The pointed question Glenn asks about separating the empirical assessment of people’s abilities from the value of having them succeed in certain ways is an important one.
Particularly in medicine, the claim that the race of a doctor matching the race of the patient produces higher quality care is one that I see commonly circulated (though as far as I know, the studies don’t correct for confounders and there is no actual evidence that supports this conclusion). However, on a broader level, I think it is entirely plausible that there are a variety of benefits, not all of them easily measured, to diversity, even in the reductive DEI sense. I wish there were more black doctors.
However, even acknowledging that there might be differences in ability, or having a paradigm in which different considerations regarding workforce diversity are weighed against each other, suggests that the value of diversity is not infinite, and that absolute proportional representation of every group of people in every facet of life might not be worth the tradeoffs, and even that very left-leaning position is completely at odds with what is permissible to say in a DEI regime.
With regards to medical careers and standardized testing, I think it’s important to point out some non-obvious facts.
The US Medical Licensing exam was designed to be used in precisely the way described here: as a threshold. If you pass the test, you’re eligible to get a medical license. If you don’t you aren’t (pending possible retakes). That’s it. The test is now used to evaluate candidates for residency and fellowship training in medical specialties. That is not what it is designed for. People train in specific specialties, and the test is in general medicine. It is not clear that acing a test in general medicine makes you suited to be the best eye surgeon, or the best psychiatrist. The test is also administered by a national entity, which can and does put ideologically loaded questions in there. I’m not at liberty to discuss any specific questions that I might have had, but again I would not say that this test is necessarily a great standard.
What would be better? In my opinion, tests for specific specialties (i.e. the standardized test to get into neurology should focus on things that a neurologist needs to know), and in some cases tests which measured things like hand-eye coordination for the surgical specialties might be appropriate as well as knowledge tests.
I read Wax’s review of Murray’s book, (via link). For me, it was preaching to the choir. I have a suggestion for both Wax and Murray. Replace “cognitive ability” with “cognitive function”. Ability no matter which preceding adjective is attached- sounds like innate.
I suspect that parental presence of both father and mother effect child’s cognitive development. Childhood presence of mother and father may activate corresponding analysis at the level of micro-decision, (small but frequent decisions that humans make daily). There is a big difference in decision-making between [a person who unconsciously involves both parents] and [ a person who unconsciously involves less than both parents]. Children of two-parent households see in their parents templates for adult male and adult female. Children may modify these templates significantly in adulthood. But, children of one-parent households only have a template for one adult sex.
1) It's awful what Penn is doing to Wax. (Now, if she'd only sided with Hamas....)
2) I like Glenn's point about: Are we OK with the percentage being whatever it is, or do we want (for some social) reason to force a change?
a) this will require a double standard
b) (Glenn's concern) even blacks who met the higher bar will always be looked down on.
c) How much will society suffer because the standards are lowered? How dangerous is it to have dumber pilots, or engineers who aren't as good at designing airplanes that don't fall off? There is a real price in economic inefficiency to be paid.
Still, if we had some sense of the numbers we might well decide the price was worth it.
My real problem with the affirmative action group (who want to force a change to the percentage) is that if they really cared, they'd address root causes. Which might be some combination of:
a) Genetic. Making no claims. Just saying "Do we know enough to take this off the table?"
b) Economic. Rich vs poor matters.
c) Culture. Are smart blacks attacked for "acting white"?
d) Single parent families. This is obviously huge, and the fact that "no one" on the left will even talk about it makes me doubt their sincerity.
(I'd focus on single parent families. Fix this, and see how much problem remains...)
(As an aside, when it comes to sex-based differences, there's clearly preferences as well that would need to be considered -- even if male and female have identical innate intelligence, males have clear statistical preferences for some activities, females for other activities. Are genetic-based preferences that correlate with race possible?)
There are even more factors, specifically good nutrition, a stable home life, a vision of a future that motivates them to succeed (or short term, meeting high expectations of parents). Perhaps a part of culture, there are behavioral and social norms (including the acceptability of fights, the ability to de-escalate, respect for authority figures, respect for common and personal property, respect for other people’s time, treating peers with respect, etc) and cumulatively these take away from time in school learning and the ability to make the most of resources that are available. I spend a lot of time with 6th graders and the energy they spend on undermining themselves is heartbreaking.
As an aside, in my opinion sex-based differences are really mostly gender-based differences in that women and men are socialized very differently. With the exception of some specific hormone linked deficits (ex. testosterone and spatial reasoning) abilities are consistently similar between the sexes (females seem to have a natural advantage in communication) so these “preferences” are probably not genetic.
I'm certainly no expert here.... but I thought that there were studies done on non-human primates (chimps?) where they gave dolls and some stereotypical boy toy (I don't recall what they were) to infants and the females showed a preference for the dolls and the males showed a preference for the stereotypical boy toy. Again, it's not "ability", but "interest", and it seemed to show that even non-human primates show sex-related interests.
Hi Steve, I think you are right that there are behavioral differences in the average girl and the average boy starting early on. But even early on, those differences can be amplified by socialization. Even in new born babies, if you dress the baby as a girl the baby is responded to more quickly and with more compassion than if dressed in boy clothes (at least in one study I read about). In that case, it was balancing the difference that as early as 6 weeks testosterone production is believed to impact expressiveness of baby boys with the socialization idea that boys shouldn’t be rewarded for crying, as horrifying as that is. I don’t know about you, but if you are looking at 10 week old babies and having trouble sussing out what is biological and what is socialized at that point, by the time the kid reaches adulthood it’s going to be impossible.
I think people underestimate the impact of socialization. I was the kind of girl who did boy stuff, and there was always a lot of friction from that. I am sure for a person who didn’t violate gender norms, they would never have experienced that and thus feel there weren’t those strong pressures. Do you know what I mean?
Agreed. There's no single explanation. I guess I was pushing back on "it's all socialization" -- which of course you never claimed it was! We'd probably disagree some on the details, but I think we agree on the big picture.
You're taking this way too seriously. Of course there are high & low IQ's in every racial group as are athletic ability or a musical ear, which is why racial realism as discussed is a ridiculous argument as per my original comment.
Sorry, dyslexic. Even if there is some genetic component to IQ or is established Pre-K, it is still the nurturing of the potential. I was being facetious as the race realists and anti-racists put so much stock in color.
Is there a genetic component to your heart, blood type, and facial features?How would there not be a genetic component to your brain?
As for nurture, geniuses are found at every level of society, some had deprived childhoods with illiterate parents. Nevertheless they were geniuses.
If Blacks as a group are considered intellectually inferior then whites and Asians as a group are athletically and perhaps musically inferior. Why is it such a surprise that different groups developed different strengths over millenium and why is this so resisted when the results are so obvious?
I am a professor at a major business school and hate to admit that over forty years of teaching the number of A’s I have given to Blacks can be counted on the fingers of one hand, maybe two. That is a simple fact. Do what you may with that statistic.
I find this whole idea of "racial realism" ridiculous. On the full spectrum of color, from the darkest African blacks to the lightest Scandinavian whites, why AP Asians, Near East Asians & Jews on the left tail IQ wise and not the Norse? IT'S NURTURE. I mean if a Finn marries a Congolese would their children be only at the mean of the curve?
AP Asians include Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia. East Asians- Japanese and Chinese, and Ashkenazi Jews are known for being on the right tail, not the left tail. If it were nurture ,it would be easy enough to increase an individual's IQ by one standard deviation, but so far that hasn't been done. IQ can be decreased through brain injury but cannot be increased by nurture. An individual's IQ is set before kindergarten.
“Children’s intelligence fluctuates as they develop. It used to be held that IQ stabilises by around the age of 10. This was the rationale for introducing tests at 11-12 years of age in those education systems where ability is used to select which secondary school children attend. However, recent evidence suggests that both verbal and non-verbal intelligence may vary during the teenage years, by up to 20 IQ points, suggesting that such selective systems do not have a firm foundation.” Source: http://www.educationalneuroscience.org.uk/resources/neuromyth-or-neurofact/intelligence-is-fixed/
Where in this linked article did it say that a child's IQ could vary by up to 20 points? If that's true, what percentage of tested children had a 20 IQ point fluctuation and in which direction?
I read the link and clicked on 1- read that but cannot find the actual study that showed children's IQs with 20 point fluctuations. Where is that study, what's the title? The 4th paragraph states a conclusion that I've never seen anywhere else. I'd like to see the research that led to such a conclusion.
This may not be the best place to do this. (Actually, it might be the ideal place.)
A question for all Black subscribers to Glenn Loury: Do YOU believe in "race realism" as understood by the Jared Taylor's and Amy Wax's of the world? Do you believe that you/we as a people or a category are inherently handicapped intellectually and thereby *incapable* of achieving what others have achieved or can achieve?
And if you DON'T, why not? What's stopping you from getting on the Wax/Taylor train? After all, there's all this data that "proves" we can't do but so much, right?
I suspect that NONE of us believe this. I know I don't. Not even a smidgen. Partly because of the endless barrage of insincere arguments that hail from White nationalist sympathizers like Amy Wax. But that's just me.
Evidently, even Thomas Sowell is sick of this s***:
Not black, but all the metadata I've seen indicate that when all other variables are held constant, there is no variation in IQ between large groups.
For example, poor, rural kids in SC's low country struggle equally regardless of race.
There's also been a sizable shift in female performance in math, when at one point the lower performance was considered genetic.
The white/black gap in IQ has also been closing as the income and education gaps between median whites and median blacks close.
I do think there is a huge culture issue, as far as a defiant attitude. As I mentioned on another post, black employees are far less compliant with standards around safety and respect for female engineers. They simply won't keep the volume down so alarms can be heard, and won't filter out songs involving sexual violence.
That's very much a "black problem", but I don't think it's genetic.
"all the metadata I've seen indicate that when all other variables are held constant, there is no variation in IQ between large groups."
Those who carry certain agendas don't want to dig but so deep. When they hear the data that pleases them, they act like there's no more research to do. They are so transparent.
"That's very much a "black problem", but I don't think it's genetic."
Neither do I. But there are those who insist otherwise, no matter what.
I’ve gone to only occasionally visiting the site because there is so much cherry-picked nonsense peddled here. It comes across as arguments made by Candace Owens if she had a PhD.
Edit to add:
Thanks for the link to the article. It does humanize Sowell’s commentary. Very useful.
The Conservatives here seem to be full of themselves. I am watching a Conservative Party surrender its moral values for a conman/rapist, then lecturing the Black community. I don’t take Conservatives seriously and find little reason to expect to have rational debates with them.
Count me as one who loves another discussion with Amy Wax on Glenn's show. Although her last appearance set me back a good bit of money donating to her "Go Fund Me" page.
I agree totally with Glenn that the persecution of Amy Wax is outrageous. Wax is correct to insist on merit in the selection process by which we choose who to train and educate for the skills modern society needs. What I think she is less clear about is her view of the relationship of natural intelligence and culture, in particular the culture of work and family life. No amount of raw, natural intelligence will do much good for a child growing up without a safe stable economically secure home life, without books, without a rich verbal interaction with loving, caring, rule-setting independent adults, and especially without a responsible father available. Simply dismantling the self-defeating policies of affirmative action and DEI propaganda at the level of high school and college, while absolutely necessary to fully benefit from existing talent, will not address the prior catastrophe of the cultural dysfunctions of the poor and especially poor blacks.
If University of Pennsylvania will allow me - I wish to append the Professor Wax hearing document as follows:
Section III: Major sanctions.
A requirement to note in her public appearances that Wax does not wear white after Labor Day.
Section IV: Recommendations
a. Professional Development.
I recommended that Wax be required to memorize and recite the Koran in entirety in Arabic.
b. Future Participation at Penn.
I recommend that her classes be attended by fashion-police. I volunteer, pick me. I promise to enforce the highest standards of fashion etiquette for students and professor.
I believe the key to this debate is something Glenn mentioned as a “side note.” Schools interpret test scores differently depending on the applicant’s background.
Liberals believe the test score gap reflects environment (poverty, racism) and therefore, disadvantaged individuals with lower scores have unrealized potential. They don’t view affirmative action as admitting people who are less capable.
The race realists believe you can’t close the gap through higher education, either because IQ is genetic or because it’s too late to intervene. Lower passing rates on things like medical boards and the bar seem to support the race realist position, but liberals would say the same environmental factors affect those outcomes, and they aren’t the true measure of someone’s potential in the profession.
Amy Wax talks as if liberals think, “Black people aren’t as capable, but it’s important to have 12% in every field anyway.” Liberals believe the double standard corrects for environmental factors and gives you the result you would have without racism.
Personally, I believe the disparities are due to environment, not genetics, but interventions should target younger children. Both to close the achievement gap and to cultivate interest in different professions, so that there can be a more diverse pipeline. Then use the same standard for everyone in higher ed.
(1): Wax allegedly violated professional standards by allegedly presenting topics in reckless disregard of scholarly standards and presenting misleading and partial information. Previous sentence summarizes every DEI program nationwide. Citing 2024 Penn discipline of Wax as precedent; every DEI program in nation must either correct such violation as relating to DEI program or be abolished asap.
(2): Wax allegedly made discriminating and disrespectful statements to specific targeted groups. Previous sentence applies to every DEI program nationwide. Citing 2024 Penn Discipline of Wax as precedent; every DEI program in nation must cease race discrimination or be abolished asap. You can quote me.
Well Mr Loury would we expect anything less from you? No…So, Amy, thanks for all your work and strength of character to stay in the mix. You are necessary! Are there other category of quotients included in your work besides IQ…for example AQ (Athletic)?
The pointed question Glenn asks about separating the empirical assessment of people’s abilities from the value of having them succeed in certain ways is an important one.
Particularly in medicine, the claim that the race of a doctor matching the race of the patient produces higher quality care is one that I see commonly circulated (though as far as I know, the studies don’t correct for confounders and there is no actual evidence that supports this conclusion). However, on a broader level, I think it is entirely plausible that there are a variety of benefits, not all of them easily measured, to diversity, even in the reductive DEI sense. I wish there were more black doctors.
However, even acknowledging that there might be differences in ability, or having a paradigm in which different considerations regarding workforce diversity are weighed against each other, suggests that the value of diversity is not infinite, and that absolute proportional representation of every group of people in every facet of life might not be worth the tradeoffs, and even that very left-leaning position is completely at odds with what is permissible to say in a DEI regime.
With regards to medical careers and standardized testing, I think it’s important to point out some non-obvious facts.
The US Medical Licensing exam was designed to be used in precisely the way described here: as a threshold. If you pass the test, you’re eligible to get a medical license. If you don’t you aren’t (pending possible retakes). That’s it. The test is now used to evaluate candidates for residency and fellowship training in medical specialties. That is not what it is designed for. People train in specific specialties, and the test is in general medicine. It is not clear that acing a test in general medicine makes you suited to be the best eye surgeon, or the best psychiatrist. The test is also administered by a national entity, which can and does put ideologically loaded questions in there. I’m not at liberty to discuss any specific questions that I might have had, but again I would not say that this test is necessarily a great standard.
What would be better? In my opinion, tests for specific specialties (i.e. the standardized test to get into neurology should focus on things that a neurologist needs to know), and in some cases tests which measured things like hand-eye coordination for the surgical specialties might be appropriate as well as knowledge tests.
I read Wax’s review of Murray’s book, (via link). For me, it was preaching to the choir. I have a suggestion for both Wax and Murray. Replace “cognitive ability” with “cognitive function”. Ability no matter which preceding adjective is attached- sounds like innate.
I suspect that parental presence of both father and mother effect child’s cognitive development. Childhood presence of mother and father may activate corresponding analysis at the level of micro-decision, (small but frequent decisions that humans make daily). There is a big difference in decision-making between [a person who unconsciously involves both parents] and [ a person who unconsciously involves less than both parents]. Children of two-parent households see in their parents templates for adult male and adult female. Children may modify these templates significantly in adulthood. But, children of one-parent households only have a template for one adult sex.
Jon,
"sounds like innate"
That is exactly what they (and many others) believe.
Just a vibe. I find the tenor of dialogue going on here has changed. Fewer commentators and a less broadly discursive, exploratory tone.
Really interesting!
1) It's awful what Penn is doing to Wax. (Now, if she'd only sided with Hamas....)
2) I like Glenn's point about: Are we OK with the percentage being whatever it is, or do we want (for some social) reason to force a change?
a) this will require a double standard
b) (Glenn's concern) even blacks who met the higher bar will always be looked down on.
c) How much will society suffer because the standards are lowered? How dangerous is it to have dumber pilots, or engineers who aren't as good at designing airplanes that don't fall off? There is a real price in economic inefficiency to be paid.
Still, if we had some sense of the numbers we might well decide the price was worth it.
My real problem with the affirmative action group (who want to force a change to the percentage) is that if they really cared, they'd address root causes. Which might be some combination of:
a) Genetic. Making no claims. Just saying "Do we know enough to take this off the table?"
b) Economic. Rich vs poor matters.
c) Culture. Are smart blacks attacked for "acting white"?
d) Single parent families. This is obviously huge, and the fact that "no one" on the left will even talk about it makes me doubt their sincerity.
(I'd focus on single parent families. Fix this, and see how much problem remains...)
(As an aside, when it comes to sex-based differences, there's clearly preferences as well that would need to be considered -- even if male and female have identical innate intelligence, males have clear statistical preferences for some activities, females for other activities. Are genetic-based preferences that correlate with race possible?)
There are even more factors, specifically good nutrition, a stable home life, a vision of a future that motivates them to succeed (or short term, meeting high expectations of parents). Perhaps a part of culture, there are behavioral and social norms (including the acceptability of fights, the ability to de-escalate, respect for authority figures, respect for common and personal property, respect for other people’s time, treating peers with respect, etc) and cumulatively these take away from time in school learning and the ability to make the most of resources that are available. I spend a lot of time with 6th graders and the energy they spend on undermining themselves is heartbreaking.
As an aside, in my opinion sex-based differences are really mostly gender-based differences in that women and men are socialized very differently. With the exception of some specific hormone linked deficits (ex. testosterone and spatial reasoning) abilities are consistently similar between the sexes (females seem to have a natural advantage in communication) so these “preferences” are probably not genetic.
I'm certainly no expert here.... but I thought that there were studies done on non-human primates (chimps?) where they gave dolls and some stereotypical boy toy (I don't recall what they were) to infants and the females showed a preference for the dolls and the males showed a preference for the stereotypical boy toy. Again, it's not "ability", but "interest", and it seemed to show that even non-human primates show sex-related interests.
Hi Steve, I think you are right that there are behavioral differences in the average girl and the average boy starting early on. But even early on, those differences can be amplified by socialization. Even in new born babies, if you dress the baby as a girl the baby is responded to more quickly and with more compassion than if dressed in boy clothes (at least in one study I read about). In that case, it was balancing the difference that as early as 6 weeks testosterone production is believed to impact expressiveness of baby boys with the socialization idea that boys shouldn’t be rewarded for crying, as horrifying as that is. I don’t know about you, but if you are looking at 10 week old babies and having trouble sussing out what is biological and what is socialized at that point, by the time the kid reaches adulthood it’s going to be impossible.
I think people underestimate the impact of socialization. I was the kind of girl who did boy stuff, and there was always a lot of friction from that. I am sure for a person who didn’t violate gender norms, they would never have experienced that and thus feel there weren’t those strong pressures. Do you know what I mean?
Agreed. There's no single explanation. I guess I was pushing back on "it's all socialization" -- which of course you never claimed it was! We'd probably disagree some on the details, but I think we agree on the big picture.
You're taking this way too seriously. Of course there are high & low IQ's in every racial group as are athletic ability or a musical ear, which is why racial realism as discussed is a ridiculous argument as per my original comment.
Sorry, dyslexic. Even if there is some genetic component to IQ or is established Pre-K, it is still the nurturing of the potential. I was being facetious as the race realists and anti-racists put so much stock in color.
Is there a genetic component to your heart, blood type, and facial features?How would there not be a genetic component to your brain?
As for nurture, geniuses are found at every level of society, some had deprived childhoods with illiterate parents. Nevertheless they were geniuses.
If Blacks as a group are considered intellectually inferior then whites and Asians as a group are athletically and perhaps musically inferior. Why is it such a surprise that different groups developed different strengths over millenium and why is this so resisted when the results are so obvious?
I am a professor at a major business school and hate to admit that over forty years of teaching the number of A’s I have given to Blacks can be counted on the fingers of one hand, maybe two. That is a simple fact. Do what you may with that statistic.
Ok. If that's over 40 years, you're quite likely a bigot, just like Amy Wax.
I find this whole idea of "racial realism" ridiculous. On the full spectrum of color, from the darkest African blacks to the lightest Scandinavian whites, why AP Asians, Near East Asians & Jews on the left tail IQ wise and not the Norse? IT'S NURTURE. I mean if a Finn marries a Congolese would their children be only at the mean of the curve?
AP Asians include Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia. East Asians- Japanese and Chinese, and Ashkenazi Jews are known for being on the right tail, not the left tail. If it were nurture ,it would be easy enough to increase an individual's IQ by one standard deviation, but so far that hasn't been done. IQ can be decreased through brain injury but cannot be increased by nurture. An individual's IQ is set before kindergarten.
“Children’s intelligence fluctuates as they develop. It used to be held that IQ stabilises by around the age of 10. This was the rationale for introducing tests at 11-12 years of age in those education systems where ability is used to select which secondary school children attend. However, recent evidence suggests that both verbal and non-verbal intelligence may vary during the teenage years, by up to 20 IQ points, suggesting that such selective systems do not have a firm foundation.” Source: http://www.educationalneuroscience.org.uk/resources/neuromyth-or-neurofact/intelligence-is-fixed/
Where in this linked article did it say that a child's IQ could vary by up to 20 points? If that's true, what percentage of tested children had a 20 IQ point fluctuation and in which direction?
It was the fourth paragraph. I did not edit it. Just to say, IQ is not set by kindergarten.
I read the link and clicked on 1- read that but cannot find the actual study that showed children's IQs with 20 point fluctuations. Where is that study, what's the title? The 4th paragraph states a conclusion that I've never seen anywhere else. I'd like to see the research that led to such a conclusion.
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/psychology/dnl/personalpages/Ramsden_etal_2011.pdf. This is from the footnote, it seems to be a link to the research group that studied changes in IQ in teenage brains. It seems to be Nature… https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10514
This may not be the best place to do this. (Actually, it might be the ideal place.)
A question for all Black subscribers to Glenn Loury: Do YOU believe in "race realism" as understood by the Jared Taylor's and Amy Wax's of the world? Do you believe that you/we as a people or a category are inherently handicapped intellectually and thereby *incapable* of achieving what others have achieved or can achieve?
And if you DON'T, why not? What's stopping you from getting on the Wax/Taylor train? After all, there's all this data that "proves" we can't do but so much, right?
I suspect that NONE of us believe this. I know I don't. Not even a smidgen. Partly because of the endless barrage of insincere arguments that hail from White nationalist sympathizers like Amy Wax. But that's just me.
Evidently, even Thomas Sowell is sick of this s***:
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/spock-versus-the-social-justice-warriors/
At any rate, if you wanna speak your piece, please chime in.
Not black, but all the metadata I've seen indicate that when all other variables are held constant, there is no variation in IQ between large groups.
For example, poor, rural kids in SC's low country struggle equally regardless of race.
There's also been a sizable shift in female performance in math, when at one point the lower performance was considered genetic.
The white/black gap in IQ has also been closing as the income and education gaps between median whites and median blacks close.
I do think there is a huge culture issue, as far as a defiant attitude. As I mentioned on another post, black employees are far less compliant with standards around safety and respect for female engineers. They simply won't keep the volume down so alarms can be heard, and won't filter out songs involving sexual violence.
That's very much a "black problem", but I don't think it's genetic.
"all the metadata I've seen indicate that when all other variables are held constant, there is no variation in IQ between large groups."
Those who carry certain agendas don't want to dig but so deep. When they hear the data that pleases them, they act like there's no more research to do. They are so transparent.
"That's very much a "black problem", but I don't think it's genetic."
Neither do I. But there are those who insist otherwise, no matter what.
I’ve gone to only occasionally visiting the site because there is so much cherry-picked nonsense peddled here. It comes across as arguments made by Candace Owens if she had a PhD.
Edit to add:
Thanks for the link to the article. It does humanize Sowell’s commentary. Very useful.
I was wondering what happened to you, Redd =)
Believe me, I get it. 100%. But the more serious contributors would speak more if I had my druthers.
The Conservatives here seem to be full of themselves. I am watching a Conservative Party surrender its moral values for a conman/rapist, then lecturing the Black community. I don’t take Conservatives seriously and find little reason to expect to have rational debates with them.
Be careful., Trump can include you in his lawsuit against George Stephanopoulos.
LOL
Unfortunately, they have a lotta clout in this country.
Which of course speaks volumes about the country.
Count me as one who loves another discussion with Amy Wax on Glenn's show. Although her last appearance set me back a good bit of money donating to her "Go Fund Me" page.
I agree totally with Glenn that the persecution of Amy Wax is outrageous. Wax is correct to insist on merit in the selection process by which we choose who to train and educate for the skills modern society needs. What I think she is less clear about is her view of the relationship of natural intelligence and culture, in particular the culture of work and family life. No amount of raw, natural intelligence will do much good for a child growing up without a safe stable economically secure home life, without books, without a rich verbal interaction with loving, caring, rule-setting independent adults, and especially without a responsible father available. Simply dismantling the self-defeating policies of affirmative action and DEI propaganda at the level of high school and college, while absolutely necessary to fully benefit from existing talent, will not address the prior catastrophe of the cultural dysfunctions of the poor and especially poor blacks.
If University of Pennsylvania will allow me - I wish to append the Professor Wax hearing document as follows:
Section III: Major sanctions.
A requirement to note in her public appearances that Wax does not wear white after Labor Day.
Section IV: Recommendations
a. Professional Development.
I recommended that Wax be required to memorize and recite the Koran in entirety in Arabic.
b. Future Participation at Penn.
I recommend that her classes be attended by fashion-police. I volunteer, pick me. I promise to enforce the highest standards of fashion etiquette for students and professor.
I believe the key to this debate is something Glenn mentioned as a “side note.” Schools interpret test scores differently depending on the applicant’s background.
Liberals believe the test score gap reflects environment (poverty, racism) and therefore, disadvantaged individuals with lower scores have unrealized potential. They don’t view affirmative action as admitting people who are less capable.
The race realists believe you can’t close the gap through higher education, either because IQ is genetic or because it’s too late to intervene. Lower passing rates on things like medical boards and the bar seem to support the race realist position, but liberals would say the same environmental factors affect those outcomes, and they aren’t the true measure of someone’s potential in the profession.
Amy Wax talks as if liberals think, “Black people aren’t as capable, but it’s important to have 12% in every field anyway.” Liberals believe the double standard corrects for environmental factors and gives you the result you would have without racism.
Personally, I believe the disparities are due to environment, not genetics, but interventions should target younger children. Both to close the achievement gap and to cultivate interest in different professions, so that there can be a more diverse pipeline. Then use the same standard for everyone in higher ed.
I have wanted intervention at 1st to 3rd grade instead of waiting until students enter college 300 years later.
In response to Professor Wax Hearing document;
Section II: Summary.
(1): Wax allegedly violated professional standards by allegedly presenting topics in reckless disregard of scholarly standards and presenting misleading and partial information. Previous sentence summarizes every DEI program nationwide. Citing 2024 Penn discipline of Wax as precedent; every DEI program in nation must either correct such violation as relating to DEI program or be abolished asap.
(2): Wax allegedly made discriminating and disrespectful statements to specific targeted groups. Previous sentence applies to every DEI program nationwide. Citing 2024 Penn Discipline of Wax as precedent; every DEI program in nation must cease race discrimination or be abolished asap. You can quote me.
Well Mr Loury would we expect anything less from you? No…So, Amy, thanks for all your work and strength of character to stay in the mix. You are necessary! Are there other category of quotients included in your work besides IQ…for example AQ (Athletic)?