Don't you hate insurance companies. I worked for one - life insurance - for about 5 years in EDP but still saw the BS that they fed customers.

The irony is that my mom worked in health insurance before her retirement. She had some Dilbertesque stories to tell about how that circus was run.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Ah, the "Mismeasure of Man". There is a broader argument here, involving more things than subject here of racial differences in one area. And that is differences amongst everyone compared to statistical measures.

The argument is that of late, we take measurements of various human characteristics and determine what is "normal", and what is abnormal. And so, armed with knowledge of what is normal, we tend to force people into certain categories. For example, take height. Armed with statistical data, you might say this child is not growing normally and will be abnormally short. And that is taken to be a bad thing, and might be treated with growth hormones or whatever they can do now.

Before the advent of modern scientific statistics, that wouldn't have happened. Yes, you would notice that some people are short and some are tall, but this "normal" vs "abnormal" thing wasn't as authoritative as it is now.

Of course, it can do great good as well, when something abnormal that wouldn't be noticed before indicates a real problem or disease that can be solved. But I'm sympathetic to the argument that it goes too far, and all this comparing how many sigmas one is from the mean can do much mischief.

-Richard

-Richard

Me too. There's too many stigmas for our sigmas.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

I've skipped over 5 pages, so excuse me if this has been noted, but Prof.Watson has 'apologised unreservedly' for his remarks.
See: http://education.guardian.co.uk/high...193992,00.html

See an interview with him, also to mark the publication of his new book, that appeared only two days earlier, in which the interviewer, John Crace, staff journalist on the Guardian, says, "Throughout his life, Watson has made few concessions to anyone or anything and, even though he is a committed liberal, political correctness has never featured anywhere on his list of priorities."
See: http://education.guardian.co.uk/acad...191666,00.html

John

"That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief."

But also:

"I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said," the statement said.

Here's a recent (2005) paper on this. I know little about ethnic categories, but there are several subgroups of Jews. The ones that score the highest are called "Ashkenazi". This is the one that stands out. Other Jewish subgroups score a little less than the mean 100. So what's going on there, and that was the subject of this paper:

http://homepage.mac.com/harpend/.Pub...jbiosocsci.pdf

The argument is apparently that the Ashkenazi culture actually selected for intelligence due to various pressures on the group. They were persecuted and the playing field was strongly tilted against them. Their response, it is argued, was to overcome the bias by getting smarter.

-Richard

You guys are not looking at the bigger implications of this.

Don't you know that, according to the rules of PCness, if somebody says something stupid early OR later in life, it completely decredits everything they've every done? Look at Von Braun. He was a Nazi, ergo, we never went to the moon. Soooo since Dr. Watson is a racist that must mean that DNA doesn't have a double helix shape! And all the other biologists have been fooled into thinking so! "I've" never seen DNA form into a doulbe helix. I've only seen "pictures". And those can not only be doctored, but created out of nothing... Oh I can't keep this up with a straight face.


(Well, its my first post since the 25 of last month. I'm practicing being a looney. Still doesn't come off right. Too stilted yet. Looks like I'm faking it. I just can't muster up the "spittle flying" effect. Aww, not enough capital letters and exclamation points!)

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Gimme a minute to read through Jay's latest observations...

Welcome back from your hiatus.

And I agree. This does, indeed, discredit the double helix design.

Now we need to figure out why this conspiracy exists.

Another thought is the possible confusion of intelligence with technology. We have better guns, faster computers and so forth, therefore our culture must be better.

I would posit that BCE Greece (know most about my own general culture) had people at the top as good or better than anything since. Since the top culture as a whole saw no great intrinisic value in mechanism the intellectual effort went in other directions.

Humans have been capable of a high technological society for a long time, many thousands of years at the least. I suspect the contingent facts of history chose a particular group in time and place to start the exponential growth of technical knowledge.

My present culture has placed a high value on applied knowledge, almost a parody of the Connecticut Yankee. A culture that places more emphasis on more abstract or artistic pursuits will look very different, for example.

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The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

I didn't have to! (Actually, I haven't seen it yet, and won't for probably months. There's an awful lot of movies starting with the letter "C," it turns out.)

Not 100%, but most of its mobility is indeed downward from one kind of brain injury or another. (It doesn't take someone or something taking a whack at your head; you can consume substances all on your own that kill brain cells, and many people do.) I've also read--and do remember I'm hardly an expert in this field--that those self-same brain exercises may help hold off various kinds of senility and dementia, but I don't know how well they work at that, either.

Sorry about your mom, noclevername. The system's a real pain sometimes, isn't it?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Yes. A grindingly slow, thoroughly impersonal pain.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

So we will eat our vegtables without complaining. Isn't that the source of all conspiacies?

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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song

It would by some no matter how solid the evidence was, but actually the idea of black athletic superiority over whites is already pretty widely accepted by some people, treated as fact. (Often it's for jokes, but those jokes wouldn't work without the presumption that it's a fact already in place in the background, just like jokes about people & things falling wouldn't work if people weren't familiar with gravity.) I take the lack of popular resistance to this idea as an indicator that racial differences which make white people inferior are socially acceptable. It's just the ones that go the other way around that aren't.

But it's not the past we're talking about. They're overrepresented in sports TODAY. Do you mean that it's the only way they can be successful today?

Treating the idea as clearly false without really examining it is just the same as doing so on the issue of intellect. Whether it is true or not can be indicated by additional information. For example, is it also that way in other countries or when people from different countries compete with each other? Can you detect a difference when eliminating cultural factors by testing the very young? (This one's been done, and found that black children do indeed develop certain measures of physical coordination sooner/faster than white children.) If it's an economic issue, then the racial difference should disappear or at least shrink when you're comparing whites & blacks who grew up economically equivalent; so does it? If it's a matter of the seemingly inferior group just not being interested or motivated, then there should be other signs of that attitude, to be found in either surveys or other data about people's recorded behaviors; so are there? If it's bias and denial of opportunity, then there will be other data showing signs of people in power blocking one group out; so does the system fit that description or not?

And so on it goes. You don't just say it must be a certain way because you want it to be (or because you don't want it to be); you check the facts. Maybe the answer's yes, and maybe it's no, but if you don't actually do anything to find out the facts, then you're not talking about reality; you're talking about a fantasy.

He didn't say they should assume it. He said they tend to find it out from experience. (And then he apparently said later that he didn't mean it, as if he was possessed when he said it.)

Irrelevent. The past hasn't magically dissappeared.
I covered the difference between perception and the actual reality.

Yet you were just doing that about the atheletes...

Yet you are doing some assuming here yourself.

What studies show that blacks are better at athletics than whites?

If they came straight out of Africa, from harsher wilderness and necessity to be more physical (African long distance runners are some of the best in the world)
Then it is simple natural selection. The fittest have been the ones desirable for genetic reproduction.

However in the United States, can you specifically prove that blacks are better at sports, yet dumber at academics?

The very nature of the issue is when people try to reasonably seperate what is not really so different.

Human kind is human kind.
There is great variance in all the races.

To try to claim some are more and some are less seems to be very unscientific to me. It defies logic.


He is still wrong.

There are a great many employers that would most likely admit that they have not noticed a difference in racial intellects.

Nobel Winner Sorry for Race Remarks
http://news.aol.com/story/nc/_a/nobe...00010000000001