INCONVENIENT TRUTH

Read an interesting article a few days ago, which showed much the same analysis except that the European, white male, IQ distribution has fatter tails that extend a bit further out either way on the x-axis. This means more higher IQ at the extreme standard deviation (also the opposite at the other end). Maybe this explains the greater creativity and achievement in science and engineering over the years for European white males vs. East Asians, but I’m no expert in this – just passing it on.

So Stanford-Binet intelligence quotient testing is normalized for the “European” ethnicity. This is big news?

We need to bring in more East Asians.

Administrator errs: “Are you saying the IQ test favors Europeans?

“If so, why would the East Asians score much higher than the Europeans?”

No. I said that the Stanford-Binet assessment is NORMALIZED for the “European” population that has long comprised the majority population in these United States. I’m a physician, not a statistician, so my ability to explain the process of statistical norms isn’t what I consider optimal.

Suffice it to say that to make comparisons along any range of mensuration, one must assign standards according to distributions. What constitutes “average” in terms of height, weight, cranial circumference and body surface area for in infant or toddler at a particular age? What’s “above average”? What’s “below average”? What are the percentiles in these ranges where this particular pediatric patient’s measurements fall? How might they correlate with nutritional and/or developmental disorders?

If Stanford-Binet testing is normalized for Americans of “European” genetic and cultural character (and it is), then Americans of “East Asian” origins will tend (ceteris paribus) to show test results in a higher range because the testing method is NOT normed for them, just as it’s not normed for the darkies, the spics, or the wogs.

It might be argued that using Stanford-Binet testing as a comparator across ethnic lines is unreliable. WITHIN these sub-populations, however (comparing, say, Thomas Sowell’s performance on such testing against that of Al Sharpton), the Stanford-Binet method could reasonably be expected to discern the ranges and distributions of intellectual functionality with acceptable statistical validity. Ya think?

IQ doesn’t mean anything, except to people who want to make it a supporting point for some OTHER agenda.

Intelligent human life is an oxymoron, regardless of whatever racism you subscribe to.

#Tucci78: Many Northern Africans have about 85 IQ, The Sub-Saharan around 75 (which is really marginal). The Bell Curve – Charles Murray.

The IQ tests I took as a kid, had nothing to do with facts or computation. More visual (flipping shapes / similar or opposite items / etc. I see nothing biased against any race (because of their culture).

I’m sure many of us on this blog have 120 – 140 IQ’s. It’s not racism, but the facts are a large percentage of African Americans have lower IQ’s. This is why entitlements / Great Society / giveaways / making excuses / set asides / quotas / do not work to improve their situation.

regardless the Stanford-Binet, or normalizing for one group vs another…

there are too many other factors at play. Let us look at common sense

matters rather than rehashing the efficacy of that test.

Cutting to the chase rather than wordy crip-crap: Healthy happy secure

parents will cherish their newborn and the baby will benefit. These parents

will want the best for the baby, and music will play and stories will be told.

Voices won’t be raised, clean and actual food will be served. Toys will be

provided and the baby will be encouraged. The TV won’t babysit. (older son

would turn it off) Most of the parents will teach through example, monitoring

their actions. Will that yield a genus? No. It will be a good start; temperament

and genetics will fill in the blanks. Nature and nurture abide.

Tucci78: Some folks are curious about you.

Damn, Tooch, you just made what I was fixin to say sound stupid to me.

😉

Persnickety writes: “…early on I thought you were a paid troll. I no longer believe that. However, I do really wonder where you came from. Literally. I have had friends and colleagues from all over the English-speaking world, at various levels of education from average to Rhodes Scholar, with upbringings in all parts of the US and Canada, much of the UK, Ireland, South Africa, small islands, etc., and not one of them writes in the same fashion you do (or speaks in that manner, although writing is often quite different from speech). That includes the ones whose vocabulary encompasses essentially all English words (think Oxford Unabridged Dictionary) as well as several other languages, and those who have studied at various mixes of Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, and Harvard.

“So, I have to ask, where are you from? Are you a native speaker of some other language and English is second? (Serious question, not meant as an insult.)”

=========
Jeez, wouldn’t it be nice to get paid for these light extemporanea? I dunno why my writing style (emphasis on vocabulary) seems to be received as somehow extraordinary. It really is the way I talk (baffling my grandchildren while infuriating my wife) and think and write when I don’t have to express myself within the constraints of academic, regulatory, and professional usages.

The American language (pace Mencken) is my milk-tongue. I’m third-generation Sicilian-American raised on the Atlantic seaboard blessedly beyond the non-rhotic accents of Noo Yawk and Bahston, educated in Roman Catholic parochial schools with an undergraduate degree in Biology from a Jesuit college (meaning that I had to effectively minor in Theology and Philosophy and suffer all the slings and arrows of a liberal arts curriculum, and did THAT ever leave scars…), followed by medical school, the usual run of clinical postgraduate training, and some decades of primary care practice and work in the pharmaceuticals industry.

But who I am (and how I arrange ASCII characters on computer screens) isn’t really the proper subject of examination. Irrelevant, in fact. Does WHAT I write make sense? Does it discomfort and discombobulate the scheming sons of bitches bent on rapine and pillage, and if it doesn’t, how might I bring further writing into higher clarity and more lucid “reasonable-ness” while better attaining the other effects upon which I’m intent?

The Oxford Unabridged is nice, but too friggin’ limiting.

According to that chart, white people need to get their free shit from the east Asians, right? Since they’re already mostly commies, they should be fine with that.

@Tucci: Thanks for the explanation. It makes a little more sense now. Some of your writing is easy to understand, some is not. For example, your post at 5:08pm required two readings for it to make any sense, and I’m probably still missing something after three readings. That’s from someone well read, with an advanced degree and some background in statistics and both hard science and social science research methods.

Sometimes you use some unusual sentence structures, and some very long thought processes that are logical if mapped out, but not easy to follow in quick reading. I suspect that this may be a result of the combination of your basic and college education background, which presumably included a lot of Latin, your medical background, which adds more Latin and certain ways of standard writing, and perhaps not interacting much with people outside your intellectual level and specialty, which may cause you to forget what types of expression are common in modern English and what expressions, while still technically correct, are no longer common.

I don’t work in medicine but I do work in another profession with its own jargon and some very dense reference materials. My clients often specifically tell me that they appreciate my ability to translate jargone-ese into something that anyone with an average college education can understand. If you’re writing to be understood by a wide audience, you need to write in a way that they can all understand. I have four suggestions for you to consider:

1) Write for your audience. I’m not saying to write for a 3rd grader, but write so that a typical college-educated person (real college, not ITT) is likely to understand your word choices.

2) Follow typical modern sentence structures. I haven’t seen you write anything that is actually wrong in structure, but some of your statements seem to be arranged in ways not typically used in modern English.

3) Avoid Latin. Very few people have significant knowledge of Latin any more, even those who are considered well educated. I know people who have Ph.D.s in the liberal arts and are fluent in five western languages with none of them Latin. How many people here actually knew what “ceteris parabus” meant without looking it up?

4) Consider the subject matter. We’re not medical students. I’ll bet you don’t know the relative benefits of 4140 vs. A36 vs. 5160 vs. 8620 steel, nor would I expect many here to know. It’s specialized knowledge irrelevant to most people. So are a few of the statements in your posts.

This is all meant as friendly advice. I take back my initial skepticism of your background.

Tucci78, you got to be tough living with … tough being within earshot of … tough being in the same county with …

Persnickety remarks that my “…post at 5:08pm required two readings for it to make any sense, and I’m probably still missing something after three readings. That’s from someone well read, with an advanced degree and some background in statistics and both hard science and social science research methods.”

Well, if I’d had any formal instruction in statistics (which would’ve made sense as an undergraduate, but the Jesuits required the calculus of infinitesimals, which is boar’s-teats fucking useless both in Biology and in medicine) rather than a catch-as-catch-can absorption of the concepts and the terminology, I would’ve been more parsimonious and explicit in that post. Let it also be borne in mind also that I’m a primary care grunt, and neither a pshrink nor an expert in any of the other squishy pseudosciences. Nor do I regard the practitioners in those fields all that warmly. Shall we discuss the Keynesian economeretricians?

When I speak of clinical matters with those who bring their problems to me for diagnosis and treatment, I take the time and the trouble to make the necessarily complex about as pikestaff-plain as possible, and I get the job done to extents that satisfy patients and their families. That’s a professional obligation. Ditto with progress notes and consultations and such written to be read by colleagues with whom I’m cooperating in managing a case. When I’ve got to edit or write for academic publication, the style changes. When I prepare reports for consideration in disability cases or other forensic proceedings, the style and content changes yet again (fucking administrative law judges are STUPID as well as lazy, irresponsible, arrogant and worthless). But in this venue (as in other “comments” threads online), I ain’t gettin’ paid for what I write, I ain’t fattening my curriculum vitae thereby, and there’s no duty to patient or family involved, so I write to please MYSELF.

Not to mention the fact that this “modern English” shit is dumbed-down and BORING.

If writing to my own purposes involves amusing or informing or helping out somebody else, that’s pure bonus. To quote one of my favorite essayists:

“My writings, such as they are, have had only one purpose: to attain for H. L. Mencken that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk. Further than that, I have had no interest in the matter whatsoever. It has never given me any satisfaction to encounter one who said my notions had pleased him. My preference has always been for people with notions of their own. I have believed all my life in free thought and free speech — up to and including the utmost limits of the endurable.”

With regard to fund of knowledge in Latin, I was as much an unwilling but capable Roman Catholic parochial schoolboy as our Illegitimacy-in-Chief had been “a good Muslim schoolboy” during his time in Indonesia, and as that son of a bitch learned how to read and speak Arabic, I absorbed church Latin in the pre-Vatican-II years. A good deal of it was incidental to duties as an altar boy memorizing the various elements of the liturgy. It’s simply that I discovered how knowing some of the Latin roots made it easier for me to understand a bunchatonna words in the English language, not to mention how it eased the process of getting a formal handle on the Sicilian dialect spoken at home and the “mainstream” Italian (actually the Tuscan dialect) taught in parochial school as a foreign language. Not to mention gaining enough familiarity with Spanish to interrogate and explain things to my Boricua and Mexican patients.

Ever read one of Heinlein’s “boy’s books” titled *Have Space Suit – Will Travel* (1958)? The early chapters had a profound impact on my adolescent attitude toward education in general and Latin in particular (though neither that novel nor the rest of Heinlein’s writings ever developed in me an appetite for pure mathematics).

Now we get to “the subject matter.” Look, as you’re reading this, your gadget-of-access is hooked up to the Internet, a firehose of information you can tap ad libitum. You don’t know the meaning of a word used? Well, not only can you ask (I’ve been a teacher, one way or another, all my adult life; I don’t denigrate questioners) but you can look it up.

I love the Internet as a research tool. Not to mention all that free porn….

HalfWit bloviates: “Tucci78, you got to be tough living with … tough being within earshot of … tough being in the same county with …”

You’re free to leave, I presume.

Or do you have to clear foreign travel with your parole officer?

Don’t mess with Tucci

https://youtu.be/FiHWDpnaVBA?t=39

PC has got some left over nuts. And they say evolution ain’t real.

I am assuming somebody must be trolling somebody in these comments… stop confusing the AI algorithms that have to scour these websites and generate thought-shaping rebuttals. Every time there’s an exception case where the program is perplexed by above 6th grade reading level, you know, a human analyst has to stop watching youtubes and manually read shit to keep production on track.

I am just a stupid college dropout well through middle age years who feels the powers of his brain slowly atrophy as in Flowers for Algernon. Yet I have read T78’s remarks here over and over looking for something I have must have missed on prior parsing… nope, it all makes sense to me up there every time.

It puts me in mind of the times in my work life when my “superiors” have presumed to correct my grammar or usage or spelling which was not wrong in the first place. Or perhaps they totally missed an allusion I make to a common item of middlebrow culture and Western Civ that a stevedore of the 1950s (Mr. Hoffler please call your office) would understand. Or perhaps they are baffled why I am reading unabridged Gibbon on my lunch hour instead of 50 shades of porn… Ultimately they only succeed in validating my decision to get the heck out of that stultifying, insufferably pretentious mental kindergarten known as the “university”, back in the day. And they didn’t reflect well on their own famous alma mater (their alma pater being undiscernable without DNA testing) however good a veterinary school it may be.

Shooting for Hemingway – out of all the endless pages of that tripe I was compelled to read in public school – only thing I remember is the Old Man leaning over the side of his boat to pee into the Sea.

My own feeling on these website comments – since they are being archived in Utah for ever I might as well put a bit of forethought into what I am typing here for the ages.

Of far more interest to me Tucci is — whence the “78” ? Are you that aged, or are you just into old shellac records?

OV, he was born in ’78

Oh yeah I tend to block out those Jimmy Carter years… 🙂 Yeah, 1978, been there, done that 🙂 — come to think of it there were folks getting born then too. Thanks Coyote.

I have been skulking around this website for a couple years. There are some things I find appalling but most is thought provoking. Some is even bias-confirming for me. And that’s just the published posts.

The comments here are like a stroll through a street bazaar where one mixes with all types. You can buy pearls conveniently cast before swine already, a great Dutch Masters painting, or just a pack of chewing gum. You rub elbows here with great ones like the farmer dude and others who may be salt of the earth but kind of make you fear for civilization’s survival another week. I personally like the whole gamut of viewpoints, life experiences, and dare I say people with paintball splatters on either end of that Y axis in the original post. I try never to be an intellectual snob for face value. But I also caution others against condescending above their own pay scale.

Olde Virginian reminisces about Hemingway as required reading (one lousy course in Marine Biology and I couldn’t get that pissing-over-the-gunwales scene out my mind every time I lowered a Niskin bottle into the water) and Hoffer as the guy our “squishy sciences” professors NEVER wanted us reading.

Take comfort from the fact that neither Mencken (in his time arguably the single most influential man in American letters) nor the late Ray Bradbury were college matriculants at all. The latter, in fact, remarked: “I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.”

The “78” is nothing special. I wanted to use the “Tucci” ekename (a derivative line in my extended family) in an online forum more than twenty years ago and began putting a pair of numbers after the name each time I attempted regisration. “12” was rejected. Likewise “34” and “56,” but “78” worked.