Children shouldn't play with matches, and unintelligent people should not try to talk about things they do not understand. [;)]

Hunter88 cited a primitive 1939 study that was a "classic" (according to him) but rarely cited because it "proves" that blacks are intellectually inferior. I looked up the study, and it is not much of a "classic" in that it does not apprear to be cited much - if at all (my link to the social sciences citation index) is down right now - but I found tha study abstract on the PsychINFO database which goes back to the 1800s.  

The problem is that while the author does show that the scores of "negroes" on IQ tests in 3rd & 4th grade falls below that of "white" kids, the study does not control for a number of causally antecedent factors.  Without such controls, the findings are completely confounded, and do not mean anything.  The study thus seriously lacks statistical conclusion validity (or internal validity), and because it is a tiny study of a very specific and ideosynchratic group, it also lacks external validity, or generalizability.  In English - no real conclusions whatsoever can be drawn from the study, because it was a piss-poorly designed and imlemented study.


Two things are particularly interesting - on the Pitner-Patterson Performance Test (another IQ test), the median score for "negroes" was 94 and for "whites" was 108.  The median score for "chinese" was 94.  Thus, according to this flawed study, Chinese people are really stupid and could never be as smart as "white" people.  I wonder how that would fit with the reality that PhD programms across the U.S. are swamped and dominated by chinese students, because they score much higher on entrance exams and standardized tests (thins that correlate very highly with IQ).  Just another hilarious example of how pathetically bad this study was, and an illustration of how these "findings" are meaningless, when a study is not conducted properly.

The other really interesting thing, that anyone who actually bothered to investigate this author (Tanser), would have found, is that he published a paper in 1941, which was a study of mixed-blood "negroes", in which he was investigating whether the amount of "white blood" (i.e. genetics) could be linked to intelligence.  Using a variety of IQ tests, he could not find any correlation or connection to suggest any relationship, thus rejecting the notion that black/white genetics has anything to do with performance on intelligence tests.

I just thought I would clarify this, since I strongly believe in Socrates' quote - "the only good is knowledge, and the only evil is ignorance"

There are three kinds of liars:
Liars
Damn Liars
and Statistics

[;)]

I'm sure I could run a study that proved I was the smartest person around.  Hunter88 was just finding whatever junk science he could to justify his beliefs.

What, Hunter88 has no response?


How strange.