with her who unaccountably recognized me. I tried to fake my way through the situation and only afterward figured out who she must have been. (The two ladies really did look quite a bit alike, but I hadn't made the connection before.) And in my community of 6000 white people, hardly anybody could keep me and my brother apart even though there is 20 months between us. We really are not anywhere near as similar as identical twins. I might think it was because they felt disdain for the spawn of a mixed Protestant and Catholic marriage, but adults genuinely liked me.

One of my pet peeves is the people who have very good recognition of faces and memory of names who claim that "anybody can do it." To me that is like Einstein saying, "There is nothing special about my math ability. Anybody..." On the other hand, my father absolutely could not carry a tune and it was painful to hear him try to sing anything and I have what is called relative perfect pitch (like my mother). Somebody can whistle a melody at me and I can repeat it quite easily. Jasha Heifetz was said to have in mind around 40 different frequencies that he used within the scope of one octave to get just the right harmony for each occasion. That ability made his violin sing in a way that just buying a Stradivarius could never accomplish. (Most professional violinists are said to be able to identify frequencies of about 100 "cents" apart. He must have done much better than that. People who can't hear what frequency their violin is producing end up playing keyed instruments, fretted instruments, etc.) That reminds me of my 140 IQ kid. I tried to get him interested in math via his love of the guitar so I went through the calculations for setting up the common pre-Equal Temperament scale and where those calculations would put each fret. I actually had some kind of a "canjo" or something that we could put frets on. I should say I tried to do that because he quickly grew impatient and pointed to the points where the frets should go. As far as I can tell he had it exactly right. Like the guy who could visualize a slide rule and then accurately compute physics problems on it, this young man apparently had the kind of memory that could produce a set of fret settings on a relative basis (my keyboard was not cut to any particular length standard). In the world of today he could probably get a job standing at the entrance of a high traffic airport and watching for disguised terrorists to try to get in. But those kinds of abilities to deal effectively with the environent will not be measured by reading, vocabulary, comprehension, math... problems.

Anyway, the story about the white person who could not identify a black person out of context is anecdotal. He might have brain damage and all the Archie Bunkers in the world might have perfectly function squishy computers but bad software. Only research can tell. I'd like to know what the results would be of testing people for the ability to identify rhythms, say something like 13 against 17. But even there we might have trouble correcting for musical education. P0M 01:24, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

The question would be, given serious motivation for distinguishing among black individuals, do the scores of these oblivious types improve?

Of course they can. I've seen it happen. (anecdotal? yes, but I'm saying it is possible...) Like many mental abilities recognitions is probably malleable and a result of expereince. But just as policy makers find it disturbing that black kids have low scores on average on tests of IQ I think it's makes sense to find it disturbing that there may be these differences in facial recognition. The response is, of course to simply desegregate society further and give people more opportunities to interact. Just as the response to the IQ gap would be to address problems in the education system. futurebird 10:55, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, if we are talking about [race] and intelligence I suppose that (if you and I are right in our conclusions from personal experience) the only thing that is relevant is the constructions that are built of superficial differences. The interesting possibility is that science progresses by disproving incorrect ideas. Science never gets to "the truth," but it keeps eliminating what is provably wrong.

On the other hand, there are some differences among groups that prove out. As far as I know, they break down into two main groups. One is the kind of thing that results with the "founder effect" -- people move off to some isolated place and they remain isolated for thousands of years. One or more prominent members of the community carry a mutation that either originated after they lost contact with the rest, or maybe that mutation dies off in the outside world because it isn't very competitive. That kind of difference could be just about anything, and it probably does not matter to the individuals. The other kind of thing results from adaptations to the environment. Skin color is an obvious example, but people all over the world who live in malaria-infested areas come into contact with the environment at a level that is more than skin deep. Their biological adaptations have medical consequences, important consequences. Even so, these are still "super-ficial" in the sense that they are changes that occur on the surface of contact between the organism and the environment.

We can't simply assume that there are no MI differences.

By the way, there is a need to decide how to define "intelligence." If "intelligence" is any mind-based ability to adapt to the environment, then something like the ability to distinguish odors is a factor in intelligence. Again, it is anecdotal, but Chinese people do things that I am pretty sure I can't do, e.g., one of my friends grew up in a Chinese restaurant and he claims to be able to tell by the smell of the food when enough salt has been added. But a confounding factor is that some cultures educate the sense of smell and some cultures discourage individuals from paying attention to smells. Identification of rhythms would be another factor. Clearly education would be important, but maybe there are differences in individuals' inner clocks. (I tried setting 13 against 17 and if I hadn't written the midi music out myself I would never figure that there were two rhythms going on. Maybe other people would spot it as automatically as some people can tell you that two colors clash. The subject needs study.) P0M 16:08, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

response in the next section

section break

We can't assume there are not differences, but the differences we see are well within the expected range for differences caused by environmental factors. These aren't my words, they are the APA's. It is difficult to separate theories of the genetic inferiority of black people from the history of that idea in our culture. The genetic theory, views with a cold scientific eyes is tenuous at best and far from proven. It's a speculation. The only reason it holds so much sway and receives so much attention is because it validates people's pre-existing ideas about race. Without the historical legacy of racism these theories would be simply "unlikely theories"

For example, I could suppose that Chinese people can identify Chinese food smells with greater accuracy because they have a specific virus that is native to China and more prevalent in Chinese communities abroad. I mean this sounds sort-of plausible. But I think most people looking at this would say: you grow up with Chinese food, you'll know it better. This is what the genetic theories about race and intelligence sound like. Only it's not just innocent speculation, it's speculation with a specific political agenda.

The example was not about Chinese food per se, it was about the ability of some people to detect the amount of salt in something by way of the sense of smell. If there is such an ability (and I am torn between taking my friend at his word and my own ideas of saltiness as a taste and not a smell), then it enhances one's ability to deal with the environment. Whether there is such an ability can only be established by careful study. (There was a report recently about the ability of dogs and humans to follow a scented trail. At least somebody is trying to quantify human abilities in this little-researched area.) Whether that ability is learned or intrinsic is another question for empirical study, and, finally, whether there is a statistical variation in the level of this ability among groups is also a matter to be decided by empirical study. Maybe it will turn out that all red-haired people have an extra measure of "smellability." But I have to agree with your assessment of genetic theories about [race] and intelligence, and, by extension, with your feeling that it probably is not worth it to follow these other ideas out -- unless you can one by one knock out the idea that there are genetically produced group differences. P0M 22:39, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

It's hard to take these discussions seriously some of the time. When I know other black people who would do poorly on IQ tests. (I imagine all four of my grandparents would have scores about 85) but, at the same time I know that they are much more intelligent than I am even though I do well on tests. There must be something wrong with intelligence test because intelligent people simply don't do well on them some of the time. And yes, this brings us to the point of defining intelligence. That's a controversial topic all on it's own. futurebird 19:16, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

The consequences of misjudging somebody's intelligence (or misjudging their potential) can have a profound impact on their lives. I don't like it when a student of mine is written off because he can't do his multiplication tables and can't read. If you tell a person s/he is stupid you risk having your words believed. When the words are believed the student may give up. It's even worse when potential is systematically thwarted.

I suspect that if I went to live with dolphins I would be regarded as a real idiot. My ways of gaining information from the world I live in and using that information to guide my actions are not ways that work very well underwater, and I doubt that I could ever master echo-location. Some blind people use echo-location very well, but as far as I know they can't compete with bats and dolphins. Einstein probably would need a "designated hitter" to get him from base to base in the dolphin world.

We distinguish "intelligence" from elements of personal success in contending with the environment like physical strength, running speed, etc. But it is difficult to divorce or abstract information processing success from information acquisition success. Moreover, it it turns out that there are several kinds of intelligence then it may be impossible to average them together in any way that is not arbitrary.

The desire to compare absolute intelligence levels probably rests on egocentric desires to be better than other people. If you are looking for a good stenographer you may need excellent abilities to decipher speech sounds, the capacity to type or write shorthand rapidly and accurately. You may not want that person to have much of an imagination. But how do you compare a good stenographer to a good composer of music? It probably comes down to a value judgment having much to do with whether one needs a good transcript of court proceedings or a nice melody to play at your coronation. P0M 23:36, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Hello, Thank you very much for your swift responses. Muntuwandi and P0M* seem to be in agreement with me in that there are no empirically verifiable measures of Multiple Intelligences that are not measured by IQ Tests. Especially given Muntuwandi earlier observation that “IQ is the only form of intelligence that can be measured”. I have yet to review Futurebird’s references (for which I thank her), but it is late(/early) in my time zone. Speak to you tomorrow.

* Wrong. I may not know of any, but I am ignorant and the world may not be interested in doing the studies that would clarify the point. P0M 01:24, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Fair enoughRomper 21:36, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

In regard to your last view Futurebird, if there is empirical evidence of lesser intelligence of ‘Whites’ in any area then that should and probably will be regarded as evidence of lesser intelligence of whites. As a good example check out American Asians/American Whites re Spacial Reasoning.

“So maybe his white neighbors are neurotic. I mean that seriously because I believe that there are serious deficiencies in white culture. (Sometimes I saw that whites frequently have the nastiness gene, but I really mean there is something wrong with our culture.)” - What on are you on about?? (Sorry I'm drunk) Romper 05:54, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

You are drunk and you don't recognize any deficiencies in white culture? Like white culture is perfect and other cultures do every single thing worse than we do? P0M 01:24, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Who said I was white? No I grasp that there are probably aspects of most cultures that members of other cultures (and indeed members of the same culture) regard as deficient. I was just confused by this - “I saw that whites frequently have the nastiness gene”. I just wasn’t sure which gene that is and if there is evidence it occurs at greater frequencies in whites. I think I am probably misinterpreting you.Romper 21:36, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, twice. I should always write ;-) when I am saying things like I just did. Being ironic of facetious is always going to get me in trouble. The "nastiness gene" is (hopefully) purely a fiction of my own mind and any nastiness involved with white people is (hopefully) a result of cultural features, or perhaps the lack of culture, toxic parenting, or whatever. The cultures of other countries may not be perfect either, but my belief is that if we could absorb the better parts of each others' cultures we would all be ahead. As it is, we frequently see people doing something in a way that is different from ours and we get upset about it. We white people also tend to attribute differences to intrinsic factors rather than learned factors. That attitude contrasts strongly (in my admitedly limited and unscientific set of observations) with the Chinese society in which I lived for 7 years where people don't go beyond identifying somebody as "white" or "foreign" or whatever. (They are not blind, after all.) They do seem to me to care very much whether someone is behaving as a civilized individual or as a barbarian.

Yes, I though you were probably being ironic or facetious. I wasn’t sure though. :-). Oh, and I may or may not be white (I just thought that me being drunk on a Saturday night = deficiencies in white culture involved quite a few assumptions/tenuous links) ;-). Romper 23:13, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

the white neighbors cannot recognize him because whites are the majority and thus the media is saturated with white images. White people will learn facial recognition from personal interaction with other whites and the media. Blacks will also learn facial recognition of whites from the media, and facial recognition of blacks from personal interaction. Basically the environment you are in predisposes one to certain types of knowledge.Muntuwandi 13:47, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't think it is that complicated. Assuming one doesn't have some marginal brain damage, the corrective measure is simply to pay attention to what people actually look like. If I have two kids in class who look "the same" to me, then I have to find a couple of tell-tale features. If I don't bother then I'll never get the job done. P0M 01:24, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

IQ can only measure logical-mathematical and verbal/linguistic intelligence because these are the only ones that can be measured on a piece of paper. The others are too complicated. We cannot make a pencil and paper test to predict who is going to win American Idol or any reality show. The person who knows best how to manipulate the audience with their performance will win. In this way there is a test, that is the competition itself.

Even though there are several intelligences their are stratified by class or prestige. IQ has more prestige than music for example. this the reason why there is resistance to the MI theory.Muntuwandi 13:47, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree, with the proviso that it might turn out that the low-prestige things are also acquired on the basis of learning experiences that are mediated by g. Before somebody does the research we would be guessing to come down one way or the other on the subject. But as long as nobody "important" thinks it's a function of genius to come out with the rhythms of some African music, then nobody will do the tests. P0M 01:24, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

There is some evidence that the need to quickly categorize people by race plays a role in this too. People who are poor at recognizing black faces tend to be faster at determining the race of the face. That is, black faces are categorizes as a race at the expense of categorizing these people as individuals. (see Race as a Visual Feature: Using Visual Search and Perceptual Discrimination Tasks to Understand Face Categories and the Cross-Race Recognition Deficit. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 2000, Vol. 129, No. 4,Page 559-574) futurebird 14:02, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Is it a "need"? Or is it a sociologically driven preference? In the past many white people could afford to ignore which black person it was to whom they directed their abuse, but the black person had to be aware of which white person it was because some of them could be very unfriendly and hurtful and you had to take defensive measures (like not talking to them if at all possible) while others might be able to do some good.

How could somebody's "time to identify" be calculated? Maybe in cases of mixed ancestry? If the study is true, what would that say about the nature of intelligence? A person has a certain g, and if s/he turns that g to identifying [race] then s/he doesn't have enough left over to turn to the problem of identifying the specific and differentiating facial features of the person? And another person devotes all his/her g to deciphering the facial identity of the person and doesn't have enough g left over to determine the person's race? (Like, "This is the freckled one with red hair, not the lightly tanned one with red hair --- but what the heck is this person's race?") I don't think that is plausible. I think what is plausible is that there are two strategies involved. One person needs/wants only a racial identity and so runs down his/her little "key to racial identification" list until one or another branch end up with a designation. Then that person quits. The other person wants/needs to identify the individual and absorbs the whole face, the separation between eyes, their separation from the nose, etc., etc. and quickly says, "That's that rotten cop." It may not make a great deal of difference to person number two whether the "rotten cop" is of [race] x, y, or z. Or it may make a little difference because rotten cops of one [race] automatically have more power than cops of another. But that information is likely to be included not by logical operations but because the virulence or benevolence of each individual is already contained in his/her mental dossier. Once you know it's "Officer Clancy," you either know he's on the take and bashes people with his sap, or that he's a good cop. Anyway, I'll have to read the article. It looks interesting. P0M 01:24, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

My main problem with extent of the inclusion of MI was its relevance to the issue of race and intelligence. As it is not a mainstream theory and as there appeared to be no evidence that the other aspects of MI (other than those measured by IQ tests) were measurable , let alone showed any race differences, I felt that it was receiving over emphasis. As there is now data regarding race differences in MI then it should of course be included to the extent that it now is.Romper 21:36, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Relevance of this article

Because of the discussions on MI I think it is time to consider the relevance of this article. There are probably hundreds of millions of perfectly normal people on earth who are illiterate or who have never ever been to school. Many still live a pre-modern existence such as the some of the san bushmen. For example how do we compare the intelligence of a white ivy league grad with a hunter gatherer who has never been to school. By IQ alone we obviously expect the ivy league grad to perform significantly better than the san tribesman, who may not know how to write. In which case it is comparing apples with oranges. The only fair comparison is if the san tribesmen had been living in a westernized country for generations, had the same access to education at all levels and a similar social economic status.

World literacy rates by country, based on The World Factbook.

So I think that this article is very biased towards westernized countries because only in developed regions is it possible to have close 100% literacy(see List of countries by literacy rate. Once again comparing an illiterate with a literate is apples and oranges. Someone who is illiterate has not had the chance to prove him/herself. When we look at the case of India for instance, the report says it has a literacy of 61%. thus 39% are illiterate. Considering a population of 1 billion that is quite significant. but on the other side the contribution that India is making to the technological sector is quite significant. Which means a portion of the literates have IQs some extremely high. However India ranks lowly overall according to IQ and the Wealth of Nations. this is the conundrum of comparison.

So I therefore think it is time to consider renaming this article something like "Race and Standardized Test scores" or "Standardized Test scores and World Regions"Muntuwandi 04:14, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Or Race and IQ/Intelligence Quotient. Romper 21:36, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

tha Yes possibly. The thing is if the article is about race and intelligence then we already know the result is there is no difference in intelligence between the races because biologically race does not exist. Therefore an article on race and intelligence should be more of a historical account of how people have had distorted views on race and intelligence. An article about test scores is more valid because it can objectively be measured whereas the total of human intelligence cannot.Muntuwandi 00:42, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

I was thinking race and IQ because race is accepted by all parties to be a valid (at least social) construct within tne USA and it primarily discusses IQ differences between races within the USA. Romper 02:12, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

I may be the only one, but to me the idea of [race] as a "valid social construct" is about like the idea of one of O. Henry's stories about the ever-beating heart of a murder victim being a "valid ghost story." It may well be valid from a public health officer's standpoint to count a Dyak family as "black" because everybody will red-line them and glass-ceiling them and they will end up living in the same neighborhood built over the local version of Love Canal and getting the same fall-out from the same nearby dump and incinerator... But that's a "validity" that pertains to our expectations of how a dysfunctional society will treat individuals who carry the "stigmata" that make their family "black" in the eyes of policemen, real estate agents, rental agencies, landlords and landladies, etc., etc. As individuals they may have little genetic similarity to the "blacks" with whom them live. But they may have little difference from them in regard to anything that really matters, just as they have little genetic difference from anybody in the city in regard to anything that really matters. What they are is, unfortunately, not what is material in this case. What matters is what they look like and how that helps determine how other people treat them.

We manage to skitter back and forth among definitions of "race" depending on how strongly some understanding of the word "race" and what it means will threaten the comfortability of those who need the assurance of their own value that membership in "the higher race" gives them. If we kept it clear that every time we use the word "race," we disavow there being any proof that intrinsic differences among groups account for differences in intelligence, then I think that the interest in this article would quickly wither and die. It isn't very interesting to conclude that people who are defined by society on the basis of several superficial characteristics and treated badly happen to do poorly on tests performed upon them by the dominant social group -- unless you are interested in doing something about the injustices. Those who want somebody to feel superior to will have to find some other measure of intrinsic worth with which to prop up their ego-centric vacuity.P0M 06:49, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Ok, then I'll say a widely used constructRomper 20:27, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Too many archives

It seems to me that there are too many archives to this article. I think that it would be best to reduce the number of archives, and, if possible, include an extended comments page for this article so that newcomers may better navigate through the material within it. Does anyone else have any ideas about this?

Also, given the number of archives, and the general length and importance of the material within this article – is it sensible to have the same length rules, etc... apply to this article as would be required to apply to other articles?

--MrASingh 20:56, 23/03/2007, 2007 (UTC)

One of the possibilities would be to make a series of archives that group content. There would be some danger that someone's contributions could get lost, removed from a standard archive and never placed in the new topical archive. And it is possible that some people might disagree about where something should have been shelved.

There are so many archives because people have had so much to say on a very complicated issue. Also, it frequently happens that somebody with no previous experience with an article will have some of the same objections that have already been expressed. If you don't answer the person's objections in a way that can educate the newcomer to common pitfalls, etc., then the person remains angry and may start edit wars. If you do answer the person you can't really do so effectively by telling him/her to do a search of all the past archives and current discussions to see what has already been said on the subject.

The length requirement seems to be a recurrent issue. Cavalli-Sforza's book on The History and Geography of Human Genes covers roughly the same topics as the article on Race, but it's nearly 3 inches thick. So where does one draw the line? Using hyperlinks it is possible to have a relatively short article that does not leave the reader totally helpless by using unexplained concepts. But it is still a difficult process to reduce things to 32K. That number, by the way, appears to have been set originally because of the limits of some of the older browsers that simply could not download and process any more information than that. It seems to stand now as an ideal limit. Going to 33k does not provoke much comment. Going to 300k will prompt criticism.

Even though Wikipedia is not paper, one of the limitations that we must always be aware of is that many users access materials using a telephone modem, so articles that are long may take a prohibitive amount of time to be downloaded to the user. One way or another the user needs to be able to download material in digestible volumes.

It is, generally speaking, easier to write a 300 page book that gets a certain body of information across in an intelligible way than it is to write a 100 page book. It takes great skill so say things in a truly economical way. Just being brief won't work if the brief expression of an idea does not enlighten the reader. And just taking a lot of space to say something doesn ensure that you get the idea communicated either. So we balance between ideals and the best job in the real world we can manage. P0M 04:59, 24 March 2007 (UTC)