IQ, Poverty, and Race

http://blog.american.com/2011/11/maybe-it%E2%80%99s-journalists-who-have-an-iq-problem/

Charles Murray questions the authority.  Notable quote from the deluded journalist who wrote the piece:

In nearly every local system, white students are disproportionately represented, even though most gifted programs explicitly target students with natural talents and aptitude, which are spread evenly across racial groups and social classes.

This reminds me of a lecture I attended a few months ago where the speaker was a Stanford sociologist who specializes in inequity.  What is astonishing and perhaps even tragic about his presentation (as well as his research) is that it is based on the implicit assumption that natural talents and aptitude are spread evenly across racial groups and social classes.  The room was packed to the brim with eager academics hanging on to his every last word, genetics be damned.  Western political correctness has uplifted the fantastic notion of equality to unquestionable heights.  And then you have academics wasting their time away working on explanations and theories that are all based on a very shaky, almost ridiculous, orthodox premise that they have chosen to accept  on faith.  I raised my hand and asked the professor if he ever considered the possibility of genetics being a factor in inequality.  He looked affronted and muttered back something along the lines of heretability of intelligence is very low (it is not) but it was clear that this was not his area of expertise.  His area of expertise was finding non-genetic theories that explain away all kinds of evil gaps.

SWPLbits

"A quick scan of the room and we realized we were the only non-Asians in the restaurant. A HUGE plus for us.We get super excited when that happens because we know the food will be awesomely authentic. "


Read on Yelp.  This shit is real, kids.  Yelp is a fascinating place since it is full of SWPLs.  

The China Conundrum? Chinese Student Reality.

From the New York Times (hat tip Half Sigma).

First of all, why did New York Times choose University of Delaware, a borderline bogus school whose saving grace is a strong Chemical Engineering program.  Oh yeah, chief racist female researcher Linda Gottfredson also teaches there.

Half Sigma learned:

1. Chinese students aren’t very good at learning English.2. Chinese students lie on their college applications, and they will cheat on tests more readily than American students. 3. They stick to themselves and avoid doing stuff with non-Chinese. 4. They study really hard.5. They don’t like to talk in class, and when they do, American students don’t understand them.

6. They pay full price. 

 Wong Chow Mein responds:

1. American students are even worse at learning Chinese and Chinese students are not, as far as I can tell, worse at learning English than any other non-native group.  

2. American students lie on their college applications too.  Chinese students don't even have the luxury of gaming affirmative action.  I am not sure that Chinese students cheat more readily on tests than American students.  I know a lot of Chinese students aren't aware that some their actions constitute cheating in the states.  American students cheat/plagiarize with a clear conscience.  They know exactly what they are up to and know it is not allowed.  

3. Self-segregation is an undeniable fact of human nature.  

4. Yes.  Chinese students study really hard.  Many American students don't study very much at all and instead frolic in recreation centers and drink at fraternity parties.  

5. A cultural difference.  In China, when you talk in class, it means you don't understand, and when you don't understand, it reflects badly on your intelligence.  But in America, professors like kids who speak in class, even if they have no idea what they are talking about or display their ignorance in public.  I don't know what obsession is with "class participation" in the States but I know that I when I participate a lot with original insights then professors love me.  A lot of   American kids just say stupid things in class or ask stupid questions.  They should just shut up.  

 6. They pay full price and American colleges love it because they are non-profit organizations who don't care about money at all.

While Chinese graduate students have been a mainstay of American colleges for quite a while, undergraduate students are a new novelty, and American students have found it more than a bit disconcerting.  Take this hilarious quote from the article:

Last fall, Kent E. St. Pierre was teaching an intermediate accounting class with 35 students, 17 of them from China. Within a couple of weeks, all but three of the non-Chinese students had dropped the course. Why did the American students flee? “They said the class was very quiet,” recalls Dr. St. Pierre, who considers himself a 1960s-style liberal and says he’s all for on-campus diversity. But, he agrees, “It was pretty deadly.”

"They said the class was very quiet" is politically correct code for "I don't like Chinese people".  I am sure if the class was graded on a curve the non-studying American students would be devastated as well due to the superior quantitative genetics and training of the Chinese.   Or it could be that Chinese people smell bad.  I think I smell pretty good myself and don't notice other Chinese people smelling bad, but that could just be bias on my part.  I think Indian people smell really bad but I have the suspicion that this is just a olfactory illusion on my part.

Back to #6.  It's clear from the article that American colleges are cash hungry and Chinese upper-middle class students pay full out-of-state/private tuition in addition to the fact that they pay extra money for ESL prep classes.  But for Delaware, it's not about the money, it's about "diversity".

But Dr. Harker rejects the notion that the university’s recruiting effort in China is mainly about money. “The students from New Jersey pay, too,” he says. “For us it really is about diversity.”

 May I remind you that the University of Delaware strongly supports diversity.  Chinese people will learn that they cannot be racists, only white people can be racists.  But this is something that, Chinese students, growing up in a one-party state, should be accustomed to.  This also reminds me that the article and general sentiment about China-America cross cultural interactions in the US seems to be that America is a country which values freedom of thought and is free from any state-led indoctrination while China is an oppressive state that deceives it citizens.  But those who have taken the red pill can see that the US is not the fairy land of freedom that it claims it is and is not much better than China.  Oh yeah, and we have this unquestionable good called Democracy that gets in the way as well.

More to come.

  

What do you want to be?

Quit asking this fucking pointless question to young high school and college women who have been indoctrinated by our feminist culture to respond, "Doctor, engineer, soldier, president, banker, lawyer, :(:(:(,".

A better and horrifically offensive gender stereotyping (to liberals, in any case)  but not completely sufficient answer would be, "Nurse, teacher, secretary, etc".

But the best answer that you never hear anymore is, "I want to be a stay at home mom with two kids married to a good guy who makes six figures".  OMG SEXISM.

How about, "I want to be sitting on my couch shopping on my macbook with my husbands money waiting for him to come home so I can get fucked good".  Yeah, that's more like it.

Why Science Majors Change Their Minds

From the New York Times.  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-science-majors-change-their-mind-its-just-so-darn-hard.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all

Kids drop out of STEM majors because they are hard and non-STEM majors are easy, not to mention the fact that non-STEM courses give higher grades.  The situation even appears at elite schools, such as Berkeley, which, unlike the elite private school thirty miles south, is renowned for its cutthroat academic environment.

Professor Chang says that rather than losing mainly students from disadvantaged backgrounds or with lackluster records, the attrition rate can be higher at the most selective schools, where he believes the competition overwhelms even well-qualified students.

“You’d like to think that since these institutions are getting the best students, the students who go there would have the best chances to succeed,” he says. “But if you take two students who have the same high school grade-point average and SAT scores, and you put one in a highly selective school like Berkeley and the other in a school with lower average scores like Cal State, that Berkeley student is at least 13 percent less likely than the one at Cal State to finish a STEM degree.”

The economics of competition are simple enough.  The confidence of a student who is used to making As in school can be severely shaken when he receives a B- in a STEM course.  Will that B- prevent him from going to medical school?  Is he even good enough to continue battling for grades with the thousands of other students who are just as smart if not smarter?  Maybe it would be better to, um, fulfill his passions in Asian-American Studies instead.

Professor Chang doesn't cover the entire story as he cleverly directs the story away from the issue of NAMs in STEM at elite universities.  Let me preface this discussion by stating that I know NAMs in STEM that are smarter than me and are more than capable of majoring in engineering and succeeding.  But for the most part, NAMs attempting to major in STEM at elite universities are going to be in for a rough ride, and many of them may just decide it would be better for them to be in African-Studies instead, where you can get an A just for being black (not really, since I've actually seen a student who thought this was how the world worked, but became highly irate at the end of the semester when he discovered that this was not the case at all) .  If you are a NAM at an elite school whose admittance to the school was heavily aided by affirmative action, it is plainly obvious that you are not as smart as the general population of the university.  Yes, a 650 math SAT score is well above average and very good for a NAM, but it is comparatively pathetic once you walk into a classroom where 50% of the class thought the math SAT was a joke and scored 800 while another 45% came pretty damn close to 800.  The chances for your survival are not good even with NAM support systems behind your back.  Society is always complaining about the lack of NAMs in STEM.  Well there might be more NAMs in STEM if we eliminated affirmative action/equal opportunity (Orwellian) at the university level so the problem of mismatching would be solved.  NAMs could major in STEM at universities where they actually have a chance at succeeding.

Forget NAMs for a second.  A lot of smart Asians and whites who graduated near or at the top of their classes from generic public schools and go on to top schools to major in STEM will also find themselves in for a hell of a ride once they arrive in the classroom only to be surrounded by kids from Stuyvesant, Exeter, and Cupertino who didn't graduate even close to the top of their high school classes but are a hell of a lot smarter.  Talk about a collision with reality.  Holy shit, they think, here I was under the impression that I was a fucking genius valedictorian with a 1500 SAT score and a 5 on the AP Calculus Exam, and then I met  my roommate Susie Wong from Stuyvesant who was fucking taking linear algebra in high school!  In high school!  Now how is it again that I am going to make an A in organic chemistry when I am battling for grades with the likes of her?

And then there are the kids who are whip smart but find that they don't have "the engineering gene", "engineering aptitude", or whatever you want to call it.

MATTHEW MONIZ bailed out of engineering at Notre Dame in the fall of his sophomore year. He had been the kind of recruit most engineering departments dream about. He had scored an 800 in math on the SAT and in the 700s in both reading and writing. He also had taken Calculus BC and five other Advanced Placement courses at a prep school in Washington, D.C., and had long planned to major in engineering.

But as Mr. Moniz sat in his mechanics class in 2009, he realized he had already had enough. “I was trying to memorize equations, and engineering’s all about the application, which they really didn’t teach too well,” he says. “It was just like, ‘Do these practice problems, then you’re on your own.’ ” And as he looked ahead at the curriculum, he did not see much relief on the horizon.

So Mr. Moniz, a 21-year-old who likes poetry and had enjoyed introductory psychology, switched to a double major in psychology and English, where the classes are “a lot more discussion based.” He will graduate in May and plans to be a clinical psychologist. Of his four freshman buddies at Notre Dame, one switched to business, another to music. One of the two who is still in engineering plans to work in finance after graduation.

Matthew Moniz could easily be me.  In terms of academic background, SAT scores, etc, we could have swapped places, and no one would notice, at least in a hypothetical colorblind society.  The author tries to frame the issue to make it seem like the problem rests with the faculty and administrators for not making engineering interesting enough and teaching it correctly, but I think it is more likely that Matthew Moniz, despite his high SAT scores, just doesn't have the chops to become a good engineer and it's probably a good thing now that he's going to be counseling people instead of designing chips or whatnot.  I sympathize with Matthew.  I am pretty fucking awesome at memorizing equations but I stink at application--and I am not sure that any amount of great teaching could change this as I've been blessed to have access to some pretty damn good teachers.  It reminds of a conversation at had with an older gal who majored in engineering/math at a top school and told me that she hardly ever studied because it was all application and she was fucking good at that.   Oh, it's also funny to note how dismissive smart liberals can be of dumb people, but only in the presence of others who they perceive to be smart, a perception usually acquired by educational credentials though not always.  And intelligence doesn't exist.  Right.  I have pretty high bar for who I consider "smart".  It's generally reserved for people who I perceive to be smarter than me, and that's not too many people, though I seem to meet quite a few of them in my social circles.  Of course when wandering outside these circles I get confused when someone refers to someone else as "smart" when in my honest opinion that someone appears to me to be fucking retarded as I am sure I appear clueless to someone with an IQ of 160 or so.  In short, I have high standards.

And then there's the fact that the STEM acronym is a misnomer.  Biology is not a useful subject!  And neither is any STEM subject for that matter if you suck at it.  It doesn't do anyone any good if you major in civil engineering and you build a faulty bridge that kills your girlfriends entire sorority.

You shouldn't major in STEM if you are white racist pig who dislikes the sight and stench of gooks and kaffirs.  Just saying.  Well, just try to stay away from the University of Caucasians Lost Among Asians lest you end up filming yourself in an angry politically incorrect rant on Youtube.

Why do I bother commenting on this piece?  Not being a STEM major, do I even have any authority?  No.  But I hope you like my insight.

Diversity in Firefighting

http://www.statesman.com/news/local/almost-1-million-to-hire-firefighters-little-change-1944041.html

They spent almost $1 million in taxpayer dollars on achieving diversity in the fire department and failed.  Incredibly, the new initiatives managed to decrease diversity.

"Incredibly, for this overly expensive process, the citizens of Austin received a hiring process of questionable validity and one of the least diverse classes, overall, when compared to other AFD hiring processes over the last 10 years," Nicks said.

I for one, don't care what color a firefighter is as long as HE fights fires.  I don't understand why there is a need for female firefighters since once they become chief they will do stupid things like waste lots of money to increase diversity. There should be no such thing as a "policewoman" or women in the military for that matter.  These professions should by all means be exclusively male.  Having women in traditionally male professions distorts the social structure of male-female relations and undermines the cohesiveness of society.

The plus side of the war against white men in traditionally white male professions is that I'll receive preferential treatment when I apply in the name of diversity.