Race Differences in Behavior

Science and Politics in Academe: Good Research is Not Enough

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At first glance, few people are as disagreeable as individuals with a touch of Asperger’s. Basically, they are high-IQ guys who tend to intuitively grasp things like logic, mathematics, and mechanics, yet are remarkably inept at socializing with other people. Because of their inborn characteristics, people on the Asperger’s end of the spectrum are often “nerds” who spend far more time facing a computer or slaving away in a lab than with other people. We have all seen The Social Network (2010) and its portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg’s alleged personality: a strange mix of raw genius, social clumsiness and lack of scruples, the latter allowing Zuckerberg to rip off the Winklevosses and betray his best friend Eduardo Saverin according to the wish of the gleeful manipulator Sean Parker. (Notice that the shared Jewishness of Zuckerberg and Saverin didn’t prevent the former from betraying the latter. That community has its breakdowns in ethnic networking too.)

Dark Enlightenment figure Nick Land claims that the biodiversity people — those scorned as “racists” by the mainstream media and parasitic class — are endowed with low agreeableness. They tend to have “low verbal inhibition, low empathy, and low social integration, resulting in chronic maladaptation to group expectations. …  Mild autism is typical, sufficient to approach their fellow beings in a spirit of detached, natural-scientific curiosity, but not so advanced as to compel total cosmic disengagement.”

There is a grain of truth here. Trying to understand one’s fellows from the objective, disinterested point of view of science is not a behavior everyone will be attracted to or able to attain. Calm reflection about abstract principles is different from both blind habit and the passionate defense of some dogma — or one’s people. The pure scientist, after all, can never “take his own side.” He must forever be purely objective.

Honest — sometimes excessively; balanced in his epistemology to the point of favoring the groundbreaking — or plain truth in general — to popular dogmas; naively believing that his grand abstractions are an excellent recipe for society, like the Enlightenment thinker Condorcet who believed in an unlimited and exponential progress in future history. Read more

A bit of IQ realism in the LA Times

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Christopher Chabris, a psychologist at Union College, and Jonathan Wei, a researcher at the Duke University Talent Identification Program and at Case Western Reserve University, wrote an op-ed refuting a central dogma of cultural Marxism, that standardized tests have no validity (“Hire like Google? For most companies, that’s a bad idea“). What the professors write is not as surprising as where it appears. In general, while academic research continues to show the value of IQ testing, the mainstream media has been hostile to IQ testing because of the touchy subject of race differences.

Their article was a response to highly publicized comments by Laszlo Bock, the head of human resources at Google, who told the NY Times that “GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless…. We found that they don’t predict anything” (much to the delight of Tom Friedman, among others). Chabris and Wei:

Decades of quantitative research in the field of personnel psychology have shown that across fields of employment, measurements of “general cognitive ability” — which is another way of referring to the old-fashioned concept of intelligence or IQ — are consistently the best tools employers have to predict which new employees will wind up with the highest performance evaluations or the best career paths. We shouldn’t rush to assume that Google, with its private data, has suddenly refuted all that work. …

Chabris and Wei attribute Google’s experience to “restriction of range”— that is, once you select from a pool of high-IQ people, other traits within that pool become important contributors to individual differences. Bock’s emphasis on other qualities, such as intellectual humility (not being obsessed with having a high IQ score) and being an emergent leader (someone who can lead when appropriate but also follow when appropriate) certainly makes sense. But among potential Google employees, these other traits occur within a pool of people already selected for high IQ — even for those employees without a college education. One need not be a college graduate to win Google’s CodeJam competition, but you can’t possibly win without a high IQ. In the words of one winner, the problems were “more like mathematical work or solving logic puzzles.” Read more

A Tale of Two Trials: What the George Zimmerman and O.J. Simpson Verdicts Reveal About Racial Denial

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One transparent outcome of the “not guilty” verdict in the George Zimmerman trial is the racial disconnect between the average American and the nation’s powerful elites (the mass media, politicians, and “civil rights” leaders). The ever-widening gulf between racial reality and racial fantasy—the daily repetition of Black violence in contrast with the media-driven narrative of nonstop injustices of an oppressed minority—seems more pronounced in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict.

We live in an era of extreme racial denial. The nation’s media and political elites—what Joseph Sobran termed the “hive”—live in a fantasy realm that dismisses latent racial differences, an existence defined by unrealistic egalitarianism and hyper-liberalism; racial disparities are merely symptomatic of the lingering impact of slavery, racism, and discrimination. The emphasis is always on some inanimate object—“mean” streets, “gun” violence, “epidemic of violence,” “crack” cocaine, “heat waves,” “underfunding” of Head Start, the lack of upward “middle class mobility”; or the fault of law enforcement—“police brutality,” “deficient” law enforcement strategies, “racial profiling,” or “Stand Your Ground” laws.

The crux of the Zimmerman case is fundamentally about holding Blacks accountable for their own actions. The jury of six females—five Whites and one Hispanic—reached a reasonable conclusion that the defendant acted in self-defense in the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The evidence presented at trial countered the prosecution’s claims that Zimmerman was the aggressor, stalked Martin, initiated the altercation, and as a “wannabe” cop shot Martin—an innocent “unarmed” 17-year-old bystander. Most of the media coverage in the wake of the verdict reinforces the unfounded assumption that Trayvon Martin was innocently preyed upon—nothing more than a victim of “profiling,” who was just an “unarmed” teenager, a kid, trying to get home. This is the fantasy that our elites are hyping and one the jury simply rejected outright.

The Zimmerman jury, after a careful assessment of the evidence, concluded that Martin was the aggressor. After an initial encounter, Martin forced Zimmerman to the ground after sucker-punching him, pounded Zimmerman’s head against the concrete sidewalk, and after 45-seconds of screaming and fearing for his life, Zimmerman shot Martin to save his own life.

The verdict has produced a predictable tsunami of racial demagoguery from beltway pundits. Chris Matthews, Al Sharpton, Tavis Smiley, and Jesse Jackson have exploited the jury decision to project their own warped views about the endless suffering of Blacks from White oppression. Read more

Remembering a Scientific Pioneer—Arthur R. Jensen (1923–2012)

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Jen-sen-ism (jen’se niz’em), n. the theory that an individual’s IQ is largely due to heredity, including racial heritage. [1965-1970]; after Arthur R. Jensen (born 1923), U.S. educational psychologist, who proposed such a theory; see -ism]—Jen’sen-ist, Jen’sen-ite’, n., adj.

— The Random House and Webster’s Unabridged Dictionaries

Arthur Jensen’s death on October 22 is a pathetic reminder of the strangehold of political correctness on our society. To the extent that it has been mentioned at all, Professor Jensen’s death has been contextualized in such a manner that leaves little doubt among readers that Jensen was wrong about his ideas on race differences in IQ. Thus the New York Times obituary mentions Stephen Jay Gould’s critique of IQ testing, despite Gould’s well-established track record as a leftist activist who likely engaged in fraud to support his views (see also here). The obituary also gives far less prominence to Jensen than to one Sonja C. Grover, an educational psychologist at Lakehead University in Ontario who feels that “you cannot separate social science from human rights.”

However it also quotes Prof. James Flynn whose work has indicated rising intelligence over recent decades and has taken the rather cautious view that “The best we can say is that it is more probable that the I.Q. gap between black and white is entirely environmental in origin.”

“Jensen was a true scientist, and he was without racial bias,” Professor Flynn added. “It never occurred to Arthur Jensen that people would use his data to argue for racial supremacy. Now, to be fair to his critics, over time he became more and more convinced that the evidence did show a genetic component.”

I suppose we should be grateful for the statement that Jensen was a true scientist, but how in the world are his critics supported by the simple fact that Jensen continued to believe that racial differences were genetically influenced when his own views are hardly a ringing endorsement of environmentalism? Read more

Race realism: Breaking into the mainstream

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A friend  and I were talking about Arthur Jensen–the psychologist who reignited the race and IQ debate with his 1969 paper “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” published in the Harvard Educational Review. My friend said that starting with that paper there had been a huge amount of supportive research published in reputable academic journals like Intelligence and Personality and Individual Differences. There have also been major works like The Bell Curve that provoked a national discussion in newspapers and intellectual media. And there have been major works by J. Philippe Rushton and Richard Lynn published by academic presses.

The thrust of my friend’s comments was that it was just a matter of time before it becomes standard wisdom, informing all respectable discussions of the issue, even among politicians and the mainstream media. Read more

How Jewish is The Social Network?

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The Jewish Social Network

The Jewish Social Network

A recent article in The Jewish Chronicle asks, How Jewish is Facebook?

Very.

The basic idea of Facebook, creating a simple and exclusive alternative to MySpace, isn’t Jewish. But the project was hijacked when the gullible Winklevoss twins entrusted Mark Zuckerberg and his accomplice, Eduardo Saverin, to help execute the project. (See also Kevin MacDonald’s review.) The movie adaptation of this true story is a fevered Jewish revenge fantasy against their hapless arch-enemies, the reviled WASP “insiders.” Both the book, by Ben Mezrich,  and the screenplay, by Aaron Sorkin,  wallow in defeating the earnest brothers, heaping these two iconic American Christians with humiliation after humiliation.

The schadenfreud reaches hysterical proportions in this scene where they narrowly lose a rowing competition…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdDeui011iA

And what did these honest and trusting twins do to deserve this antipathy? Better yet, what did White America do to deserve this antipathy? How, when the President of Harvard himself is a powerful Jewish oligarch who laughed the twins out of his office, can Mezrich see himself, his people, or Zuckerberg as the sympathetic underdogs in this context? It’s simple: he’s Jewish and sympathizes with his own. To ask why he hates them is to make the same mistake the Winklevii made: grasping for a universal honor code in a tribal universe.

Mezrich explains why he hates them… Read more

Too Hot to Miss: Above the Law Debates Race and Intelligence

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Legal blog Above the Law posted a Harvard law student’s e-mail suggesting that race and intelligence might be linked — and it set off a highly unusual debate between the original poster, Elie Mystal (who is partly black) and the blog’s founder, David Lat (who is partly Asian).  The comments are a must-read.

In a rare move, Lat, a former federal prosecutor, posts in the comments and backs the Harvard Law student:

Let me play devil’s advocate for a second….

If we accept “race” as a biological concept — which I realize is questionable, becoming diluted through intermarriage, etc. — is it really so insane to suggest that some races might, ON AVERAGE, possess certain qualities to a greater or lesser degree than other races?

For example, would it be racist to say that, ON AVERAGE, African-Americans are taller than Asian-Americans? Or that Caucasians are more likely to have blond hair than Asian-Americans?

Mystal provides a lengthy response, summing that it’s “insane” to believe such a thing.  But of course.

A great point from Lat — made by race realists for years — is that it’s impossible to deny that race exists while maintaining affirmative action policies at the same time.

I for one am encouraged that 1) a Harvard law student is at least aware of — and doesn’t reject out of hand — a race/intelligence link, and 2) that an Internet pundit like Lat would put in a cautious defense and 3) that the entire business is now spilled over onto the Internet for robust consideration.  Is the Internet helping to dismantle one of the biggest myths of the 20th Century?

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist. Email him

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