A University of California advisory board suspended the much-celebrated planned review of the system’s admissions policies to bring back standardized testing requirements for undergraduate applicants. The decision of the academic senate’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools is not surprising to many of us who have been critical of the system in abandoning objective standards for admissions.
Ahmet Palazoglu, chair of the system’s academic senate, confirmed that the faculty group was ”revising its timeline” for ”a comprehensive review of standardized testing in admissions.”
As various schools reversed the disastrous abandonment of standardized testing, the California system continues to slow-walk the process. Many of the advocates of abandoning standardized testing to advance diversity in admissions are relatively silent in the face of falling academic standards. However, there was still a successful effort behind the scenes to delay any restoration.
As I have previously written, the University of California system was an early supporter of this disastrous move. It was heralded as a way to preserve diversity after voters in California repeatedly rejected race-based admissions and the Supreme Court appeared ready to bar such practices (commonly proven with reference to standardized test differentials among applicants).
Now, many professors in the California system have come to the same conclusion as some of us who denounced the move years ago. They have witnessed the drop in academic skills and abilities among incoming students.
The value of standardized testing was well established years ago. The claim that additional time is needed to contemplate the change is consistent with the university’s prior record. It previously studied the question and then ignored the findings to end the use of standardized testing.
These tests not only have the greatest predictive power for performance but also play an important role in advancing minority students. Former University of California President Janet Napolitano, however, overrode those conclusions.
Napolitano responded to such criticism with a Standardized Testing Task Force in 2019. Many people expected the task force to recommend the cessation of standardized testing. The task force did find that 59 percent of high school graduates were Latino, African-American, or Native American, but only 37 percent were admitted as UC freshman students. The Task Force did not find standardized testing to be unreliable or call for its abandonment, however.
Instead, its final report concluded that “At UC, test scores are currently better predictors of first-year GPA than high school grade point average (HSGPA), and about as good at predicting first-year retention, [University] GPA, and graduation.”
Not only that, it found: “Further, the amount of variance in student outcomes explained by test scores has increased since 2007 … Test scores are predictive for all demographic groups and disciplines … In fact, test scores are better predictors of success for students who are Underrepresented Minority Students (URMs), who are first generation, or whose families are low-income.” In other words, test scores remain the best indicator for continued performance in college.
That clearly was not the result Napolitano or some others wanted. So, she simply announced a cessation of the use of such scores in admissions. The system would go to a “test-blind” system until it developed its own test.
Ending standardized testing had an obvious secondary purpose: to frustrate new legal challenges to the use of race in college admissions.
We have also seen the dismal decline in standards at elite universities like Harvard, where faculty have been compelled to teach high school-level math classes to students.
Various schools have now reversed this ridiculous move pushed by faculty and administrators in the cause of racial diversity. The proponents of the change, such as Napolitano, have said little after they decimated the academic integrity and standing of their schools.
The UC faculty cited the UC San Diego Senate–Administration Workgroup on Admissions report, which found that 70 percent of these students are performing below a middle-school level.
Like Harvard, faculty are now teaching high-school-level math.
The trust of the new push to restore standardized testing has focused on STEM subjects. In a June 5 open letter, STEM faculty raised the alarm that UC has regularly admitted students who cannot complete college-level coursework.
UC Board Chair Maria Anguiano insisted that they just needed more time before reintroducing testing that it required by the vast majority of schools: “The goal of this review is not to rehash old questions or data but an opportunity to take a fresh look at how we define and evaluate college readiness in a rapidly changing world.”
For many critics, this comes off as a state academic system contemplating its collective navel as academic standards plummet. Neither the public nor many of the faculty want to continue on the terrible course taken under Napolitano. However, even on this easy and straightforward question, the faculty is dragging its feet to study the matter further — after previously disregarding the results of a study supporting standardized testing.
When my mom went to Berkeley, you pretty much had to be elite and be capable, as a freshman, of some of the more difficult courses like calculus. Now the students come in and they can’t do HS Algebra and need tutoring to become competent in courses, which, in the past, you had to be proficient.
Imagine rulers who do not want an educated We the People (in inner cities, in higher education, anywhere).
Why a hypothetical Steve? Children play with hypotheticals. If you’re an adult just use facts. If you can.
Yet you cant even identify yourself
What incredible irony!
George Will Questions What Vance Learned At Yale
Visiting the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, J.D. Vance told his hosts what he perhaps thought they were keen to hear: Today, Watergate would be only a “12-hour news story.” He said the real story was that “the deep state took down” Nixon. Vance — such a tease — did not explain how. What conversion convinced Vance of that? Has Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, always considered a president plotting to obstruct justice trivial? Or is this another convenient conversion, considering the president Vance so obediently serves?
“I’ve always liked” Nixon, Vance said, because Nixon, like Vance, was a young senator, then a young vice president, who wrote books and was “hated by the media.” This narcissism as a rationale for historical revisionism did not impress National Review’s Dan McLaughlin, who says celebrating Nixon is part of Vance’s “ongoing effort to downplay the political success of Ronald Reagan.”
Disparaging Reagan is a prerequisite for running in 2028 as Trumpism’s second wind. The political left, like the Trump-Vance administration, favors wielding uncircumscribed executive power to erase the distinction between public and private economic sectors. This administration has made the federal government an investor in 30 companies. And the administration’s Kulturkampf, Vance believes, has not gone far enough. He wants to “seize the endowments” of universities that he thinks are politically incorrect.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/07/15/jd-vances-shifting-stances-politics-economics-history-religion/
Most don’t care what the WA compost writes. It’s no wonder the owner is firing people left and right.
Why is it that Dustoff’s comments are brain dead material?
Brain dead ANON!
Vance is 100% correct. Biden and Obama did far, far worse than Nixon did, as did the Deep State in Trump’s first term.
George Will has always been a weirdo, and is now also a has-been.
But how did Vance “disparage Reagan?” Explain please. Sounds made-up, and is offered entirely without evidence.
Iran is preparing to strike the United States at any moment. Their supply of sophisticated, deadly, powerful drones is vast. No one needs to be present to fire them.
Iran’s divine mission remains the same as it was 47 years ago. Nothing has changed. They intend to destroy Israel and the U.S. to prepare the way for Mahdi (their prophesied savior).
Unauthorized drone incursions over Barksdale Air Force Base and Fort McNair signal a national security failure, as fragmented policy leaves military bases dangerously exposed.
THEY’VE GOT US BY THE BALLS AND ARE NOT IN A HURRY TO DESTROY US. WE ARE UNPREPARED.
BARKSDALE AIR FORCE, La. —
To clear up inaccurate and incomplete reporting, beginning Monday, March 9, Barksdale AFB experienced several unauthorized drone incursions that varied in duration and number of drones. Out of an abundance of caution in response to the initial event, Barksdale base leadership issued a Shelter in Place order for the morning of March 9
Brett Velicovich
Former US Army drone expert Brett Velicovich has warned that Iran could launch a deadly drone attack on California at any moment, citing an FBI alert to law enforcement about a potential strike …
If you want to get up to the minute information about this threat, read/listen to this world renown expert as he pleads with Trump, Hegseth, generals and admirals to wake up.
Recently, this theological framing has been highly militarized. Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei publicly declared that retaliating against US and Israeli leaders for the deaths of former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other Iranian officials is a “divine mission” that operatives worldwide must carry out.
Yawn….
Go back to bed you cretin.
We can rely on Mexico to protect her citizens should Iran strike California.
Clues To Why Republicans Are Underrepresented On Faculties
At least 1,662 Department of Energy webpages offering guidance on protecting the electrical grid during heatwaves have gone dark as of 3 July, according to a Guardian analysis of a list of deleted URLs provided by researchers at the Internet Archive, a non-profit that hosts a repository of more than a trillion archived webpages.
The energy department deletions coincide with the Trump administration’s latest push to undermine federal climate regulations. At least 18 webpages were removed within days of the proposed rollback to energy efficiency regulations for home appliances like air conditioners and heaters.
If enacted, the proposed rollback would effectively undo decades of policies that have been proven to lower household utility bills and make it much harder for the energy department to update efficiency standards for new appliances under future administrations, advocates say.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jul/15/energy-department-webpages-deleted-heatwave
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The Trump administration is going out of its way to fight climate change policies enacted by previous administrations. We don’t want appliances being energy efficient? We don’t want to protect the electrical grids from heatwaves??
It’s hard to imagine a professor of science or engineering endorsing these rollbacks. Like academics are supposed to tell their students that keeping oil companies profitable is ‘best for the country’..??? Like preparing for climate change is just a ‘waste of money’..????
Not that the admin is thinking this:
Energy efficent appliances don’t last as long and are replaced more often. Compressors are undersized and fail more often. That makes me wonder if full life cycle Cost of an appliance is better or worse if you replace appliances more often.
Today, in the chronicles of liberal tolerance:
– Democrat congressional candidate says Trump is the Antichrist and “must be killed.”
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/former-marine-running-congress-says-trump-antichrist-must-killed-shocking-video
– Canadian liberal woman with purple hair and face piercings charged with assaulting Jersey Shore teen who was wearing patriotic clothing and a MAGA hat, slapping the juvenile across the face and body on the eve of America’s 250th birthday.
https://nypost.com/2026/07/15/us-news/canadian-woman-charged-with-assaulting-jersey-shore-teen-in-maga-clothes-is-criminal-illegal-alien-who-overstayed-visa-dhs/
More On Blanche Hearing
Todd Blanche was visibly frustrated during an exchange with Sen. Cory Booker as part of his confirmation hearing Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The back-and-forth took place as Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, was questioning Blanche — President Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as attorney general —about attending a dinner hosted by David Ellison, the head of Paramount, while the Justice Department was investigating Paramount’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Booker also pressed Blanche about his meeting last summer with convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, contrasting it with Blanche’s claims earlier in the day that he would be prohibited from meeting directly with victims of Maxwell or her co-conspirator, the late Jeffrey Epstein.
The senator called Blanche’s claim “utter nonsense,” adding that “counsel can be present, or a client can waive their right to have counsel. But you’re a lawyer. You know this. That was not truthful.”
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/07/15/congress/blanche-vs-booker-00999301
What if Obama was there to give Lindsey Graham mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? Then would any of you have
anything nice to say about him?
Biden in 2028! Jill’s gonna back up her man. Remember, he’s available.
Obongo “The Ineligible” would never have been “…admitted to become a citizen thereof…” by the American Founders because he was never a “free white person.”
That’s a problem with reference to Obongo’s “fundamentally transformed” legitimacy and validity.
To wit,
Naturalization Acts of 1790, 1795, 1798, 1802 (four iterations for definitive clarity)
United States Congress, “An act to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” March 26, 1790
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That any Alien being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof….
Useless hypothetical.
I bet Barry the Fairy would enjoy mouth to mouth on Lindsey, Larry Sinclair said he did with him under oath. Of course there had to be Hunter’s Party favorites involved.
If you are injured in a horrible accident and can no longer work, you will feel differently about the social Darwinism of capitalism.
Capitalism does include Medicaid or other benefits for injured individuals. In fact, the wealth generated by capitalism makes those benefits feasible.
If you have to live your life in a socialist nation like Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela – or you had to live in any of the Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War – you would then appreciate in very tangible terms the benefits of free market capitalism. Notice the migration was always East to West during that time. East Germany built the Berlin Wall to keep people in, not out.
If you were employed, you would generally have had the opportunity—and, arguably, the foresight—to obtain health insurance, short- and long-term disability insurance, life insurance, and long-term care insurance through employer-sponsored benefits or by purchasing coverage on the private market.
Just call one of the world’s biggest liability accident law firms. The biggest Democratic lobbyist group around. Billions recovered from insurance companies, why even they are billionaires themselves now. There are no accidents, just liability opportunities and what the heck, those resulting insurance premium increases get spread out to everyone. You to can be an instant millionaire, it only cost 33.3% plus fees, of any settlement call now!
Blanche On Weaponization Fund
Blanche at various turns pegged the fund as a “moot issue” and even pointed out he was under oath in saying he had “rescinded” the document establishing the $1.776 billion fund.
But Cornyn argued the issue was not settled, as President Trump or other parties could push the matter in court.
Cornyn also pointed to a memo Blanche signed shortly thereafter that “forever bars and precludes” Trump, as well as his children and businesses, from facing any prosecution or investigation, a wide-reaching document insulating them from reviews beyond just the IRS.
At one point, Blanche protested saying the agreement “binds only the IRS and by extension the Treasury.”
“I hear what you’re saying, but I certainly don’t read that in the agreement,” Cornyn said.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5970491-blanche-ag-confirmation-cornyn-anti-weaponization/
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The agreement ‘binds only the IRS’..?? That’s reassuring! In other words the Trump family could just blow off taxes from now on and face no criminal penalties.
Like Harvard, faculty are now teaching high-school-level math.
Like your blog, commenters are now using grammar-school level discourse. It’s not just math that has been rejected by Americans.
Pro-tip: use a standardized test in order for commenters to use the comment boxes in your blog, where they must score >80th percentile. I predict that the number of comments would fall drastically, and quite possibly elevate the discourse.
Pot. Kettle.
It’s okay, the world needs more baristas. It seems there is a Starbucks on every corner and they all need to fill those positions. An overeducated idiot should be able to handle the job.
Some day soon the younger people of this country will wake up and find out that they are working for people who were not born here. Most of these foreigners come from society’s that are more disciplined than ours. For example, the new owner of the Seattle Seahawks and his wife were born in India. He’s just one of many. When Regan was president someone asked him if he was aware of what the Japanese were buying in America. Regan’s reply, “I’m glad that the Japanese feel that America is a good place to make an investment in”.
Tickle Me Elmo on fire
Donald Trump, as a creator of insults, is not a poet. But he is prolific—no critic can doubt his commitment to his craft—and his body of work, whatever it may lack in artistry, is notable for its volume alone. Every time the president calls someone a “dog” or a “pig” or a “horseface,” he solidifies his status as the GOAT. As a result, whether the insults are personalized attacks (“Sleepy Joe,” “Shifty Schiff,” “Pocahontas”) or general ones (“crazy,” “nasty,” “dumb as a rock”), they form, together, a data set: a collection of text that can be categorized, analyzed, and mined for insights—not into the person being targeted but into the man who does the aiming.
I have to say that it was absolutely delightful to watch capitalism work its wonders today with the continuing downward spiral to oblivion of SpaceX stock.
Intra-day it dipped to $132.15, well below the IPO offering price of $135, and closed at 135.27, just barely above the IPO price.
This means that virtually all the idiots who hold this worthless stock have lost money.
It also means that the scamming huckster Elmo’s net worth has dropped by $600 billion in just over a month. Another $150 billion loss will see his net worth cut in half. It is my fervent hope that the stock price will fall so low that the loans he has taken out with the stock as collateral will be called due because the loan exceeds the value of the collateral. Elmo has pledged some of his stock holdings as collateral, which means that the bank can sell the stock without his permission, and this would trigger massive capital gains taxes that he tried to avoid by taking out the loans in the first place. He does not receive a salary from any of his companies. Instead he finances his daily living with low interest loans against his stock holdings. He doesn’t sell the stock, because that would trigger massive capital gains.
Morningstar, the highly respected independent financial analysis company values Spacex stock at no more than $63, so hopefully the downward spiral has a long way to go.
It is also worth noting that more than 30% of the public stock float has been sold short. A short interest of 10% is considered high. A short interest of 30% is considered to be extraordinarily high.
What this means is that the Wall St heavy hitters see this IPO stock offering for what it really is. A grossly overvalued scam.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer fellow.
Capitalism is such a wonderful thing.
I can see by your statement you are not successful in the stock market. I am. I bought at IPO knowing full well the price would fluctuate and the returns, while likely substantial, will arrive over the course of the next 5 years. Same with Tesla. Socialism not doing so well anywhere now is it?
Wishful thinking is not a rational position, compared to the cold hard reality of actual analysis of real numbers.
You probably also bought Trump’s gold sneakers, and gold watches , and totally fake crypto.
SPCX is grossly overvalued by any measure, as the market is telling you. Trust the market, it is always right.
By the way my YTD return is 97.95%, and my 3y return is 451.44%.
Liar.
Space X IPO. Musk becomes a Trillionaire. 4200 of his employees became millionaires. Did Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders ever make someone a millionaire?
Independent Bob
Musk was a trillionaire for 12 days.
His current net worth is $855 billion. His worth has decreased by $600 billion in just over a month, because SpaceX stock is collapsing below the IPO offering.
SpaceX stock is grossly overvalued. Fair value is $63. The stock has spiraled down from a high of $225 to just over $135 at close today. The market is telling you what his stock scam is really worth. There is about another 50% drop to reach fair value, at which point Musk will be worth around $425 billion.
More than 30% of the publicly available stock has been sold short. There is no sign of any short covering. The market is telling you that SpaceX stock is a grossly overvalued scam.
Listen to what the market is telling you. It is always right.
You sound very jealous ano.
What have you built that’s worth millions.
Thanks to Musk. He bought back our astronauts from space when Boeing could not.
Stocks go up and down. Not a big deal.
I have built my own business (but now retired from active participation) and stock portfolio, both worth many millions.
I have never worked for an employer in the 56 years since I graduated from college.
Stocks fluctuate. Everybody knows that. You only lose if sell on a dip instead of buying on a dip.
But SPCX is not FLUCTUATING.
It has spiraled straight down from Day 1.
Trust what the market tells you. It is always right.
Wishful thinking leads to major losses.
“You only lose if you sell”
Not only do you NOT sell, but you dollar-cost-average into the index, including generous contributions by your employer, and reinvest capital gains and dividends over the span of your career, and then you sit on the beach drinking Mai Tais, enjoying life after retiring early.
Todd Blanche: “I’m His Lawyer”
Pressed by Democratic senators on Wednesday, Blanche insisted that he does not merely do the president’s bidding and that he would resign if ever asked to do anything illegal or unethical. He also said he had disagreed at times with Trump and said he did not believe the president was eligible to run for a third term.
“President Trump trusts me to give him counsel,” Blanche said at one point. “Counsel does not mean I’m a yes man.”
Still, Blanche had a notable slip when pressed by the senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, who asked whether the two men were friends. “I’m his lawyer,” Blanche said, before correcting himself. “Was his lawyer,” he said.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/15/todd-blanche-confirmation-hearing-attorney-general
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Todd Blanche accidentally told the Senate exactly what critics fear: ‘He’s Trump’s lawyer’. Not the man to be running DOJ.
Exactly the man to run the DOJ. I think the people involved in the Obama seditious conspiracy should pucker up…
Eight Ball (Estovir), just so we know how wacky you are, describe the ‘Obama conspiracy’.
Come on Nozzle, you can figure it out, here’s a hint… Hillary Clinton, John Brennan and Jim Comey…Russssssia.
Russia,Russia,Russia!
Speaking of odd-balls. You sure have a hang up for (Estovir)
Missing something in you’re love life maybe?
Cry harder, remember when O-dumber made the claim he had visited 58 states.
Another aspect is that Universities, by accepting objectively unqualified students, are being dishonest with those students. I get that the test results are not fully deterministic and that some students can rise above the prediction of their test scores – I am perhaps a beneficiary of tolerant admissions. Even so, the universities are accepting the incoming student’s money, generally expending low expenses for freshmen schooling with famously large classes and inexpensive laboratories, and pocketing the change. If the student drops out, the university doesn’t care as it has its money with no refund. But the student has expended, and perhaps borrowed, significant funds on an endeavor for which the university full well knew he was at great risk without telling him so. This, frankly, is highly unethical on the part of the universities.
Everyone treated the same. It’s up to the individual to prepare for the test. Those of you saying, people of color can’t do well on testing. What would the reason be? If they need remedial assistance, then sign up for it to sharpen your skills. If you don’t do well, just stop the test, sounds pretty dumb.
I once worked for the Princeton Review which tutors people on improving scores on standardized tests. When in high school, I was a National Merit Semifinalist based on PSAT scores which might be a way Turley suggested benefits minority students by singling out high achievers that most of you would label as DEI that should be abolished. My point today is that standardized tests are historically biased, many questions assume familiarity with subjects like cricket (the game not the insect) and country clubs that aren’t uniformly known. The wealthier and whiter you are, the more likely you are to perform well.
OOOOOh boy the Turley faithful are NOT going to like this take – that is – if they can actually see through the eye holes of their white hoods to read it.
Black Olives Matter
“Black Olives Matter”
Or spatter, if dropped from a sufficient height.
Thank God for 161 years of welfare and affirmative action.
Actually they will think it’s a good thing. The subpar students will cheapen a Degree from the University and employers will stop hiring their graduates. That means less idiots in the work force and cheaper coffee because baristas will be a dime a dozen. I really hope the University of California lowers admission standards too. That should also speed the demise of a useless University.
The libs go lower. Shocked we are not.
That’s a load of Cricket crap!
Schools are for teaching a standard curriculum.
Learn the English language and grammar, might actually help students to write a complete sentence.
Learn Math
Learn Chemistry
Learn some basic Science
Learn some history
It’s not a racial thing, it’s a parenting thing and when the average IQ of a specific demographic is 80, well that’s the breaks.
What part of what I said is untrue. That I worked for the Princeton Review and taught people how to improve their scores? That the questions often require a basic knowledge of some non-basic things? That wealthy and white people have an easier time on tests written for them? I get that you don’t want those things to be true, but they are.
Let me get back to you, I am up at our exclusive Whites Only Country Club Cricket match.
😂 that argument died with the advent of TV and drawling accents also.
Then why do Asians score as good, if not better than whites on those tests?
Because they of Asian country clubs where they go conspire against other people and of course discuss Bingo.
Reportedly, Asians have an average IQ of 110, Caucasians 100, Blacks 80, Sect of European Jews 120. That’s reportedly the Science.
Remember the Asian kids that took Harvard to court because they were denied admission even though they had the academic achievement level to be accepted. Harvard had already accepted their quota of Asian students for that class.
🤔 study? Wild guess…
Blacks score 1 std dev below whites, Asians score .5-1 std dev above whites – on average.
Foreign-born blacks score higher than American born.
Must be something in the french fries 🤣
Asians score well, not good like a Merican. And it’s because they play cricket in India and the tests are written for them.
It’s good that Asians score well.
And that Asians have no need for welfare and affirmative action.
The same way they do better on the National Spelling Bee, they work harder than white people.
And blacks too.
Funny how you left that out.
I only answered the question before me, forgive me for not addressing your issues.
How recent is your experience. The “regatta” type questions were considered problematic a couple decades ago, but the questions used in the SAT now undergo rigorous prior review for any type of cultural biases. By the way as a kid raised poor and white I’d never seen a yacht and never been to a regatta. Nonetheless knowledge of what these things are is, in my opinion, a reasonable way to test breadth of knowledge and understanding of cultural experiences other than one’s own. Bottom line, SAT always has been and still is a valuable tool in determining the ability to do college work.
“What part of what I said is untrue.:
Most of what you wrote is unfalsifiable – again if you were a merit scholar you would know that.
I have no idea if you were a merit scholar – but your writing does not lead to that conclusion.
I have no idea if you worked for the Princeton review – not honestly do I care.
Can people improve their standardized test scores ? A little – but not much, and if what you claim was True – you would know that.
No the questions do not require basic knowledge of non-basic things – College admissions tests are IQ tests – they test your logic and reasoning skills.
We have spent decades trying to figure out how to boost intelligence with no consequential results. Slow improvements occur naturally over time.
some of the biggest factors are things like diet – all the factors that have lead to increases in average height over the past 200 years have also lead to increases in intelligence.
An NO the wealthy and white do not have an easier time because the tests are written for them – Contra your claim – standardized tests do NOT ask about Cricket,
and the over performance of Asians obliterates your cultural bias and whiteness claims.
It is irrelevant what I want to be true. It is irrelevant what YOU want to be true – what is relevant is what IS true.
Are SATs biased in favor of the more intelligent ? Absoluitely. Are they culturally biased – Nope.
There is a reason that Asians sued Harvard and want colleges to do race blind admissions only favoring standardized tests – it is because Asians out perform everyone.
Regardless East Asians score one half to on std deviation higher than whites on tests that purportedly are designed to culturally favor whites.
“Hundreds of studies on millions of people have confirmed the three-way racial pattern (Jensen, 1998b; Lynn &
Vanhanen, 2002; Rushton, 2000). This same order of mean group differences is also found on “culture-fair” tests and on reaction time tasks.”
There is still a fight – mostly because academia leans heavily to the left and is trying to force the data, over this – and this idiotic FALSIFIED cultural claim persists.
Just as YOU a purported Merit Scholar are echoing it.
The DATA generally finds that IQ is about 75% genetic – that has held solid for over a century despite efforts to falsify it.
Further the disturbing racial patterns that we find in college bound students are found in testing as early as 3-6 years old. Again not only is the White/Black difference present – but the White/Asian one as well.
AS EARLY AS 3-6
No standardized tests are not “culturally biased”
If you wish to debate other “nurture” based explanations – be my guest.
But please quit selling GARBAGE.
It is nonsense like this that is why people hate DEI.
It is just a reality denying mechanism to claim that real world differences do not exist.
Again I do not have a problem with a college using any criteria they wish so long as ZERO public money is involved
an d so long as parents and students are free to make their own choices.
One size fits all approaches – including pure admission tests everywhere always under perform – because each individual is unique.
But lets not repeat lies that were falsified long ago.
John, a student, can work for The Princeton Review.
I doubt you truly understand how IQ tests, for example, are biased. Probably one of the most frequently used IQ tests over the years is some variant of the Wechsler. Two parts of that test involve memory, vis forward and backward digit span. The test administrator says a group of single digits one at a time and then asks the participant to repeat them. I believe they start with 5 digits. If they are repeated correctly, the next group is 6 digits and so on… For the backwards test, the participant must say them backwards.
Working memory is thought to be limited by the size of a phonological loop. Typically, what you can rehearse in about 1.5 seconds – give or take. Obviously, one can rehearse (sub vocally articulate) more one syllable words than five syllable words.
Now, in the U.S. we say numbers differently by geographic location. For example, in the South the number “one” might sound like it has two syllables. Of course, seven does have two syllables, as it does in German. Think of all of the Spanish digits with more than one syllable.
The numbers from 1 to 10 in Chinese are the following:
一 ( yī ) – 1
二 ( èr ) – 2
三 ( sān ) – 3
四 ( sì ) – 4
五 ( wǔ ) – 5
六 ( liù ) – 6
七 ( qī ) – 7
八 ( bā ) – 8
九 ( jiǔ ) – 9
十 ( shí ) – 10
Clearly, it is faster to say “qi” than it is to say seven or siete. So, I would think Asians would score better on those two subtests. That’s a cultural bias. Given the concentration of Blacks in the South, I would think they would speak with the same Southern drawl. That is, slower, longer vowel sounds. Of course, Northerners don’t speak with a drawl, and proportionately, there are more whites in the North versus Blacks than in the South. That’s a cultural bias.
So, that explains your “three-way racial pattern,” doesn’t it.
I’m sorry, but your analysis is somewhat naive. OTOH, I doubt all of those studies you site are any better.
Good luck with your racism.
This claim is absolutely untrue. In the late 1970s, College Board began “sensitivity reviews” to ensure “fairness and equity” and that was institutionalized. By the early 1980s, every SAT question underwent a review before it could appear on an exam.
Spreading this misinformation is inappropriate. There may be other reasons wealthier and whiter students – again a lie because it’s ASIANs who perform best. Those reasons could include: formal test prep, stronger K-12s, focus on academics, and parental pressure to perform, but it’s not because of the questions.
So you’re saying it only used to be racist but no longer, just like America.
I’m saying that what you said is untrue and has been for at least the last 50 years. No country is perfect but the US is better than most. I don’t like people who lie about it. PS FYI this is from someone who was an NMSQT Finalist 40 years ago.
My experience was far more recent than 50 years ago, believe what you must.
*. I’ll speak to once and only once. There isn’t any secret information being kept away from blacks in the US. It’s not at Harvard nor Yale. It’s in your mind.
Knowledge is a combination of nature and nurture.
The US has been destroyed now. Feel happy or sad about it. There is no justice anymore for anyone happily or sadly. We’re all losers now because we’ve lost opportunity that the US once had and replaced it with ruin.
There aren’t any secrets.
You spoke one too many times already.
Is Africa “racist”
Get a grip, you have a huge chip on you’re ego.
I find it hard to believe you were a Merit Scholar – just from this post – DEI based selection and Merit based selection are the OPPOSITE of each either – if you are intelligent enough to earn a Merit Scholarship – you would grasp that.
Again if you were an actual merit scholar – you would know the claims of historical bias are Garbage.
Nearly all standardized tests are essentially IQ tests. While IQ has risen over time – and due to the way IQ is defined – as a deviation from the mean, that means that a person with an IQ of 100 today has greater intelligence than a person whose IQ was 100 a century ago – again presuming the baseline reference for the IQ measurement was the population 100 years ago.
It has been argued that because tests like the PSAT or SAT’s or ACT’s – were develkoped by western white males that must mean they are as you claim “culturally biased”.
But we have developed IQ tests that are constructed such as to completely remove any possibility of Bias. We have IQ tests that produce decent results on children before they can read or write. We have IQ tests that are purely graphic and symbolic – without any “cultural references”
of any kind. And these produce the same results as those that are supposedly culturally or racially biased.
No standardized tests are NOT culturally or racially biased.
This is also confirmed by the FACT that despite the massive standardized test study industry – there is very little that you can do to more than marginally improve performance on an IQ or other standardized test.
Again if you actually were a Merit Scholar – you would know that, and you would not be making these stupid arguments.
Nearly all of what we call “standardized tests” are just IQ tests. If you have your scores on PSAT’s SAT’s ACT’s GRE’s … you can go online and look up your score and the year you took the test and get your IQ. Even without online tables – you can calculate your IQ by knowing not your SCORE – but the percentile that you scored in. If your PSAT score was 50% – half the people taking the PSAT did better than you and half did worse – then your IQ is 100 – assuming that everyone was required to take the PSAT
NO Standardized Tests like the PSAT’s do NOT have questions about Cricket – not the insect and not the game. Again if you actually were an National Merit scholar – you would not be arguing such nonsense. Long BEFORE the lefts cultural attacks on standardized tests – the producers of these tests – tested the tests to remove any questions that offered any advantage aside from differences in intelligence. That process BTW is ongoing. A small percent of questions on EVERY standardized Test are “test questions”
They do not count – but they are being examined to determine how accurately they reflect IQ and how much cultural or racial bias they exhibit. Those questions that accurately measure IQ and have no biases are incorporated into future tests – replacing questions that were not predictive or had evidence of bias.
Most of us are subject to a wide barrage of standardized tests going through school – nearly all standardized tests are IQ tests.
Regardless in a lifetime of taking standardized tests – which have ALWAYS produced the same results, I do not recall a single question on Cricket ever.
Again – If you actually were a national merit scholar – you have turned off your ability to critically think and damaged your own IQ.
You note that Whites perform well on Standardized tests. Asians perform better – Maybe Indians are better informed about Cricket than Americans – but the Chinese, and Singaporeans are not.
Most standardized tests – and particularly College admissions tests are IQ tests. The correlation between IQ and success – most any form of success is BY FAR the strongest in ALL social sciences. Colleges use standardized tests for admissions because far more accurately than ANY other measure they predict success in college and success past college. Nothing else comes close.
You are free to argue that performance in college and life should not be the sole criteria in admitting students.
But standardized tests produce the most accurate prediction of future performance that we have.
I have zero problem with Colleges using whatever Criteria they wish to select students – so long as we are truly dealing with a FREE MARKET.
That means ZERO government involvement – no subsidies, no research grants, no guaranteed student loans, no threats with respect to Title IX or anything else.
No left wing government threats no right wing government threats.
Just colleges choosing how they wish to perform their role and students and parents choosing where they wish to go.
Just as McD’;s chooses how to make their burgers and you and I choose where and whether we wish to buy a burger.
John Say, I’ve got to say this is by far the most ignorant post from you today.
Casting doubt on enigma’s credentials because YOU assert some sort of expertise by proceeding to provide completely irrelevant comparisons and expose how ignorant you are. This is how the anti-DEI movement grew, by the sheer amount of arguments from ignorance.
Your entire argument relies on outdated 1970s myths about intelligence testing that have been thoroughly debunked by modern psychometrics. Insulting someone’s credentials while being completely wrong about basic science is a bad look.
Standardized tests are NOT IQ tests. They are not even close to alike. No psychometrician or testing agency (like the College Board or ACT) classifies these exams as IQ tests. They are achievement and aptitude tests designed to measure acquired knowledge in specific high school subjects like algebra and reading comprehension.
You claim a 50th percentile score equals a 100 IQ “assuming everyone took the test.” This is a gross logical failure. The SAT and PSAT are taken by a highly selective, self-selecting pool of college-bound students, not the general population. Scoring in the 50th percentile of an elite, hyper-educated subgroup means your score is significantly higher than the general population’s average. Bypassing this basic statistical concept proves you do not understand how percentiles work.
You claim that prep industries only “marginally improve” performance. This is false. Controlled studies show that targeted test preparation, high-quality tutoring, and repeating the exam consistently raise scores by significant margins. If the tests were purely measuring unchangeable, un-trainable IQ, the multi-billion-dollar test prep industry would have zero statistical efficacy.
Also, You mention that a person with a 100 IQ today is more intelligent than a century ago due to deviations from the mean. This is a complete inversion of the Flynn Effect. The Flynn Effect proves that raw scores rose over the 20th century because of environmental factors—better nutrition, increased schooling, and exposure to technology—not because human genetics suddenly evolved higher baseline intelligence. This confirms that these tests measure environmental access and education, not unchangeable biological traits.
You took the mention of “cricket” literally to brag about your own test history. The point about cultural bias isn’t literally about sports trivia; it is about language syntax, vocabulary selection, and socio-economic context that favors students from wealthy, English-speaking households who can afford private schooling.
Trying to use pseudo-psychology to claim that standardized tests are infallible, unchangeable metrics of human worth isn’t “critical thinking.” It is just a desperate attempt to justify systemic inequalities using broken data.
I am not castring doubt on EBs claims – his own arguments are.
If you argue up is down and down is up – no one is going to believe you are a national merit scholar.
Regardless, such claims are unfalsifiable, so I really do not put much weight in what others claim about themselves.
I posted that my IQ is so high that I am 1000 times more probable to be correct than you – would you take that seriously ?
MOSTLY – I do not make appeals to my own authority.
I judge EB’s intelligence by his posts. Those do not demonstrate being in the top 2% – which is what is required for a Merit scholar.
But as Nasseem Talib notes in the Black Swan and is unfortunately obvious in the rreal world – there are LOTS of IYI’s
Intellectual Yet Idiots.
This video is not political, the title is correct but deceptive.
What it is about is “how to think critically”
Intelligence increases the odds of that – but intligence is unfortunately not a guarantee of critical thinking.
“Your entire argument relies on outdated 1970s myths”
I cited studies that reached the same conclusions in the 90’s and the 21st century.
It is not the arguments of the 70’s that are outdated – it is the failed attempts to falsify them.
There is no valid cultural explanation for the differences in IQ.
BTW I did not cite “arguments” – I cited DATA – FACTS.
The discrepancies in IQ by race are detectable as early as 3-6 years old.
They have nothing to do with Cricket or culture.
Regardless – the culture argument is STUPID – if Cultural differences are the foundation of differences in outcome
TEACH THE CULTURE
LEARN THE CULTURE
If IQ can be raised by Culture – then adopt the culture that results in the highest IQ.
” about intelligence testing that have been thoroughly debunked by modern psychometrics.”
ROFL
Again look at the cite above – from the 21st century – hundreds of studies over millions of people ALL universally come to the same result.
Absolutely the left has TRIED valiantly to flasify these results. AND FAILED.
No they have no been debunked by modern psychometrics – they have been REINFORCED.
Nor should this surprise anyone. “Debunking” actual data is very nearly impossible.
You can succeed when”
The statistical significance is law – the two points I have made have the highest statistical significance in all of the social sciences.
Another alternative is demonstrating poor study methodology – that MIGHT work for a small number of studies with small sample sizes.
But we are talking hundreds of studies and millions of participants.
First and foremost. IQ CAN NOT BE LEARNED. We have tried – that is the “holy grail” of social science.
EVERYONE want that to be possible – Including me. If there is any valid way to boost IQ – it would be valuable – many times more valuable than SpaceX.
We have looked HARD – and we have found nothing that improves IQ – beyond the few standard of living factors that also increase height such as diet.
These are more evidence that you can STUNT IQ – not that you can raise it.
In the domain of race and IQ – which is a sub point, not my main refutation of EB, we have beleived – and it is likely true that lead in paint contrinuted to lower IQ’s in poor children – and there is more poverty in minorities. But that does not explain the fact that the same patterns are found outside the US in places where there has never been lead paint – because there is no paint.
The conclusion regarding IQ from the time of Darwin through the present is that it is 75% heritable. In 2 centuries no effort to falsify that has succeeded.
Again I would be happy – nearly everyone in the world would be happy to discover that IQ can be taught or nurtured or improved with a pill.
But we have found nothing in 200 years to displace the heritable nature of IQ.
Claiming you have without evidence is just the typical garbage from the left.
Ah, the classic internet pivot. You got completely cornered on basic SAT percentile math, so you decided to dust off some 1970s-style Bell Curve racial eugenics to protect your fragile ego. Truly, a masterclass in “critical thinking”.
Let’s dissect the absolute trainwreck of your “facts”:
Notice how fast you ran away from the actual debate? The topic was the SAT, ACT, and PSAT.Because you got publicly exposed for not understanding how elite, self-selecting test pools work, you completely swapped the subject to biological IQ. The SAT is an achievement test measuring high school algebra and vocabulary. Those are >b>100%learned skills. No amount of pseudo-science changes that.
You confidently threw out “75% heritable” as if it means intelligence is biologically fixed. It doesn’t. Heritability measures variance within a specific group in a specific environment. If you put identical seeds in a desert, the differences within that desert are genetic. The difference between the desert and a lush garden is entirely environmental. You are confusing a lack of resources with a lack of capacity.
You claim disparities show up at age three to prove it’s biological. Congratulations, you just discovered that systemic poverty starts at birth. By age three, a child in a high-income household has heard 30 million more words than a low-income child. You aren’t measuring genetic superiority; you are measuring who could afford books and nutrition.
“Just learn the culture!” This is your most hilariously clueless take. You can’t just “adopt a culture” of generational wealth, zip codes with fully funded school districts, private SAT tutors, and legacy admissions pipelines. It’s not a lifestyle choice; it’s a bank account.
You can type “ROFL” in all caps and pretend you are defending “Western civilization,” but everyone here sees exactly what you are doing. You got humiliated on basic statistics, so you threw a racist temper tantrum to feel smart again. It’s not science—it’s just sad.
No pivot – just a point by point refustation of your claims.
“You got completely cornered on basic SAT percentile math”
Nope – you completely misread what I wrote – and you did so OBVIOUSLY.
“you decided to dust off some 1970s-style Bell Curve racial eugenics to protect your fragile ego.”
There are only a limited number of distribution patterns for the distribution of human attributes – by far the most common is the bell curve.
BTW all the bell curve is, is a distribution pattern – many many things distribute on a bell curve. Even some non -biological phenomena.
Most human attributes distribute on a bell curve – intelligence is one of those. IQ is litterally defined by a bell curve.
I did not chose that. It is just how it is. By defintion an IQ of 100 is Average – the appogee of the bell curve. Over time if Average shifts – the intelligence that is labeled as an IQ of 100 shifts. That is not an argument – it is just how it is.
Intelligence does not distribute exactly the same by race _ i did not claim that or make it that way – Nature did.
We have known that pretty much since Darwin. The left has spent the past 60 years trying to find a basis for differences in intelligence based on race that do not run afoul of left wing nut politics.
I would note that everyone from Me to Charles Murray would be perfectly happy to find an answer besides nature – genetics.
YOU have proposed a number – claiming thaty these have been proven – not only havent they – but they are OBVIOUSLY false.
If ANY of your explanations were correct – we would have correctly racial variations in IQ decades ago. Further most of YOUR claims require that we are able to intentionally increase IQ – AGAIN – if that were the case the entire world would rejoice.
It is false. And if you have a brain you know that.
As the viode I linked noted – for most anything someone claims is true – you can not only directly test their claim – but there is always other things that MUST also be true and/or other things that must also be false as a consequence.
If the sun burned out tomorow – the earth would grow dark and cold – if the earth is not dark and cold – we KNOW the sun did not burn out
That is a very simple example of critical thinking – something you seem completely incapable of.
“Notice how fast you ran away from the actual debate? ”
Which debate – I have repeatedly addressed standardized tests – there are probably a couple of thousand words on that today.
“The topic was the SAT, ACT, and PSAT.Because you got publicly exposed for not understanding how elite, self-selecting test pools work”
What I correctly understand is THEY DONT. If such a thing existed there would be MULTIPLE ways to fix it TRIVIALLY.
Your self selecting elitist test pools nonsense Fails for multiple reasons I have already pointed out.
1). Standardized tests are by a large margin the best predictor we have of success – in life and in college. Perfect – no, but very good.
If they were not – no one would take them, no one would pay for them, colleges and employers would not use them – even the Army uses them.
Testing companies DO NOPT GET PAID BY POLLS OF ELITES – they get paid by students, and student pay them because Colleges want the results, because colleges accurately beleive they predict success – BECAUSE THEY DO.
If that were not true – the tests would gvo away or more likely change so that their quality was better.
You presume a problemthat may never have existed – but even if it did – you have frozen in amber nearly a century ago while the world moved on.
2). Even if your claim was true – it is a trivial to eliminate – teach the culture, learn the culture.
“you completely swapped the subject to biological IQ. ”
There is just intelligence – we BELEIVE it is about 75% heritable but after two centuries we STILL have absolutely no basis for the supposed non-heritable portion.
Again if we did – then we could change it. BTW – I personally do not beleive that Intelligence is 100% heritable. I do not know if the 75% number is correct.
What I know is we have no model for non-heritable intelligence that holds up under scrutiny.
AGAIN IF WE DID WE COULD INCREASE INTELLIGENCE – and we can not.
“the SAT is an achievement test measuring high school algebra and vocabulary. Those are >b>100%learned skills. ”
Loosely correct – HOWEVER
intelligence: The ability to acquire, understand, and use knowledge
the SATs measure how much we have learned – and that is THE SAME as measuring our ABILITY to learn AKA intelligence.
Again EVERY STANDARDIZED TEST is an IQ test – an intelligence test, a measure of our ability to learn.
“No amount of pseudo-science changes that.”
No psuedo science needed – Intelligence is the ability to learn. Argument over. You lose.
“You confidently threw out “75% heritable” as if it means intelligence is biologically fixed. It doesn’t. Heritability measures variance within a specific group in a specific environment.”
Heritable means capable of being inherited or passed down through generations. It refers to traits or characteristics that can be transmitted from parents to their offspring.
Oops.
BTW I did not pick 75% that is the standard conclusion of much of the field for much of the past 200 years.
As I have noted – while I SUSPECT that is correct – we STILL have no model for the non-heritable portion – if we did – we would have the ability to boost IQ
I do not think anyone credible is claiming to have ever been able to get more than a few points of ACTUAL increase in ACTUAL intelligence through anything.
With respect to your seed claims – it is YOU that does not understand heritable – any differences in the results of identical seeds in different environments are the NON_HERITABLE portion of the attribute.
Are you actually arguing that poverty precludes people from talking to their children ?
Regardless – I could care less – You have just made MY argument for me.
If exposing children to 30M more words by the age of three boosts their IQ – that is testable completely independently.
And if you prove it – you have established a means to boost IQ and the world will pay you a fortune for it.
But I would point out some impediments to your claim – AGAIN – east asians universally test at .5-1 std dev higher than whites.
With the exception of Hong Kong and Singapore – the rest of east Asia lives in poverty worse than that of black and white poor in the US
With respect to your claim – there is evidence that stress – including the financial stress often associated with poverty can reduce measures of IQ by 10-13 points
But that is a TEMPORARY factor – coming and going roughly with the stress. Most people perform worse on intellectual tasks when they are stressed.
I would also not recomend taking an IQ test while Drunk or high.
Regardless – YOU are off on a tangent – NO ONE is debating that temporary factors can negatively impact performance on standardized tests.
My wife only took the SATs once – she was sick at the time, she scored well but significantly lower than I did. She later took the GRE’s – she was healthy and scored much better and the results indicate an IQ similar to mine. It is likely her GRE results are more correct.
Regardless, the differences in IQ that I cited are robust world wide. East Asians – who with the exception of hong kong and singapore have a lower standard of living than the US and with the execption of Taiwan and japan have a MUCH lower standard of living than the US – still out perform whites.
Further they do so in the US by the same rates as they do in Asia.
I would be happy for you to establish that Poverty causes lower IQ,
But we KNOW the reverse is actually true – low IQ strongly correlates to poverty – and IQ is heritable – hence the odds are that low IQ parents wiill have low IQ children. The correlation is not perfect – but it is pretty good. Conversely YES – IQ predicts success and afluent people are more likely to have children who are also of higher intelligence.
That is literally how irritability works.
It is not perfect – poor people sometimes produce genius children and the wealthy sometimes produce morons.
““Just learn the culture!” This is your most hilariously clueless take. You can’t just “adopt a culture” of generational wealth, zip codes with fully funded school districts, private SAT tutors, and legacy admissions pipelines.”
Correct – those are not culture – those are wealth. Culture is cricket – or sailing and those can be learned
YOU made that perfectly clear.
And again Asians in say China do NOT have generational wealth, zip codes with fullyu funded schools, private SAT tutors.
BTW legacy admissions pipelines have absolutely nothing to do with SAT performance. That is just a lunatic toss from left field.
Legacy admissions policies are a completely unrelated debate. One I have not said anything about.
Regardless – as I noted – the entire field – NOT me, believes that intelligence is 75% heritable. Short of genetic engineering you can not change the heritable portion of intelligence. Intelligence predicts success, the successful tend to procreate with each other – the result is intelligent children, wealthy zip codes etc are all indicia of inherited intelligence – conversely low intelligence correlated to failure which correlates to poverty and intelligence is 75% heritable – so AGAIN we would assume that the children of the poor will be less intelligent that the children of the wealthy.
To be clear that is a rule – with exceptions – but it still a rule.
You literally looked up a generic dictionary definition for the adjective “heritable” because you cannot grasp—or are desperately hiding from—the strict, mathematical definition of heritability used in actual behavioral genetics.
Let’s drag this back to reality and show exactly how you are mangling the science to protect your worldview:
You don’t know what “Heritability” means in statistics: You grabbed a dictionary definition for “heritable” (inheriting traits) to dodge the scientific definition of Heritability (\(h^{2}\)). In genetics, heritability is a mathematical ratio measuring how much of the variance in a specific population is due to genetic differences. It is not a fixed biological constant. If you equalize the environment (e.g., give everyone the exact same wealthy school district), the heritability statistic goes up, because the environmental variance drops to zero. You are treating a statistical description of a specific group as an unchangeable genetic rule. It’s embarrassing.
You claim that the difference between identical seeds in different environments is the “non-heritable portion.” Yes! That is exactly the point you just missed. If group A (wealthy) has a different environment than group B (impoverished), the difference between the two groups is entirely environmental, even if the trait is highly heritable within each group. You cannot use within-group heritability to prove that between-group differences are genetic. This is Day One material in introductory genetics, and you completely flunked it.
You claim that East Asia (outside of Singapore and Hong Kong) lives in “poverty worse than black and white poor in the US.” This is a hilariously outdated 1970s delusion. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have massive, hyper-developed, high-income economies with world-class, highly funded, centralized public education systems. Even in mainland China, the regions that dominate international testing (like Shanghai and Beijing) are hyper-wealthy, middle-class tech hubs with intensive, high-stakes test-prep cultures.
You smugly challenge, “If exposing kids to 30 million words boosts IQ, prove it and make a fortune.” It has been tested for decades. Early childhood enrichment programs like Head Start and intensive interventions (like the Abecedarian Project) have consistently proven to permanently boost academic achievement, language processing speed, and long-term socio-economic success. The world did pay a fortune for it—it’s called the global early-childhood education industry.
You claim zip codes and private SAT tutors are “wealth, not culture.” Newsflash: Wealth creates the culture of test success. Wealth buys the time for parents to read to children, buys the stable housing that reduces cognitive stress, and buys the private test-prep courses that teach the exact tricks to suceed the SAT.
You can keep typing “Oops” and hiding behind a dictionary, but you cannot escape the math. You got exposed for making up SAT percentile statistics, so you tried to pivot to racial eugenics, and now you’ve been exposed for not understanding basic genetic statistics. Every time you reply, you just dig the intellectual hole a little deeper.
The meaning of heritable has been the same since …. Darwin – probably much earlier.
There is no separate mathematical definition and even if there was – you can avoid the fundamental problem that words are just the way we communicate meaning. Human attributes are either acquired genetically – or environmentally – usually learned. They are not transmitted via cosmic rays from space.
Again nearly everyone would love it if intelligence could be significantly and reliably improved – no one has come up with any consequential means to do so todate
“You don’t know what “Heritability” means in statistics:”
Actually I do and you don’t – but that does not matter – you seem to think you can engage in some badly mangled appeal to authorites that do not back up your claims to evade REALITY. You do not have to be a behavioral geneticist to understand there are only two broad means by which human attributes are acquired
Frankly even that does not matter with respect to this debate.
Please EVERYONE is desperate for you to provide some means to reliably increase intelligence
Again if such a thing existed – you would instantly be richer than Elon Musk.
Separately – I would suggest you read your own definition – yuour definition and your USE contradict each other.
With respect to the seeds example – AGAIN – I have zero problems with the claim that the environment of the wealthy boosts intelligence
EXCEPT that we can and have tested that and the impact is not significant.
I can go into the twins separated at birth studies or the studies of children interracially adopted.
But there is a much simpler counter – the one I keep raising over and over and over again.
One that EVERY person either knows or can know simply from inspection.
If we had ANY means to boost intelligence – you would know it.
While the argument – made not just be me but many others here that we could teach students cricket or sailing or how to set a place setting for dinner to boost SAT scores is tongue in cheek – it is also Valid – If there are “environmental factors” – those are replicable and we could then easily raise everyones intelligence.
Every single person here – including you KNOWS that know consequential or reliable means of boosting intelligence exists.
“You claim that East Asia (outside of Singapore and Hong Kong) lives in “poverty worse than black and white poor in the US.”
“This is a hilariously outdated 1970s delusion. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have massive, hyper-developed, high-income economies with world-class, highly funded, centralized public education systems.”
Absolutely Taiwan and South Korean have standards of living that approach the US.
The population of east asia is 1.6B – the population of Taiwan is 23M the population of South Korea is 55M the population of Singapore is 10M
The population of Hong Kong is 10M – all together they do not make up 10% of South East Asia.
Have you been to Beijing ? I have. Regardless the standard of living in China today is approximately 14K The standard of living in the US 94K
Singapore is 107K, Hong kong is 54K South Korea is 37K – slightly more than 1/3 the US Taiwan is 42K Japan is 45K
The US working class – 2nd Quintile is 35-65K 2024 – that is the same as all the “advanced” countries in east asia Except Singapore.
The US bottom – is 35K – higher than the 90% of the 1.6B people in “east Asia”
While you are innaccurate with respect to Beijing and Shanghai – that does not matter.
The .5-1std difference in IQ between East Asians and Caucasians across the entire populations – Not Beijing and Shanghai.
For your idiotic – Wealth ENVIRONMENTALLY produces increases in intelligence to be true with the data we have – There would have to be 10 times as many uber wealthy p[people in East Asia as the US AND the rest of the east asian population would have to live in massive abject poverty.
The differences between Caucasian IQs and east asian IQs is across the average population.
Further even the model above with essentially medevil income disparities – still would not work – because by YOUR theory you would have depressed the average so much by the massive poverty required to bring the average back down.
“You smugly challenge, “If exposing kids to 30 million words boosts IQ, prove it and make a fortune.” It has been tested for decades. Early childhood enrichment programs like Head Start and intensive interventions (like the Abecedarian Project) have consistently proven to permanently boost academic achievement, language processing speed, and long-term socio-economic success. ”
The boosted academic acheivement BREIFLY – Participants in Head start entered 3rd grade ahead of their peers – by 6th grade it was not possible to distinguish those on head start from those who did not participate.
AGAIN – Everyone would be absolutely ecstatic if we had something that worked – the benefits of head start proved temporary
But you do not need to take my word for it – you do not need to take the words of the long term studies for it.
You can just note that absolutely nothing has changed for minorities trying to get into college – the differencece in SAT scores are still there and still the same. Minorities on the whole still have more difficulty performing in College.
To be clear ALL of this is AS A WHOLE – there are plenty of absolutely brilliant minorities. Bell curves have long tails. Average figures are still averages they do not change the fact that there will be people – 1, 2, 3 std devs from those averages.
But trends in averages are important – because what they tell us is that NOTHING you – the left has done has WORKED.
No head start did NOT work. That is not only well known from many studies – but also obvious from the failure to change trends in SAT’s
It is also obvious from the FACT that colleges are putting tremendous effort into remedial programs.
Even there – while nearly all participants in college remedial programs are DEI beneficiaries – even if you want to debate that – there is still zero doubt that the increased need for remedial programs means one of two things – either colleges are accepting more under qualified students – and given that enrollments are declining that means that the K-12 education system is FAILING, or the larger numbers of minorities they are admitting are under-qualified.
Or what is more likely – a combination of the above.
But the details DO NOT MATTER – what matters is that YOU FAILED.
If Head Start boosted intelligence – why having the SAT scores of minorities improved noticeably ?
If you haven’;t F#$Ked up K-12 education – why is the need for remedial college programs rising significantly ?
You fixate oin cherry picked left wing nut talking points – which are themselved typically cherry picked elements from cherry picked studies – they are not the conclusions.
I know of no one that is debating that Head Start resulted in significant improvements in students preparedness for School – but again – those result faded quickly. The benefits were temporary. And again – while plenty of studies prove that.
But you do not need studies to prove it – there was ZERO impact as students headed to college. Average SAT scores did not rise.
Once AGAIN there is nothing that actually works to boost intelligence
Have lots of people gotten wealthy on programs like Head Start – absolutely – just as we are hearing about Billions of dollars in Fraud in various other government social welfare programs. Fopr the money Head Start did at least provide TEMPORARY benefits – as to the Quality Learing center which is just flat out fraud. But the FACT is that no social welfare program has EVER been NET beneficial NONE. – there are many many reasons for this.
Goivernment inefficiency. Fraud waste., abuse, the fact that one size never fits all.
One of the best things Democrats ever did for the poor was the Gingrich Clinton deal to end welfare as we known it – the benefit to Poor people of ELIMINATING government programs was incredible. Unfortunately with the great recession – Obama restored and expanded a significant portion of what Clinton was slowly phasing out – Screwing over poor minorities once again.
Again one of the HUGE problems with the left is that as even private charities find – it is incredibly difficult to help people.
There is a portion of the “poor” – who will benefit from charity and government programs – but ALL of them will dig themselves out of poverty with or with out help. For much of the rest “helping” them actually traps them in poverty. It reinforces their perception of themselves as either incapable or as victims.
You can not make someone more intelligent. But you can make them more dependent and less capable of taking care of themselves – and that is the actual effect of many government programs.
Success builds on Succes. I repeatedly provide a long list of things that are relatively easy to accomplish that if followed – even MOSTLY followed will lift you from poverty to the middle class – nowhere in that list is a single govenrment program.
Incredibly important in that list is YOU DO IT YOURSELF – Success builds on success. That is true whether you are an addict on the streets of LA trying to recover – or you are Elon Musk. 26 years ago Musk was just one of tens of thousands of successful tech entrepeneurs – and not even a particularly noteable one – he was not Bezos, Page, Brin Jobs or gates. He was not even Balmer or Allen.
Success builds on success. You can not succeed if you beleive you are a victim. You can not succeed if you do not beleive that YOU alone are capable of succeeding. Unless you grasp your own ability to help yourself – no amount of help from others will accomplish anything.
This is also why so many lottery winners ultimately fail. They did NOT succeed on their own. Giving them a massive pile of money does not make them believe in themselves.
It does not even matter if you really are a “victim” – no one else can dig you out of whatever hole you are in – EVEN if you are not the one who dug the whole.
You can not increase Intelligence – but nearly everyone can improve their own lives. And nearly all of them actually know how, and will succeed when they decide they are ready to do so.
Head Start did not work – nor did that early education complex which while not litterally engaged in fraud in the way the quality learing center is, is still no less a waste of other peoples money – because Head Start does not work.
1. You Literally Do Not Know What “Heritability” Means You claim there is no separate mathematical definition of heritability and that it just means “inherited.” This is a spectacular, career-ending failure of basic science.
The Real Definition: In statistics and behavioral genetics, heritability is a population-level metric, not an individual one. It measures how much of the variation in a trait within a specific group can be attributed to genetic variations in that specific environment.
The Classic Proof: If you take genetically identical seeds, plant half in rich, fertilized soil, and plant the other half in barren, dry sand, the height difference within each plot will be 100% genetic (high heritability). But the massive height difference between the two plots is 100% environmental.
By applying a localized heritability metric to explain a macro-level racial gap across vastly different socioeconomic environments, you are committing the exact foundational error that first-year genetics professors flunk students for making.
2. Your East Asian Population Math is Broken. You tried to claim that South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore don’t make up 10% of “South East Asia.”
The Geography Failure: None of those countries are in Southeast Asia (except Singapore). They are East Asian cultural and economic centers.
The Income Failure: You claim China’s average standard of living is $14,000, and use that to argue that the entire East Asian population is poor. You are completely blind to the data. The high SAT scores and IQ test metrics for East Asians do not come from subsistence farmers in rural western China. They come from the hyper-developed urban centers—like Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei, Seoul, and Tokyo—where educational spending, luxury test-prep, and household wealth per capita match or exceed the U.S. middle class.
Your entire theory requires that a poor farmer in rural Tibet is taking the SAT and scoring a 1400. They aren’t. The test-taking demographic in East Asia is hyper-wealthy and urbanized, completely proving that wealth and intensive schooling drive the scores.
You claim that Head Start “failed” because the initial IQ bump fades by the 6th grade. Once again, your analysis is incredibly lazy.
The Long-Term Data: Decades of follow-up studies on early childhood intervention (like the Abecedarian Project and the HighScope Perry Preschool Study) prove that while the raw, abstract IQ test score bump can narrow over time, the permanent structural life changes are undeniable.
Children who went through these programs show permanently higher high school graduation rates, significantly higher college attendance, higher adult earnings, lower incarceration rates, and better health outcomes.
If a program permanently alters a child’s cognitive processing speed, academic attainment, and economic mobility for the rest of their life, declaring it a “failure” just because it didn’t permanently alter an arbitrary, culturally calibrated test score is a total delusion.
You keep screaming that if we could boost intelligence, someone would become “richer than Elon Musk.”
We do have a multi-billion dollar industry that reliably boosts standardized test scores and cognitive performance. It is called the private education and luxury test-prep market.
The reason it hasn’t turned everyone into a genius isn’t because intelligence is a fixed genetic rock. It’s because resources are finite and unequally distributed. Wealthy families spend billions of dollars every year buying high-quality nutrition, stable housing, elite private schooling, and boutique tutors to maximize their children’s cognitive outcomes.You are looking at a system where rich people literally buy higher test scores every single day and trying to pretend it’s an unchangeable biological law.
You pivot to claiming that the rise in college remedial programs is proof that “the left failed” and that underqualified minority students are being pushed into colleges.
Let’s look at reality: The rise in remediation is a direct result of the systematic defunding and privatization of public K-12 infrastructure over the last 20 years.When you fund schools through local property taxes, wealthy white suburbs get state-of-the-art labs and AP classes, while high-poverty school districts get understaffed classrooms and outdated textbooks.
When those underfunded students go to college, they need remediation not because their brains are biologically deficient, but because their high schools lacked the funding to teach them college-level algebra..
You are blaming the students for the institutional bankruptcy of the schools they were forced to attend.
Your entire argument is a desperate, circular loop: You claim the environment doesn’t matter because the gaps remain, but you ignore the fact that the environmental and economic gaps ,b<have never been closed.
You failed the basic math at the start of this thread, you failed the legal history of the 14th Amendment, you failed the software architecture of climate models, and now you have fundamentally failed basic behavioral genetics. You are shouting partisan talking points at a mountain of empirical data, and it is embarrassing to watch.
“You claim zip codes and private SAT tutors are “wealth, not culture.” Newsflash: Wealth creates the culture of test success. Wealth buys the time for parents to read to children, buys the stable housing that reduces cognitive stress, and buys the private test-prep courses that teach the exact tricks to suceed the SAT.”
Again – you are ignoring arguments you already lost. The differences in intelligence are measurable and FIXED at 3-6yrs old there is ZERO evidence that anything after 6 matters. Regardless you clearly know nothing about the wealthy.
Nor does it matter – Contra your claim – Head Start does not work – its gains are all gone long before SATs.
Beyond that – you know nothing – Do you really think most SAT scores above 1200 are from the children of the vanderbilts ?
Regardless, if you think reading to kids helps – then people should read to their children – it costs nothing.
As anyone who actually has children – wealthgy or not will tell you – there is no time for kids.
We MAKE time, because they are important to us – Rich or poor we MAKE time.
Stable housing is trivial DO YOUR JOB, Show up on time, do a good job. Does that guarantee that through no fault of your own you will not lose the job – Nope. But it does assure that you will have no problem finding another. There are ALWAYS more jobs than people. Why ? Because there is always something that we can find for someone to do that has value. Regardless people who do their job well are assured that they will either keep that job or be able to get another.
I would note – this is no different rich or poor. Only a tiny tiny portion of people with children own their home free and clear and have a job that is anymore secure than someone working at McDonalds. For EVERYONE – Keeping your job or being able to get another is a function of doing your job well.
How long do you think the family with a $5K/month mortgage will last compared to the person renting an apartment for $800
Your job security is doing your job well – regardless of where you are on the ladder.
“You can keep typing “Oops” and hiding behind a dictionary, but you cannot escape the math. ”
If you do not want called out for errors – do not make them.
There is no math that favors your idiot argument.
“You got exposed for making up SAT percentile statistics,”
Nope you just engaged in completely tangential nit picking that changes nothing.
“so you tried to pivot to racial eugenics,”
Just the facts. I did not create the world. I did not create the disparity in intelligence by race – just as I did not create the disparity in musical ability or athletic ability by race. East Asians dominate the SATs, Blacks dominate sports
I did not make the world trhe way it is – but pretending it is not the way it is – THAT is actual racism.
” and now you’ve been exposed for not understanding basic genetic statistics. ”
ROFL
Where have I been exposed ? Heritable in ALL contexts means what you get from your parents BEFORE YOU WERE BORN – genes.
non-heritable is everything else. Not only are you wrong on your idiotic claim – but not you nor anyone else has actually proven that the 25% of intelligence that is supposed to be non-heritable is.
I beleive that 25% number is correct – but there is NO PROOF that intelligence comes from anything but genes.
Again anything that is non-heritable is something that we can CHANGE no one anywhere ever has successfully boosted intelligence measurably
If exposure to cricket and sailing boosted intelligence – cricket and sailing would explode.
If reading to your children had a demonstrable effect – we would all read to our children.
If exposing infants to 30M words boosted intelligence – we would all chatter away at our infants.
If head start actually worked – EVERYONE would want head start for their kids.
You can get SAT prep courses for $100 – anyone can afford them. The rich pay more – they also drive Lamborghini Hurcans. But you can not cross manhattan any faster in a Lamborghini than a VW Beetle.
i am not defending western civilization – that is a completely independent debate.
As I have noted – east asians significantly out perform whites in intelligence tests.
And without any doubt 1000 years ago east asia was far and away the wealthiest part of the planet.
It may have been as recently as 300 years ago.
Western culture DESPITE slightly lower average intelligence – out performed east Asian culture.
The Why of that is an entirely different debate.
There are also other historical anomalies – prior to cauladen the estimated average intelligence in Scottland was significantly lower than the English – but by the american revolution – only a single generation later – we had the scottish enlightenment and for a short period scottland was the intellectual center of the world.
I am NOT aware of any sudden rise in average intelligence anywhere before in such a short period of time.
Regardless that is a point of inquiry.
Again the holy grail is finding ANY mechanism to boost intelligence.
Todate no such thing exists – if there was an IQ boosting pill it would be worth more than Viagra, or GLP1s.
because you are never able to think beyond the first order – you are ALWAYS oblivious to the fact that you constantly make static claims – but the world is NOT static. If the things you claim were true in the way you claim – we would and could change them
3 yr olds may benefit from hearing 30M words – they may benefit by better nutrition – though in the west there is very little difference in nutrition between poor infants and wealthy ones. Many factors related to infants FAVOR the poor – wealth parents are more likely to both work and the child is likely to be in some form of care at a very early age. As one example.
Infants do not benefit from or even notice yatchs country cloubs or all the things that you claim are culture – though you have literally just redefined wealth as culture.
Regardless your 30m words claim has some merit and can be tested – so why hasn;t it been and what are the results ?
Not only can it be tested – but it is also something that can be fixed – easily – so why haven’t you done that ?
If affluent parents can expose their children to a far greater number of words by 3 and that is beneficial – that is replicatable.
Rather than tear down society and rebuild it into a $hithole – as you are want to do – just expose infants to 30 m words and we can solve all kinds of disparities. .
Oh, look—another pivot. Every time a basic fact dismantles your argument, you desperately throw a smoke screen of irrelevant historical anecdotes about 18th-century Scotland or 1000-year-old Asian dynasties.
You smugly ask about the 30-million-word gap: “Why hasn’t it been tested and what are the results? Why haven’t you done that?” This is spectacularly dishonest. It has been tested, proved, and implemented for decades. The landmark Hart and Risley study that discovered this gap is literally one of the most famous and replicated pieces of educational research in human history. It forms the baseline foundation for Head Start programs, public pre-K initiatives, and early childhood intervention policies worldwide. Acting like a global, multi-billion-dollar educational infrastructure doesn’t exist just because you haven’t read about it is peak willful ignorance.
You actually had the audacity to claim that “many factors related to infants favor the poor” because wealthy parents work and put kids in daycare. This completely distorts the economic reality of child care. High-income families utilize premium, low-ratio developmental care and private nannies. Low-income working parents are disproportionately trapped in underfunded, high-ratio care or “childcare deserts” [2.1]. Furthermore, systemic poverty means higher exposure to environmental neurotoxins like lead and chronic financial stress, which pediatric neuroscientists have proven physically alter brain development. Pretending poverty is a developmental advantage is an astonishingly out-of-touch delusion.
You Still Mangle First-Order Logic. You accuse me of failing to think beyond the first order, yet you claim that if a problem can be fixed, it should already be solved. That is child-like reasoning. We know exactly how to fix the literacy gap: massive public investment in universal high-quality pre-K, pediatric care, and direct economic support for struggling families. The barrier isn’t scientific ignorance; it is political obstruction from people who share your exact ideology—those who scream about “socialism” and “tearing down society” the second anyone suggests funding public schools or helping poor children.
You wrap up by telling me to just “expose infants to 30 million words” to solve disparities. Congratulations! You just admitted that environmental changes, language exposure, and early education are the keys to cognitive outcomes. You just completely abandoned your own 200-year eugenics argument about “75% unchangeable genetic heritability” and admitted that intelligence metrics are environmentally driven.
You started this thread by confidently making up completely false math about SAT percentiles. When that blew up in your face, you ran to racial IQ charts. When the actual science of genetics blew that up, you pivoted to Scottish Enlightenment trivia and pretended childcare is an luxury for the poor. You are completely unmoored from data, logic, and history. Please keep typing; your self-demolition is highly entertaining
“Oh, look—another pivot. Every time a basic fact dismantles your argument, you desperately throw a smoke screen of irrelevant historical anecdotes about 18th-century Scotland or 1000-year-old Asian dynasties.”
Nope – you just Constantly add all kinds of unrelated claims to your arguments.
The debate over the west is a different debate – YOU raised it. I will be happy to obliterate you on that too if you wish.
Not the slightest desparation – You long ago lost this argument.
I am just having fun.
“You smugly “No you think you can read my emotions ?
Regardless, I am confident – because you are stupid and make crappy arguments.
I am also confident – because I KNOW reality -= and clearly you do not.
With respect to the 30M gap – Head Start REMAINS a FAILURE – all the benefits disappear in about 3 years.
Head start has a strong but temporary benefit for the kids in it.
We ALL Wish that were not true.
If Head Start worked – we would have head start for the middle class and for the wealthy
We don’t. Like all government programs – once started you can not end it.
You keep talking about various programs – absolutely they exist – they are all niche projects – Head Start is probably the largest in the world.
They REMAIN niche projects – because THEY DO NOT WORK.
I do not hate Head Start I really do not care about head start much one way or they other EXCEPT DOES IT WORK.
And the answer is NO.
Provide ANY Data that shows that kids that went through head start are doing better on their SATs or doing better in college.
Head start started in 1965 – The earliest participants are in their 50’s
It should be EASY to provide proof that the program has long term benefits.
BTW – RFK jr. and Trump have expanded Head Start. Head Start is popular – right and left.
That is NOT the same as Head Start works.
You keep dodging my DEMAND that you provide evidence that ANYTHING you claim WORKS.
Now you are jumping to Neurotoxins.
Love Canal was a middle class suburb.
Regardless the ACTUAL Evidence – and this effect the rich MORE than the poor is that helicopter parenting has produced children with weaker immune systems. That afflicts the rich and the middle class far more than the poor.
Lead – which is something we actually KNOW causes mental impairment – has been removed from Paint, has been removed from Gasoline.
Is increasingly being removed from waterlines – lines that provide water to the homes of the rich and poor alike.
And despite RADICALLY Lowering Everyones exposure to environmental lead – we are NOT seeing any noticable rise in intelligence.
In fact in the 20th century we are seeing a small decline – which is NEW.
Overall both in the US and Globally – rising standard of living corresponds to safer and healthier living.
Coal replaced buring wood, dung and peat, Oil replace coal, Gas and electric have replace oil.
The reality is that Everyone – rich and poor lives in Cleaner homes with FAR LESS toxins than ever before.
There is no environmental toxin – NONE that was more harmful and more prevalent than those produced by burning wood, dung and peat – which humans have done for likely 900,000 years. Even YOU likely know how bad col heat was – and that was BETTER than Wood. Today no one in the west burn coal in their homes – though there are plenty of places in the world where they still do – LIKE EAST ASIA. In fact Enviromental polution in East Asia is significantly greater than the US. The AQI of LA iright now is 50, the AQI of Bejing right now is 72. the AQI of Shanghai is 93.
All of these are down – But LA has the worst polution of any major city in the US and though still too high has been radically lowered starting LONG AGO.
LA has a unique problem in that polution is trapped by geography.
Conversely Beijing and Shanghai are little different from all major chinese cities – many are far worse.
All your nonsense about Neurotoxins – is just that – these are tiny problems that wealthy nations fixate on.
All seriously health threats from pollution in the US are WAY Down. They are down from the past, they are down from most of the rest of the world.
The trend for clean air, clean water, clean homes is IMPROVEMENT correlating with rise in standard of living.
True in the US, true everywhere in the world.
There is litterally only ONE anomally in that EVER – an that is the US produced a MASSIVE amount of pollution during WWII. And then spent decades cleaning it up. Love Canal was the consequence of WWII.
Regardless the pollution fo WWII with few exceptions DID NOT effect homes.
The homes of poor people in the US are safger in everyway than those of poor people elsewhere in the world.
Even than rich people in most of the world.
This is just another RED HERRING.
Absolutely the wealthy live in cleaner homes than the middle class and the middle class lives in cleaner homes than the poor – and that has always been true.
But the poor today live in cleaner homes than the uber wealthy in 1900. and than the middle class in 1950.
Should we do better ? Well there is actually a serious debate on that. Probably eliminating things like lead are a good thing.
But the overall improvement in cleanliness has resulted in children developing weaker immune systems, having more and more serious allergies.
And the critical period for this is ….. 0-3yrs. Much of the advice that doctors were giving wealthy and middle class mother for the past 50 years has been DEAD WRONG
With respect to your “neurotoxin” argument – “that dog won’t hunt”
Small problems with rare impacts do not cause wide spread societal differences.
Your just spitballing now.
Or maybe trying to sell this to yourself.
“Yet you claim that if a problem can be fixed, it should already be solved. ”
Correct.
“That is child-like reasoning.”
No it is actually how the free market works.
How do you think Caol replaced dun and wood and peat ? how do you think oil replaced coal. ?
how do you think gas and electric replaced oil ?
These happened because a society with a higher standard of living wanted it.
Wood is still one of the cheapest forms of heat
Coal is still cheaper than oil
Oil is still cheaper than gas or electric.
Left wing nuts did not drive these changes – ordinary people did.
They were not as a result of government poilicies.
They were he result of peoples free choices.
When something is better and we are able to afford it – it just happens – no government needed.
That is not chbild like – it is how the world has improved for all of human existance.
” We know exactly how to fix the literacy gap: massive public investment in universal high-quality pre-K, pediatric care, and direct economic support for struggling families. ”
ROFL
The things that YOU claim the wealthy provide their kids that the poor do not – mostly
COST NOTHING – and happened without government.
If saying alot to your kids is beneficial – then parents should speak to their kids.
Shuttling them off to be warehoused with lots of other young children is not going to expose them to 30M words.
Further if it is NOT just 30M words – but a significantly broader vocabulary – Head Start programs will do NOTHING.
The average vocabulary of the working class MIGHT be 15,000 words. The average vocabulary of a business person is 50,000 words.
Puting children in the care of some day care is NOT going to expose them to but a tiny fraction of the vocabuilary of a upper middle class mother.
Regardless you say you KNOW this works – but so far it HASN:t – contra your claims the benefits from Head Start are TEMPORARY.
Again head start has been arround for 69 years – Please show me the test results that demonstrate that the children of the first decade of Head Start now have IQ’s or SAT scores that meet middle class norms – much less are competitive with the wealthy ?
OIn fact lets go beyond intelligence – show me ANYWHERE ANYTIME where any countries program of this type for children produced ANY documented benefit when they reached adulthood ?
If there was any benefit to any of this – my challenge would be Trivial to meet.
These is no government social welfare program of any kind ever that has delivered a NET benefit.
No you do not know how to fix the literacy gap.
Again Head Start has been around for 60 years – we have seen NO IMPROVEMENT in the SAT SCORES of the poor.
We have seen no improvement in the SAT scores of even the subset of Head Start participants.
Or pick a different criteria besides SAT scores.
Find ANYTHING that has been done for children that has shown measureable benefits as an adult.
The barrier is not political obstruction it is FAILURE.
Even liberal lion of the Left – Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan – who was the architect of many great society programs under LBJ concluded by the early 80’s that these programs – and that includes HEAD START had on net made things WORSE for poor and minorities.
Yes the barrier is scientific ignorance – the unwilliness of left wing nuts like you to grasp that Government fixing the world is somewhere between incredibly hard and totally impossible.
AGAIN – if there was something that worked – it would just happen – without govenrment funding. It would happen because the poor in this country are better off than the middle class in europe and even the rich in much of the world
CONTRA your nonsense – they can and already do afford a better lifestyle than anyone on earth a century ago – and than 90% of the earth today.
If they could do even better for their kids – they would PERIOD – themselves, without any government at all.
As is typical the left tells us there is some Malthusian disaster, tries to get us to spend a fortune – most of which is directed without regard for the problem, and the results ? Nothing. Because the actual problem is NOT an end of the world issue and because anything that actually needs improved – we do perfectly well on our own. As we have done for thousands of years.
The scientific ignorance is the unwillingness of those of you on the left – EVEN scientists to Grasp that if you came up with something that worked – no government would be needed.
The FACT is none of this works.
As to “socialsim” – what I have pointed out is that this nonsense fails FOR THE SAME REASON SOCIALISM FAILS.
You are still perfectly free to prove success – but no one EVER should have publicly funded any of this garbage without FAR BETTER evidence of success.
Which you do not have.
Spending public money on things that are certain to fail is THEFT
“You wrap up by telling me to just “expose infants to 30 million words” to solve disparities. Congratulations! You just admitted that environmental changes, language exposure, and early education are the keys to cognitive outcomes.”
No I have said – you have made a Claim that calim is trivially testable – so TEST IT.
If it works Great – we have something that costs nothing, and works.
I strongly suspect that it will not work – But I have no problems with trying something that costs nothing and that poor parents can do themselves at no cost if it actually works.
There is no “admit” one way or the other – the Scientific claim is that 25% of intelligences is non-heritable.
But we do not have a single non-heritable factor that we have established contributes to intelligence.
Regardless I do not have a problem beleiving – and that is all that it is a belief that there are non-heritable factors in intelligence.
But saying that there likely are som unidentified non-heritable factors is NOT the same as saying that This will work or that will work.
You want to spend public money to do something YOU have to prover that it works – you can not guess, and you can not produce some study,
You have to try it, EVENJ IF IT works – then you have to try it again, then you have to scale it.
I would be very surprisesed if it is not possible to find one or two non-heritable factors that is carefully constructed trials conducted by the very best people produces good results – Section 8 worked pretty well when the participants were cherry picked and they were provided the best of the best in supporting services. It has proved HARMFUL to minority communities when it was scaled up. Many things do not scale – that is true of government programs – it is true in the free market – it is true everywhere. Solutions that work are rare – solutions that work at scale are close to non-existant.
Money is not the only reason things do not scale. With section 8 – there is just are not enough of the really really good support people – they do not exist – not at any pay. Only 2 in 100 people have an IQ of 130 or above – no amount of money will change that.
Further we need those people – not just to run government social programs – but as doctors, lawyers, judges, rocket scientists, entrepreneurs.
As economist Julian Simon demonstrated in the Ultimate Resource II – the only actually limited resource is the human mind.
At any given time – we only have so many people – it takes years to make more and we do so slowly.
Of those 8B people – only 2% have IQs over 130, only 0.25% have IQs over 145. Intelligence is RARE.
Finding people to dig ditches is easy. Finding people to take us to mars is not.
Even finding people to teach children, nurse the ill, police society, …. is HARD.
Contra BOTH the left and the right – you can not fix the limited supply of human intelligence by paying people more money.
Money does not make ordinary people smarter. But it does move smart people from one valuable task to another.
Do you want green energy or do you want to scale section 8 up nation wide ? You do not have enough people who are smart enough to do both.
Even in other fields – the average IQ of a teacher is supposed to be 125 – which is also supposed to be the average of college graduates as a whole.
Frankly I find both claims high. US teachers appear to have the same IQ as teachers globally but they are significantly behind teachers globally in numeracy.
Regardless there are only so many people with IQs of 125 we need more people with IQs of 125 than just for teachers.
We need more people at nearly every IQ level than we have.
That means ANYtime you throw money at a problem – even if you succeed – you fix one thing by breaking another.
and immigration – which I am broadly FOR – mostly makes the problem worse – the average IQ of legal immigrants is significantly below 100,
That of illegals even worse. The average IQ of Somalis is 68 – that is considered mentally retarded. Sub Saharan Africans are only slightly better.
central and south Americans are better but still not to an average of 100. More immigrants means more need for people with higher IQ and a SMALLER supply as a percent of the whole.
American is actually quite good at boosting IQ – even if we do not know how. Generally each successive generation of the children of immigrants has higher intelligence than their parents. SOMETHING in the US must improve intelligence. BTW that is NOT true accross the world – for unknown reasons successive generations of immigrant children in arab countries actually decline in intelligence. In the US the gains slow with successive generations but the first generation gain is .5 std dev or about 7pts.
” You just completely abandoned your own 200-year eugenics argument about “75% unchangeable genetic heritability” and admitted that intelligence metrics are environmentally driven.”
Nope -75% heritable 25% non-heritable. Regardless, there is a giant gulf between there exists some non-heritable factor and this particular factor works.
This is not eugenics it is science – heredity – Gregor Mendel, Darwin, Watson and Crick.
Facts are not racist X.
But you are a racist.
Calling someone a “racist” is a classic, desperate evasive tactic when you have completely run out of arguments.
You didn’t cite “facts.” You got publicly exposed for:
Mangling basic middle-school subtraction and percentages.
Falsely claiming SAT percentiles map 1:1 to general population IQ.
Misunderstanding the basic statistical definition of heritability.
Falsely claiming early childhood word exposure has never been tested.
When your fake statistics were thoroughly debunked by real psychometrics and economics, you threw a temper tantrum and resorted to a childish ad hominem attack.
Projecting your own biases onto others won’t fix your broken math. You are completely cooked. Project over.
“Calling someone a “racist” is a classic, desperate evasive tactic when you have completely run out of arguments”
So the left has run out of arguments with respect to Trump and MAGA ?.
“You didn’t cite “facts.” ”
I cited lots of them – you have not cited facts.
“Mangling basic middle-school subtraction and percentages.”
Nope.
“Falsely claiming SAT percentiles map 1:1 to general population IQ.”
Again – read EXACTLYT what I wrote – you are AGAIN Lying.
Misunderstanding the basic statistical definition of heritability.
“Falsely claiming early childhood word exposure has never been tested.”
I did not claim that – though I did tell you if you were so gung ho to test it.
I beleive you named a study but you did not produce any results.
Regardless AGAIN – If something COSTS NOTHING, and HAS SIGNIFICANT BENEFITS – then it happens automatically.
Given that doctors are not telling parents to talk constantly to their babies and expand their own vocabulary – advice that is easy to give and costs nothing – then I presume – likely correctly that the results of any study were not what you hoped for.
But AGAIN – even if I am wrong – Great – lets advise poor parents to read dictionaries to their children.
“When your fake statistics ”
You have not disproved any claim I have made.
“Were thoroughly debunked by real psychometrics and economics”
ROFL – you know nothing about either.
Regardless – I havve asked you REPEATEDLY – for actual evidence of anything that has ACTUALLY improved intelligence demonstrably.
You have NOT offered anything.
But the reason I asked you with so much confidence is that if such a thing existed – EVERYONE WOULD KNOW.
Is there a person on the planet that does not know what viagra is ?
It there a person on the planet that does not know what a GLP1 is.
The stupidest people on earth KNOW about big things that work – they even know about little things that work.
Boosting intelligence is the biggest thing ever.
EVERYONE would know if such a thing existed.
Your making the same arguments as the collusion delusion.
You are claiming that something is true – that if True could not possibly be kept secret – that nearly everyone who knew it would make sure others did too.
I linked a video on valuable skills in the age of AI – really it is about critical thinking.
ONE aspect of critical thinking is looking at some claim – YOUR claims, and then thinking – “if this is true, what else must be true ?”
If there was something that could boost IQ by 10pts – a pill theraphy, lifestyle change, reading to your children ….
EVERYONE would know.
If something could boost your IQ by 10pts and it cost $1000 – EVERYONE would find $1000.
If it cost $10000 – everyone would find $10000
A 10pt boost in IQ probably has a lifetime value of over $1M.
This is just ONE of many things that MUST be true for your claim to be true.
If there was something that could boost IQ by 10PTS and it cost $1B – Trump and musk would have bought it.
X
as is typical – you make stupid claims provide no support, expect people will beleive you because they sound good.
Insult anyone who argues with you.
Toss out red herrings all over.,
beat straw men to death.
lie about the arguments others have made.
And then claim They did all these things to you.
I have insulted you with actual insults – AFTER insulting you with FACTS.
You are clearly the winner, x.
No temper tantrum – having great fun as you circle the drain.
EB opened a stupid can of worms and you jumped right in and are struggling against reality hillariously.
Regardless, the issues here are simple – If what you claim is true – it is easily fixable – and you have had 60+ years to do so and failed.
Either you are wrong or incompetent.
If what you claim is true – Even if YOU refused to fix it – others would.
One of the wealthiest families in the world is the Walton family.
They got that way by affordably selling to poor people things they wanted.
If there was a magic fix for low sat scores – Walmart would sell it for $9.99
The world is not static. The problems that can not be fixed by the free market today – either are not solvable today, or face siufficient obstacles from government that they are not solveable today.
But tomorow is another day – and we start again.
In 2000 I would not have bet that a significant portion of cars would be electric cars.
Government did not make that happen Elon Musk did – now others are riding his coat tails.
Regardless the POINT is that free markets will change whatever we want – When it is actually possible to change it.
People wanted a sex pill – for along time – that was impossible – then we got viagra.
People wanted a weight loss pill – for a long time that was impossible – now we have GLP1’s
Who knows – it is early days – maybe they will prove to be a disaster. If so – we will go back to the drawing board.
Free markets provide whatever we want – when or standard of living is high enough and what we want has become possible.
And Walmart is proof that whatever it is – a discount version will be available to the lower classes affordably.
No actually solvable problem sits static for 60 years.
Your Walmart analogy is hilariously broken and perfectly exposes your complete economic illiteracy. You are treating human brain development like a cheap plastic toaster you can buy off a shelf.
Let’s look at why your “static market” argument completely collapses in the real world,
You can’t buy a stable home at Walmart. The free market is excellent at selling consumer goods, but it cannot sell a low-income child a zip code with a fully funded school district, an stress-free household, or highly paid teachers. Those are structural, systemic resources, not retail commodities.
You claim that if a fix for low SAT scores existed, the market would sell it. It does sell it! It’s a multi-billion-dollar industry called private tutoring, test-prep academies, elite private schools, and early childhood centers. The market created the fix, but because it’s a free market, only affluent parents can afford to buy it. You are literally staring at a market solution that favors the rich and claiming it doesn’t exist.
You claim no solvable problem sits static for 60 years. But U.S. high school graduation rates rose from roughly 50% in the 1960s to over 85% today. Extreme poverty rates have dropped. NAEP test scores rose steadily for decades until the pandemic. Progress has happened, but it is constantly dragged down by underfunded infrastructure and the very wage gaps you defend.
The only one circling the drain here is you. Sit down and take the loss. It’s the most honest thing you can do now.
“Your Walmart analogy is hilariously broken and perfectly exposes your complete economic illiteracy. You are treating human brain development like a cheap plastic toaster you can buy off a shelf.”
The exact same economics applies to everything – toasters, rockets to mars.
“You can’t buy a stable home at Walmart. ”
Correct – yuou have to create that yourself – it costs nothing.
Do not make stupid decisions like getting pregnant before you can afford a child.
Do not marry dead beats and thugs.
Do not form a family or household until you are able to support one.
I can go on and on – the requirements for a stable home – are no different for the rich or poor,
and plenty of rich people come from broken homes.
Regardless these things are in YOUR control.
“The free market is excellent at selling consumer goods,”
At either end of every single free market transaction is things that we do not normally consider economic.
buying tickets to the movies – going out to dinner with my wife or family – these are economic – but they are also about love and family and fun.
I work because I enjoy it – I also work to pay the mortgage and to go to dinner with my wife.
You keep making stupid arguments – your claim that markets are not about things such as stable homes is bunk that was debunked more than a century ago.
Even you left wing nuts rant that “no child should die because their parents can not afford cancer treatment”.
But only a moron actually beleives that – For every single child that avoided death because some angel stepped in to pay an unaffordable bill – children all over the world died from the same thing or things even easier to correct.
Further even transfering this to government – changes nothing. PPACA wrote into federal law that it woudl cover anything life saving up to $250K.
Over that – the person dies. There is not enough money on the planet to save every person that can be saved if money is not a factor.
We do not like it – we spout nonsense about children never having to die over money.
Fortunately those hard decisions are rarer and rarer the more affluent a society is.
But people die over money all the time. And that will never change.
What will change is the threshold at which saving them becomes practical.
Regardless there is nothing that is not fundimentally economic – because economics is ultimately about everything we want and need and how we go about getting them.
You want a stable home – make good life choices – like get and keep a job, like do not commit crimes, or take drugs, or get pregnant before you are ready to have a family.
Make good life chocies – even make MOSTLY good lifer choices and you will go from poverty to the middle class – and you will have a stable home.
Children end up in unstable homes through no fault of their own – adults do not.
Further while unstable homes are more common among the poor because …… The poor are less intelligent and therefore make poorer life choices.
It is still increasingly common to find stress and unstable homes in wealthy families.
Regardles unstable homes are easy to fix – the adults in those homes can fix them.
But government, charity, outsiders CAN NOT.
“but it cannot sell a low-income child a zip code with a fully funded school district,”
The shittiues schools in the country have the most spending per student.
You need to let go of that stupid claim .
And there are other choices – I am in PA – we have cyber charters. MOST of those in cycber charters are por minority single parent kids.
No matter what your zip code – you can join a cyber charter – it costs you nothing, The education is not as good as a private school – but it is above the state average.
“an stress-free household”
Do not make bad decisions that cause you stress.
I would tend to bet that wealthy families have far more stress.
A poor single mother has to worry about paying the rent.
If Elon Musk F#$KS up – hundreds of thousands of people could lose their jobs, investors and IRAs and pension funds could lose billions.
Pretty sure Musk has 10,000 times more stress. Though I am sure he is better able to deal with it.
One reason people are poor is because they are not intelligent and make poor life choices.
Another is because they do not handle stress well.
You keep talking about the tress etc of poor families – but none of it is unique.
What is different is not whether we have stress, but how we deal with it.
My wife suffers from anxiety and depression – we live exactly the same life – but she is far more stressed than I.
Far more stressed than your poor person.
She is very intelligent and therefore we are not going to lose our home or many other things.
But that does not change the fact that she is hyper stressed.
She has ways to cope – but they do not make the stress disapear.
Stress is not caused by poverty. Badly handling stress may cause poverty – but poverty is not the cause of the stress.
Everyone has stress – rich or poor – just like intelligence it is NOT distributed evenly.
Just like intelligence it is likely the poor are more stressed – but again – they are poor because they are not intelligent, they have made poor life choices and they deal with stress badly.
We can not fix intelligence – that is what this long debate is about.
We have some means of reducing stress – not perfect ones – but ones that REDUCE not eliminate.
And again as I said – you can succeed – you can have a stable home.
By MOSTLY making good life choices.
To some extent that can be taught – in school, the same schools we have today, without spending any more money.
“highly paid teachers.”
The states that best prepare studnets for college do not have highly paid teachers.
I have addressed this before – at its very best paying people more – just trades one problem for anyother.
Raise teachers pay and lose your nurses and police and ….
Another common left wing nut problem – you MUST make the world work with the people you have – not the ones that do not exist.
“Those are structural, systemic resources, not retail commodities.”
The moment you use the word resources – your in the domain of markets.
Government does not CREATE resources – it steals them from elsewhere.
AGAIN Coases law tells you that free markets will allocate resources better than anything else.
And you are back to the socialist calculation problem.
Move something into government and the cost explodes – why ? One reason is that Government is isolated from the price system that is the free markets.
While all govenrment is not litterally socialsim – nearly all government suffers from the socialist calculation problem.
One of the reasons I want to get rid of all taxes except consumption taxes – is because that partly restores market controls on government choices.
The left – and all the people who buy your “eat the rich” nonsense.
Want that because the damage done by stealing from the wealthy though HUGE is not obvious.
Peopel do not grasp that stealing from the right is stealling real investgment that benefits them.
If ordinary people understood investing – they would already be rich.
But everyone knows that THEY are paying sales taxes – propose to spend money and EVERYONE will require you to justify that spending.
That will be incredibly hard to do – because in FACT very little govenrment spending is justified.
\
You will not get your head start money because the very people you think are benefiting from it will not pay even part of the cost.
Bercause when it is THEIR money – they better understand that it is WASTE.
“You claim that if a fix for low SAT scores existed, the market would sell it. It does sell it! It’s a multi-billion-dollar industry called private tutoring, test-prep academies, elite private schools, and early childhood centers.”
You can buy test prep for $100 or do it yourself for free as my son did.
Anyone can afford free.
Regardless 50 years ago there was almost no test prep industry. You claim it produces results.
So where are those results ? One of the reasons mensa no longer accepts SATs is that ECT has had to dumb them down.
The eductions system is failing and real scores are going down not up.
“The market created the fix, but because it’s a free market, only affluent parents can afford to buy it. You are literally staring at a market solution that favors the rich and claiming it doesn’t exist.”
Again – if you were correct – Walmart would offer it. You make more money selling toilet paper than diamonds.
The waltons are the wealthiest family in the world because they take both the basics AND the luxury goods that the poor want and they make them affordable. You can make more money selling an SAT test prep that boosts your score 100pts for $100 to everyone that $10000 to the uber rich
There is no such thing as a market that favors the rich. Anything ordinary people want badly enough – the market will provide affodably to ordinary people.
If only the rich buy something – it is because the rest of us do not want it badly enough.
Poor kids in this country are walking arround with a computer in their pockets that is 1million times more powerful that the one I bought for nearly 7,000 in 1978. Free markets did that.
Your poor family can go to the grocery in February and buy a pint of strawberries for 10% more than they cost in season.
They might be grown in Israel or Brazil and flown in.
There is no food that is not available to even the poorest family in the US completely out of season at barely more than in season.
NO ONE had those choices 50 years ago. EVERYONE has them now.
87% of US households have air-conditioning. many of the rich did not have air-conditioning in 1975.
Poor people have air conditioning.
My tenants have air conditioning.
If I did not provide it -0 they can buy a window unit on Facebook for $25.
This is what free markets do. – they make todays luxuries cheap necessities tomorrow.
If Walmart or some similar entrepeneur is not providing cheap test prep to match that available to the rich it is either because the poor do not see the value
or it does not work. The evidence is more the latter than the former.
” But U.S. high school graduation rates rose from roughly 50% in the 1960s to over 85% today. Extreme poverty rates have dropped.”
Correct – solvable problems get solved.
” NAEP test scores rose steadily for decades until the pandemic”
“Declines in test scores from 2015 through 2025 affected both rich and poor districts, and crossed racial and geographic divides. Declines were long-term, occurring not only during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Why U.S. Test Scores Are in a ‘Generation-Long Decline'”. The New York Times.
OOPS
BTW I can not find any NEAP date prior to 1994 – but from 1994 to the present scores have been DECLINING – very slowly.
This only matters in that it is another lie of yours.
What I explicitly said was that no problem that is solvable sits static for 60 years.
Proving that SOME things have improved – does not falsify that claim – it supports it.
“Progress has happened”
Of course it has – NO THANKS TO YOU.
“but it is constantly dragged down by underfunded infrastructure and the very wage gaps you defend.”
Education spending has risen faster than any other spending except healthcare.
OOPS.
Having zero interest in something and recognizing that it is none of governments business is not defending it.
You are entitled to whatever wage you can negotiate freely with your employer.
I have no problem with unions – so long as government stays out of the relationship between the union and the employer.
You can negotiate as an individual or as a member of a group – your choice – but wage negotiations are not governments business.
Regardless – EXCEPT for education and healthcare the inflation adjusted price of EVERYTHING has dropped.
Get rid of the FED and the real price will drop.
Pick ANYTHING except healthcare and education – find out what it cost 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago. ANYTHING
Convert he price to the number of minimum (or median) wage hours you would have to work to buy it.
Compare that to the price in hours worked to buy at todays minimum (or media) wage – and the price of EVERYTHING is lower.
BTW if standard of living rises – and it has – this HAS to be true.
AGAIN standard of living is producing more that humans value with less human effort.
“The only one circling the drain here is you. Sit down and take the loss. It’s the most honest thing you can do now.”
ROFL
I would ask you to name a single point you have gotten correct – but you do not even appear to be cognizant of your own lies.
Regardless almost nothing you have asserted is correct.
You have proven nothing.
” Insulting someone’s credentials while being completely wrong about basic science is a bad look.”
Meaningless drivel
EB is a pseudonym – he has no “credentials” – his claims about himself – just as most all of our claims about ourselves are not falsifiable.
That is not an insult – it is just reality.
Asserting based on the intellectual nonsense that EB and now you are repeating that his claim to be a merit scholar is dubious
IS AN INSULT
It is also valid analysis.
Sometimes the Truth hurts.
In fact that is one of the Core truths that the left rejects – that any conclusion that is emoptionaly hurtful is inherently false.
“Standardized tests are NOT IQ tests. They are not even close to alike. No psychometrician or testing agency (like the College Board or ACT) classifies these exams as IQ tests. They are achievement and aptitude tests designed to measure acquired knowledge in specific high school subjects like algebra and reading comprehension.”
“A typical “SAT to IQ” conversion (for the SAT 1995+ version) lists 1600 SAT ≈ IQ 138 and 1500 SAT ≈ IQ 129. For the SAT 1994 and older version, the same scores are listed as 1600 SAT ≈ IQ 166 and 1500 SAT ≈ IQ 150.”
From AI
https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/satiq.aspx
“Mensa accepts SAT scores as proof of IQ if they were taken prior to specific cutoff dates, typically requiring a score that places you in the top 2% of the population. For the SAT, this generally means achieving a combined score that meets Mensa’s qualifying criteria, which is often around 130 or higher on standardized tests.”
Your comment smugly brags that Mensa accepts SAT scores to prove IQ. But if you actually scroll down on the exact link you pasted, it says in plain English: “Mensa considers that scores from after January 31, 1994, ‘No longer correlate with an IQ test.'”The modern SAT is not an IQ test. Mensa rejected it over 30 years ago because it became a test of learned high school achievement, completely obliterating your entire argument.
Your “Data” is literally just a guy named Rodrigo making a spreadsheet. You confidently claimed you were citing “DATA – FACTS.” But your source is a private, copy-pasted estimation page written by a single guy named Rodrigo de la Jara. Rodrigo himself explicitly warns you on that page: “Everything below that is extrapolation. Also note that the decimal places give the impression that the numbers are more precise than they really are.”You are treating a random guy’s internet math project as infallible psychological gospel.
Even on Rodrigo’s extrapolated chart, a 1000 SAT is listed as the 71st percentile of test-takers, not the 50th. Once again, your previous claim that “50th percentile on the SAT = 100 IQ” completely implodes because you still cannot grasp that college-bound test-takers are a selective, above-average pool.
You tried to use an AI snippet and an outdated, archived 1990s table to claim you “defeated the left with facts.” Instead, you proved you cannot read a basic disclaimer on a webpage. “Sometimes the truth hurts,” indeed.
“Mensa considers that scores from after January 31, 1994″
Don;t care – point still made. Are you going to claim racism in SAT tests only started in 1994 ?
You didn’t just miss a detail; your entire point collapsed. You explicitly argued that the SAT is an immutable, biological “IQ test.” The fact that testing agencies and Mensa explicitly stated over 30 years ago that the modern SAT no longer correlates with an IQ test means your core premise is completely dead.
Saying you “don’t care” that the modern SAT is not an IQ test is a flat-out admission of willful ignorance. You got completely cornered by the facts, so you are choosing to shut your eyes to protect a ruined argument.
You ask if racism only started in 1994. No, that is the exact year the College Board changed the test structure to reduce abstract vocabulary traps and focus heavily on learned high school curriculum. By stripping out the abstract puzzles, they proved that SAT scores are driven by educational access and learned skills, not genetic wiring.
When presented with direct, verifiable evidence from the very link you pasted, you literally said “don’t care.” You aren’t defending truth or science; you are just a internet troll clinging to a debunked narrative because your ego can’t handle a statistical reality check. You are done.
X please read what I actually wrote.
But then why am I surprised – you get nothing right.
You made claims regarding he NAEP =- that god know where you got – NEAP scores have been declining for a long time – the decline was worse during the pandemic – but thet were in significant decline for more than a decade and slow decline before that.
You can not get ANYTHING correct – you can not get your own claims correct.
You want to rant about my eyeballing a percentage – you can not even get things you purportedly looked up right.
You lie about your own claims
you lie about my claims.
You beat the crap out of straw men.
I have made BIG arguments – I have said FIND ANYTHING – and you come up with nothing.
That is pretty damming – there MUST be something ?
Even the rules of economics are never that clean.
Yet you have come up with nothing.
Lets assume NEAP showed a steady gain – it did not – which is why the perennial “Why can’t johnny read” article 0- even on the NYT.
But if it did that would at best be a continuation of trends that are more than a century long – not evidence left wing nut programs worked.
But lets just say they did – that over the course of 60 years and uncounted trillions of dollars in spending that scores rose half a STD DEV – they haven’t but lets just assume they have. That is a massive cost for a tiny benefit. No the free market would not have paid that.
And what is the free market – THE PEOPLE.
It is the most democratic system in existence.
Free markets are near pefect democracy – only restricted from the use of FORCE.
Any test of your ability to learn is a test of intelligence – as I pointed out before – intelligence is defined as the ability to learn.
I do not know what MENSA’s beef with more modern versions of some standardized tests – but if they as YOU claim measure learning – then they measure intelligence – those are the same thing.
Saying “I do not know” what Mensa’s reasoning is isn’t just an excuse—it is an embarrassing evasion of facts you introduced yourself. You are intentionally playing ignorant because looking into Mensa’s actual data would force you to admit your entire argument is a total fraud.
Claiming that a test of learning is the exact same thing as a test of intelligence is a massive psychometric failure. Intelligence is your raw, abstract cognitive capacity. Learning is the acquired knowledge you gain from specific instruction. A test on high-school algebra or English vocabulary doesn’t measure your biological brain power; it measures whether you had a competent teacher and a stable school district to teach you the material.
Mensa didn’t have a random “beef” with the SAT. In 1994, the College Board intentionally altered the test to remove abstract, analytical puzzles and align it strictly with high school curriculum. Mensa cut ties because they recognized the SAT transformed into an achievement test—meaning it measures wealth, private tutoring, and school funding, not unchangeable IQ.
You are the one who confidently dragged Mensa into this comment section to try and validate your point. The exact moment your own link proved that Mensa completely rejects the modern SAT, you suddenly threw your hands up, claimed ignorance, and tried to rewrite the dictionary definitions of psychology on the fly.
You are completely intellectually bankrupt. Stop replying, take the loss, and go read a textbook.
“Saying “I do not know” what Mensa’s reasoning is isn’t just an excuse—it is an embarrassing evasion of facts you introduced yourself. ”
No it is a fact. I am not privy to Mensa’s thinking. I do not even particlurly like Mensa.
Regardless neither you nor I know why Mensa stoiped using the SATs as proof of IQ.
Plenty of other places still do. There is ZERO doubt that SAT’s are still a measure of intelligence.
Though you keep gaming it – you ADMIT that.
Is the SAT a test of learning ? You have said that repeatedly. You Beleive it is a test of elite learning – as if there is such a thing.
I know DEI nut jobs want to shill 2 + 2 – 5 – but for 99.999% of people – rich or poor – we learn the same things.
But we do not learn them at the same rate.
The SAT tests hoiw MUCH you have learned in the approx 18 years you have lived.
We ALL start at the same place – near zero learning.
But we do not end up at the same place.
So testing how much we have learned by 18 is the same as testing how fast we learn.
Technically one is the derivative of the other – but that is irrelevant when the starting point for everyone is the same and the time is approximately the same.
Intelligence is our ability to learn which can be measured by how much we have learned divided by the time it took to learn it.
All standarized tests are tests of intelligence.
So Mensa quit accepting SATs – what does that mean?
We can not know without their saying – maybe they have.
My guess is that the SATs started duming down the test to inflate scores – we know that happened.
and either they did so continuously – meanin Mensa would have tro calculate a new convesrion to IQ for sat scores for each year,
Or Mensa did not want to go to the trouble of calculating a new conversion.
Or Mensa is now offering an IQ test of their own that costs money, and they do not want to use SATs because that reduces their income.
Or myriads of other factors.
None of which change the fact that SATs are still tests of intelligence.
How good are they – different question. EXT has been being blackmailed by colleges for decades – the quality of the dest as declined and they have been trying – unsuccessfully to make them palletable to woke colleges.
But none of that changes the fact that they are an intelligence test.
Possibly a bad one,
Regardless, I have not backed off anything. Lots of pellaces accept SAT scores as a measure of intelligence – they do because they are.
Mensa was one – they are not now – so what ?
If mensa thinks the quality of the test has declined – lots of us would agree.
But a bad intelligence test is still an intelligence test.
ALL TESTS OF LEARNING are inntelligence tests – to be clear the CONVERSE is not true.
“You are intentionally playing ignorant because looking into Mensa’s actual data
What data – what is it yoiu think Mensa is hiding ?
What is it you think I am evading ?
What explanation from Mensa would deflate my arguments ?
There is none.
The absolute most harmful claim from Mensa would be that After 1984 Mensa beleives that the ECT was jiggering the test results.
That does not change the fact that the SAT is an intelligence test. It just means that the scores are unreliable.
Or possibly Mensa beleive that they turned the SAT into a test of filling in boxes.
If so then from 1984 onward the SAT is useless for anyone.
But it does not alter my argument.
Lets forget Mensa and 1984.
Tomorow ECT could change the SAT they could make it a test of something else.
If they did everyone would know – they would be asking different questions.
Regardless the fact that ECT could change the SAT into a test of something else – has ZERO impact on my argument.
TODAY every standardized test is a test of intelligence.
Maybe to make you happy I need to add “every standardized test of learning”
Does that make you happier ?
Does that change my arguments ? No.
Does that make you right about anything ? No.
X the only fraud here is you.
All of your counters are garbage – but most even if they were right – still change nothing.
Tests of what you have learned are tests of intelligence – by definition. Intelligence is your ability to learn.
The average black male SAT score is 880, the average black female SAT score is 1024.
Your opinion of how I calculated rough percentages does not change the numbers or the difference.
Todate we have found no reliable why to improve intelligence.
If we did – everyone would know.
It would not be hidden in some obscure table in a single left wing nut paper.
It would be scrolling on times square and people would be lined up for it.
If enough people would pay $100 for SAT prep – walmart would be selling it.
If SAT prep was actually worth $100 – enough people would pay for it and Walmart would be selling it.
“Your “Data” is literally just a guy named Rodrigo making a spreadsheet.”
Nope – you can find myriads of places that will allow you to calculate IQ from standardized tests scores.
YOU keep telling me that the SAT measures Learning – then it measures intelligence.
It is literally that simple.
As Aristotle said A = A.
Relying on a flawed logic puzzle to ignore actual science is the ultimate evasion. Citing Aristotle’s \(A = A\) to claim that “learning” and “intelligence” are identical variables is an embarrassing failure of basic logic.
A test of learned knowledge (like a high school algebra exam) requires instruction. A brilliant student trapped in an underfunded school with no math teacher will fail a calculus test, while a mediocre student with an expensive private tutor can be trained to pass it. The test is measuring educational access and wealth, not raw biological brainpower.
You claim you can find “myriads of places” to calculate IQ from SAT scores, but you still cannot face the fact that Mensa completely rejects the modern SAT. They explicitly stated over 30 years ago that the test no longer correlates with IQ because it became an achievement test based on high school curriculum.
You can hide behind pseudo-philosophy all you want, but you cannot alter reality. You got caught spreading fake statistics, your own links completely debunked your arguments, and now you are reduced to redefining words on the fly to protect your pride. You are completely cooked.
intelligence noun
the ability to learn
Oxford English dictonary
A = A
Keep digging.
eventually you will get to china – and they probably have 30 pts on your IQ.
“A test of learned knowledge (like a high school algebra exam) requires instruction.”
Nope
Keep pushing those fallacies.
How did people learn before there were teachers ?
How did the first person learn ?
How did the first person to lean any specific thing learn it.
How did Aristotle learn A = A
How did pythagoras learn the pythagorean theorum ?
How did newton learn the laws of thermodynamics ?
How did einstein learn the special theory of relativity ?
Teachers are a useful tool. They MIGHT speed learning up.
Though frankly people with high IQs rarely learn from others.
I would also sugggest that you might read Temple Granden
Mostly she summarizes the work of others arround areas that she is interested in.
But one of those is visual learning.
Regardless there are multiple ways that people learn Granden is a visual learner – normal teaching is useless for her.
There are also multiple types of visual learners. I am not the same kind of learner as Granden, and I am not a pure visual learner.
But I am primarily a visual learner – I form thoughts into structures in my mind but not in the same way she does.
Further granden is close to a pure visual learner. I am not I can learn in non-visual ways.
If you want an actual challenge to SAT’s as a measure of intelligence – SATs only measure one kind of learning.
It is the primary way MOST people learn and even those who do not learn the typical way USUALLY they can express their learning in a way that SAT’s can measure. But some people can not – the SAT will measure those peoples intelligence incorrectly.
To my knowledge there is no evidence that the means by which people learn varies by race – but if you find such evidence, I would be happy to consider.
But the FACT is you do not know very much – i.e. you are not very intelligent, and worse – you are completely oblivious to what you do not know.
This makes you manipulable, gullible, and resistant to anything outside your ideological comfort zone.
Except for the domain of your limitations this makes you no different from christian or islamic fundimentalists.
You reject any aspect of reality that conflicts with your ideology.
But possibly worse than religious fundimentalists – you have an ideology that is filled with far more contradictions than theirs.
Reconciling a god with all that is known, even with what is likely knowable is relative easy – Einstein had no problem with it.
Reconciling reality with an ideology that has the elevation of victim-hood as a significant dogma item is impossible.
” A brilliant student trapped in an underfunded school with no math teacher will fail a calculus test,”
Nope, I taught my self calculus. It was not taught at My HS.
Further in the fall of my freshman year my guidance counselor made me the math tutor for a senior taking cllege math 4 years ahead of what I had been taught.
We met twice a week – She showed me the part of the book she was working on, she explained what she understood to me, and then I processed that built on it and taught her what she had not learned – No teacher involved. No one who already knew what we were learning.
There are many ways to learn – Teaching is one of them. Today it is the most common.
For most of human existance there has been very little teaching.
“while a mediocre student with an expensive private tutor can be trained to pass it. ”
Nope – some people just can not ever learn calculus – there is no amount of skill in a teacher that can over come the limits of the learning ability of the student.
You have atleast admitted that there are more and less capable students – but you do not understand how important that is.
No two students will elarn the same amount or at the same rate from the same teacher – we are NOT all equal.
A pi$$ poor teacher or even no teacher at all can teach incredible amounts to someone intelligent enough – as IQ rises EVERYONE increases the amount they teach themselves vs the amount others teach them. At a high enough IQ – traditional learning is useless.
Schools are designed for the center of the bell curve – not the tails. They have to be. They work poorly otherwise.
We want the greatest possible learning from the center – those with High IQs will pick things up fast or learn it themselves.
In HS I was occasionally thrown out of classes – because I did not need to be there and because when the teacher tried to keep up with me – the rest of the class got left behind.
Converdsely teachers are NOT going to spend much time with those with less intelligence – because that will reduce EVERYONEs learning rate.
One size does not fit all.
And the above does NOT factor in the fact that will MOST people learn in the same way – that is only slightly more than 50% of people – maybe 60-70 if you count people with more than one learning modality that includes the traditional way, but it is not primarily the traditional way.
A teacher is nearly useless if a students mode and speed of learning are outside the norms for the group being taught.
Granden advocates for more specialized classes for people with different learning modes.
We actually had that to SOME extent int he 60’s and 70’s – we mostly do not have it today.
Certain types of learners are SOL in a modern school.
Just to be clear – because you LOVE to misrepresent me – I am not arguing the teachers are in all cases unnecessary or that we should not have schools and teacher. Only that you know very very little about learning – and there fore about teaching. You are the worst nightmare of the very people you are trying to help.
If you are following me thus far then Maybe – I doubt it, but you grasp that while we CAN not increase intelligence – we CAN by moving away from one size fits all approaches and grasping that people learn differently boost the SAT scores of some people who do not learn in traditional ways.
That impact is likely small – We did SOME of that in the 60’s and 70’s and got better results than today. But not dramatically better.
That is likely because half the non-traditional learners have high IQs and will learn even if they are taught in ways that are wrong for them.
Those who benefit most are those with lower IQs and particularly those with low IQs and non-traditional learning modalities.
We are doing nothing for them – the left is doing nothing for them. As a practical matter even directing resources at them will NOT boost SATs or get many of them into college – they are NOT college material. But they are capable of getting better jobs and better income with an education tailored to them.
That is very expensive and no one is doing it. No one is even talking about it.
“The test is measuring educational access and wealth, not raw biological brainpower.”
No it is measuring what you have learned – even you previously admitted that.
Does it concurrently measure wealth – to an extent – a significant portion of intelligence is heritable
Intelligence corelates to succes – smart people are successful, successful people has smart children.
Nature fortunately do not make this an endless cycle – genetic factors regress to the mean.
The oddas are that the children of brilliant parenbts are slightly less inteligent than they are.
The odds are that the children of stupid parents are slightly more intelligent than they are.
But yes generally intelligence tests are going to measure the wealth of the test takers – because intelligence is heritable and intelligence strongly predicts success. so the children of wealthy parents tend to be more intelligent than the children of poor parents.
Whether you like it or not – that is not something you can fix. It is dictated by genetics.
This is also why the children of very successful parents are almost always less successful than their parents,
While the children of poor parents almost always do better than there parents.
And that is true even in a static economy – Couple that with rising standard of living – and those rising substantially outnumber those falling and the average rise is large than the average fall.
“You claim you can find “myriads of places” to calculate IQ from SAT scores”
I do not claim it – it is a fact – I provided several but there are many – dozens.
“but you still cannot face the fact that Mensa completely rejects the modern SAT.”
False. Mensa does not accept the modern SAT as proof of an IQ over 130.
“They explicitly stated over 30 years ago that the test no longer correlates with IQ because it became an achievement test based on high school curriculum.”
False
“Mensa’s Acceptance of Test Scores
SAT Score Acceptance Criteria
American Mensa has specific guidelines regarding the acceptance of SAT scores for membership. The organization only accepts SAT scores if they were taken before September 1977. This means that any SAT scores obtained after this date are not eligible for consideration.
Reasons for Limited Acceptance
Historical Context: The cutoff date reflects a time when the SAT was a different test, and the scoring system may have varied from current standards.
Standardization: Mensa requires scores from standardized tests that meet their criteria for measuring intelligence. The organization focuses on tests that are recognized for their reliability and validity in assessing high IQ.”
That is NOT what you claim. While again I am specuialting – just as you were, but I am not claiming my speculation is a FACT.
The FACT is mensa does not accept modern SATs.
My speculation is that in efforts to placate colleges ECT has been juggering with the scoring to get more higher scores particularly from minorities, and that makes them an unreliable measure of high IQ.
It does not change the fact that they are still a measure of learning and therefore intelligence.
A bridge that is shakey and feels like is is going to collapse is still a bridge – but most people would not use it unless they have to.
“You can hide behind pseudo-philosophy all you want”
Very very little of what I have argued is philosophy
Almost the entirety of my arguments are logic and facts.
My core philosophy is simple – “humans have free will.”
The entire libertarian philosophy can be derived from that.
So can a substantial amount of economics. But most economics can also be derived empirically.
It is amazing that in the real world – valid philosophy and FACTS always agree.
“Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.”
Ayn Rand
While that is a premise of objectivism – I am not an objectivist.
It is also the core to the scientific method.
“but you cannot alter reality.”
Correct. Thank you foir quoting me – now apply that knowledge.
” You got caught spreading fake statistics”
Nope – black male average SATS were 880 Black female SATA were 1024 – I beleive that was in 2024.
That is a FACT. Your oppinion on the my estimate of a percent does not change the FACTs.
Keep beating that straw man.
“your own links completely debunked your arguments,”
Presumably you mean the Mensa link – regadless no they do not.
If Coca Cola does not accept the SAT as proof of something – does that mean the SAT is invalid ?
There are many possible reasons that Means may not liek the modern SAT – their Actual expressed reason is that ECT has jiggered with it such that it is inaccurate for High IQs. That does not mean that it is not an intelligence test. It just means Mensa thinks that it may provide false positives in determining an IQ over 130.
“now you are reduced to redefining words on the fly to protect your pride. You are completely cooked.”
The meaning of intelligence is virtually word for word the same in nearly every dictionary.
Even YOU have defined it that way – except when it is convenient.
Boy you really hate rodrigo.
But even you accept that Mensa will accept SAT before 1994 – so did Rodrigo suddenly go loony after 1994 ?
https://cognitivemetrics.com/calculator/sat-iq
here is another – the primary source is the NCES datalab.
https://humanvarieties.org/2023/08/06/a-remarkable-correlation-between-iq-and-sat-scores-across-ethnic-groups/
https //emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Cognitive-ability-has-powerful-widespread-and-robust-effects-on-social-stratification-Evidence-from-the-1979-and-1997-US-National-Longitudinal-Surveys-of-Youth.pdf
“Therefore, contrary to dominant narratives,
cognitive ability is important to a range of social stratification outcomes, and its effects cannot be attributed to
socioeconomic background or educational attainment.”
How many more papers websites and tables do you want ? – the Above 2022 paper found that SAT scores had an 87% correlation with cognitive ability to a 95% confidence level – again in the social sciences that strong a correlation is unheard of.
HOW MANY MORE DO YOU WANT ?
Citing a known, fringe white-supremacist blogger and an open-source hobbyist calculator while screaming in all caps is a textbook example of disingenuous and intentionally misleading internet trolling. You are spamming the thread with links you don’t understand to bury the fact that you keep getting caught manipulating data.
You confidently pasted a link from Human Varieties, an extremist, race-essentialist blog. Worse, your PDF link is from Emil Kirkegaard,a notorious, discredited Danish eugenicist with zero institutional credibility who is globally condemned by the scientific community for manipulating data to promote scientific racism. Trying to sneak white-supremacist junk science into a thread about college admissions isn’t “data”—it is a desperate, bad-faith attempt to validate a racist worldview.
You completely fabricated an 87% correlation. The 2022 paper you quoted uses the NLSY datasets, which look at the AFQT (a military vocational aptitude test), not the modern SAT. You flat-out lied and substituted the word “SAT” into your summary to deceive casual readers.Furthermore, the paper explicitly notes that test scores reflect stratification—meaning they track access to resources, stability, and generational schooling.
You still don’t understand the 1994 cutoff. You ask if Rodrigo went loony after 1994. No, the >b>College Board changed the test in 1994.They explicitly stripped out the abstract, un-trainable logic puzzles and realigned the SAT to measure learned high school curriculum. That is why Mensa dropped it. It didn’t change because Rodrigo went loony; it changed because the test explicitly stopped trying to measure raw IQ and started measuring academic achievement.
You can scream “HOW MANY MORE DO YOU WANT” all day long. Dumping discredited, fringe eugenics links into a comment section because you got humiliated on a basic arithmetic problem is a total logical collapse. You are completely cooked. Sit down.
“You confidently pasted a link from Human Varieties, an extremist, race-essentialist blog”
ROFL
Again – ad hominem is not argument.
You do not like one source – How man y more do you want ?
Yes absolutely the entire left has ranted and raved and called data that has been perfectly solid for more than a centrury “racist.
Beat the straw man that death.
So lets start right at the top. Poor people perform worse on the SAT’s PERIOD. Hoprefully we BOTH accept that.
I am also HOPING – though you are so dishonest that my hope might be false,
for a solution – to get better outcomes for poor people – Better SAT scores better success at college, better success in life
YOU CAN NOT succeed at those without opening your eyes to ALL the facts.
Most of the RANTS by the left about the correlation between race and IQ rest on the premis that it is NOT race – but poverty that is the critical factor.
There is no doubt that poverty is a factor. Why Because the absolute strongest correlation is all of the social sciences is that intelligence – as measured by IQ corresponds to success. The NEXT thing that nearly everyone – including left wing nuts agrees on – and regardless is pretty easy to prove is that intelligence is a heritable attribute. From that alone we already know that the wealthy are going to have higher IQ score and higher SATS and the poor are going to have worse ones. Why because the strongest correlation in all of social science is between success and intelligence.
You are fighting what is damn near a tautology and then ranting that real science is racist because you do not like it.
Now I would bet – though I do not at this instant have the data, that the IQs of Poor whites and the IQs of poor blacks are virtually the same.
I would bet that you can go quintile by quintile separating by race and find no statistically significant racial differences in IQ between quintiles.
Because success increddibly strongly correlates to IQ.
Your problem is that Both in the US – and throughout the world standard of living correlates strongly to race.
You can not fix the distrtibution of a 75% heritable attribute with social polices. Just not happening.
I did not make the world as it is. But I am not lying about it to suit your malovolent ideology.
Nor am going to take as credible the foaming at the mouth ravings of you or other left wing lunatics who are lobbing grenades like racist, nazi fringe extremeist at everyone who produces data you do not like.
I would not that the left critiques of these course do not actually say that they are wrong, they say that the heinous sources are confusing poverty with race.
Duh – Globally poverty correlates beautifully to race.
If you say something is the result of poverty – you are saying it is the result of race – atleast globally.
The only anomaly in this is that East Asia has the highest average IQ’s in the world
That was likely true a few centuries ago when east asia was the wealthiest part of the planet.
It was true 50 years ago when east asia was the poorest part of the planet.
and it continues to be true as east asia advances into the bottom of the first world.
The next problem – you and left wing nuts have is that the supposedly racist data is solid – even when we move to diverse affluent countries like the US.
next whjy on earth would I give any credance to the name calling o0f you and others who have never been right about anything ?
You FALSELY claimed that NEAP data showed a stedy rise in k-12 scores until covid that is false – even the NYT has a sharp devline starting in 2018 and a shallow decline from 2005 onword. The longer data I can find has YOUR favorite metirc should a shallow decline all the way back to 1994.
I hjave not been able to get older data – but NYT and most major media that YOU conside credible has been reporting on the decline in education my entire life time. There are bazillions of “why johnny can’t read” articles.
The joint Bush Ted Kennedy “No Child left behind” was passed in 2001 – tpo address the Crisis of failing public schools.
Today the left HATES NCLB – and conveniently forgets that Ted Kennedy was its lead author an instrumental in crafting it.
If you want a debate on NCLB – we can have it – but the FACT is things were bad BEFORE which is why it was enacted and have been bad since – which is why the left trashes it.
Aside from the Bush fixation on testing – which is not a major issue – Everything that has been done to education since the 60’s has been done by the left.
More spending – you got it. More teachers – you got it – do you forget that Clinton passed legislation to get more teachers ?
And more money and more money and more money.
There are very very few things over the past 60 years that have had any positive benefit.
#1 on that list is the very limited amount of school choice we have in this country.
Home schoolers are out performing all but the top high schools – there is no real stigma associated with homescholling any more.
If I had it to do over I would home school my kids. We cyberchartered which awas nearly the same thing – except with far more government intrusion that was harmful to educating our kids.
Chartes and cyber charters are taking the dregs of the public schools – they are taking the kids from 4hithole school districts, they are taking the discipline problems, they are taking he special needs kids which is saving public schools a fortune because you do not have to rebuild the building if the special needs student is schooled at home, and they are taking a FEW kids like my kids who do not do well with one size fits all education in public schools.
And after taking mostly the worst of the worst – they typically raise them from the bottom to slightly above the mean. That is incredible.
Are they somewhat self selecting for success – a small amount – the students leaving $hithole schools have parents who are determined that their kids will do better. That is a major factor in success. Being left behind are the kids whose parents do not give a crap – you will need magic powers to fix them.
But they are also taking the discipline problems – that is helping all the rest of public schools. And they are taking the people who do poorly with a traditional public education – that is helping public schools but also helping cyber charters.
Regardless this is the one thing that is working.
And BTW it is working in Denmark and Sweden and Norway too. If it helps your left wing nut sensibilities to call “school choice” a social democrat” program – go for it.
Regardless over 60 years that is pretty much the only bright spot on an absymal and worsening education system – one in which the ONLY thing that you got that you did not want was some school choice.
YOU OWN this mess.
YOU broke it.
And like the socialist you are you are still ranting – its the money – with more money it will work!
You got more money, and you F#$Ked up.
Now you think calling everybody pointinmg out how badly you have F#$Ked up a racist extremest fringe white supremecist nazi is the solution.
You do not seem to grasp – you shot your wad.
No one gives any credibility to your insults.
If you or other in accedemia are calling the views of someone else “Racist” – that is a reason to LISTEN to that person. ]
If he pi$$ed you off maybe he knows what he is talking about – because you sure dont.
“You claim a 50th percentile score equals a 100 IQ “assuming everyone took the test.” ”
“This is a gross logical failure. ”
Nope qualification is right in my claim – no error at all.
Regardless you argument is both poor and irrelevant. It does not alter that PSAT’s and SAT’s correspond to IQ’s
Nor that IQ is distributed on a Bell Curve and that PSAT and SAT scores distribute on a Bell curve.
Nor that an IQ of 100 ius by definition someone who is smack dab at the 50% point.
If – as you correctly claim – though you exagerate the SAT’s PSATs are self selecting. Then you can adjust.
The mean SAT score in 2024 was 1024. The SATR score corresponding to an IQ of 100 was 880 – so there is about 1 30 point SQUEW to SATs – which is about 22%
None of thos makes anything I claimed a logical failure.
Further while I did not explicitly identify the shift – I did note its existance.
Oh, wow. Watching you confidently hallucinate your own arithmetic while lecturing people about intelligence is an absolute gift. For someone who claims to be a logic vanguard, your math is in complete shambles.
Let’s calculate the “intellectual skew” of your latest comment:
You claim that the difference between a mean SAT of 1024 and 880 is “about a 130-point skew.” Let’s do the actual math: \(1024 – 880 = 144\). You missed by 14 points on a two-column subtraction problem.
You then claim that this magical 130-point difference is “about 22%.” 144 out of 1024 is 14%.144 out of 880 is 16%. Where on Earth did you get 22%? Did your high IQ calculator run out of batteries, or do you just make up percentages on the fly and pray nobody checks the math?
You proudly assert that because both IQ and the SAT distribute on a bell curve, they must correspond. This is an embarrassing statistical error. Human height distributes on a bell curve. Human weight distributes on a bell curve. Does that mean height and weight map 1:1? Is a person in the 50th percentile of height automatically in the 50th percentile of weight? No. Just because two completely different metrics share a Gaussian distribution model does not mean they are the same variable.
You can keep trying to patch your leaky arguments with broken percentages, but the reality is clear: you got caught inventing a “50th percentile = 100 IQ” rule for a highly selective test pool, and now you are sweating through your keyboard trying to justify it.
Next time you try to evaluate someone else’s intelligence, make sure you can pass a 5th-grade math worksheet first. It’s a bad look.
“You claim that the difference between a mean SAT of 1024 and 880 is “about a 130-point skew.” Let’s do the actual math: \(1024 – 880 = 144\). You missed by 14 points on a two-column subtraction problem.”
Off by 10% just eyeballing it – that is pretty good. How accurately can you estimate the difference betweeen 4 digit numbers without doing any math in your head ?
Regardles – so the difference between black men and women is 10% greater – that makes my argument STRONGER
That is unless you think that the “culture” in SATs is high heels and rubies rather than cricket and sailing.
The difference between 800 and 1000 is 20%
“You proudly assert that because both IQ and the SAT distribute on a bell curve, they must correspond. ”
Nope. I have said they correspond. IO have said they both follow a bell curve – I have not said they fact that they both follow a bell curve is why they correspond.
Height also distributes on a bell curve , athletic ability distributes on a bell curve – most human attributes distribute on a bell curve – that does not make any attribute that distributes on a bell cure – a proxy for intelligence.
But if you DO want another point – MANY human attributes that distribute on a bell curve – also have different curves by race.
It is likely that the apogee for the physical abilitess of blacks is higher than that of whites.
We can go through lots of attributes – some have no difference by race – some do. While almost every eye color is found in almost every race – at the same time the distribution of eye colors is heavily effected by race with blue eyes almost non-existent outside of causation.
“This is an embarrassing statistical error. ”
Absolutely – it is massively embarrassing – and the error is yours
I have not said ANYWHERE that every human attribute that distributes on a bell curve is a proxy for intelligence.
Only that many human attributes distribute on a bell curve.
I strongly suspect that human birth weight distributes on a bell curve – but I would be surprised if american adult weight distributed on a bell curve.
At the very least it is not likely to be symmetrical.
Beat those straw men to death
:The SAT and PSAT are taken by a highly selective, self-selecting pool of college-bound students, not the general population. Scoring in the 50th percentile of an elite, hyper-educated subgroup means your score is significantly higher than the general population’s average. Bypassing this basic statistical concept proves you do not understand how percentiles work.”
Did not bypass anything – READ WHAT I WROTE AGAIN.
You wrote, “If your PSAT score was 50%… then your IQ is 100.”
When caught ignoring the selective test pool, you panicked. You tried to fix it by claiming a 1024 mean SAT vs. an 880 baseline equals a “130-point skew” which is “about 22%.”
As already pointed out, \(1024 – 880 = 144\). And 144 is 14% of 1024, not 22%.
You didn’t just bypass the statistical concept; you completely mangled third-grade arithmetic trying to cover your tracks. Shouting “READ WHAT I WROTE AGAIN” in all caps does not magically correct your broken percentages.
I wrote
” If your PSAT score was 50% – half the people taking the PSAT did better than you and half did worse – then your IQ is 100 – assuming that everyone was required to take the PSAT”
Again beat that straw man
Sop many fallacies –
First you completely ignored that the mean scores of black men and women are significantly different =- again beating a math straw man that is entirely irrelevant.
And evading the core point that the black male/female difference is greater than the white black difference and that black women score very close to the white average.
So how is it that your “selective test pool” – is screwing over black men – while having almost no impact on black women ?
Are you going to claim that black weomen have very nearly the same culture as whites – but black men have a radically different culture ?
And I do not even care what stupid definition you have for culture. The average black woman is no more familiar with Cricket that then average white or black man.
Nor are only black men deprived of 30m words before they are 3.
The point again – critical thinkin g REQUIRES that for a claim to be true – the REST of the world must be consistent with that claim.
If you claim the sun has burned out – then you must explain why the earth is not dark and frozen.
If you claim that the SATs are culturally selective then you must explain why they select for while culture and they select for the culture of black women – but not black men.
YOUR claims constantly run into conflictes with reality.
Misrepresenting my arguments does nothing to fix your errors.
Oh, the irony of preaching about “critical thinking” while turning evasion into an Olympic sport. Let’s actually look at reality since you seem to have a fictional relationship with it.
You claim the black male/female difference is greater than the white/black difference. That is a flat-out, verifiable lie.
Across decades of SAT data, the gap between Black men and Black women hovers around 10 to 20 points (with women slightly higher in reading/writing and men slightly higher in math).
The gap between Black test-takers and White test-takers is over 100 points.
To claim that a 15-point gender gap is “greater” than a 100+ point racial gap is not just bad math; it is a desperate delusion. Black women do not score “very close to the white average.” They score within the exact same macro-statistical band as Black men.
You are demanding an explanation for a phenomenon that literally does not exist. The test pool isn’t magically “screwing over Black men while sparing Black women.” Both demographics face the exact same systemic headwinds of underfunded school districts, lack of generational wealth, and a multi-billion-dollar test-prep industry that privileges the rich. The minor gender variations inside all racial groups are well-documented and typically track with high school GPA trends (where girls across the board tend to take more advanced humanities courses), not some fictional cultural warp zone.
For someone yelling about “fallacies,” your inability to understand what “culture” means in psychometrics is hilarious. Nobody—literally nobody but you—is talking about cricket, sailing, or 30-million-word gaps as a gender split.
Cultural bias in testing refers to linguistic phrasing, regional dialect penalties, and socioeconomic stratification built into the questions themselves.
Because Black men and Black women generally grow up in the same communities, attend the same schools, and experience the same socioeconomic realities, their scores are nearly identical compared to the massive gulf separating them from wealthy white districts.
You want consistency? Here is the frozen, dark earth your argument refuses to look at: If these gaps were purely biological or evolutionary, they would be static. Yet, whenever you provide a marginalized group with the same funding, resources, and elite test-prep as their wealthy peers, the gap vanishes.
You are inventing fake data about Black women magically scoring like White men just so you can dodge the blindingly obvious reality: standardized tests measure a family’s ZIP code and bank account far more than they measure innate human worth.
Stop misrepresenting the college board’s own spreadsheets just to avoid admitting your premise is completely bankrupt.
“Across decades of SAT data, the gap between Black men and Black women hovers around 10 to 20 points (with women slightly higher in reading/writing and men slightly higher in math).” I cited data from a specific recent year. Adjacent years werre similar
I made no claims for the pas 60 years.
But I will clearly stat e that you lie so much I have no reason to beleive you.
“The gap between Black test-takers and White test-takers is over 100 points.”
and less than 130.
“To claim that a 15-point gender gap is “greater” than a 100+ point ”
I didnt – that is again YOUR claim.,
I have not claimed that the gap between black men and women is 10pts – you have
I have claimed that the gap in a specific RECENT year was 130 points – it was.
and 130 is greater than 100.
name calling facts – does not change that they are facts – it just more fallacy.
“You are demanding an explanation for a phenomenon that literally does not exist. The test pool isn’t magically “screwing over Black men while sparing Black women.” Both demographics face the exact same systemic headwinds of underfunded school districts, lack of generational wealth, and a multi-billion-dollar test-prep industry that privileges the rich. ”
Back to the same fake arguments again.
Where are theese underfunded districts – not DC, not NYC – these are the most explensive schools in the country and near the worst performing.
The undefunded schools argument is a rfed herring – and a straw man concurrently.
There are charter schools in 45 states and the district of columbia. Most of these are available only to poor minority children – and uniformly they are preforming at or above the median for their state.
If you poor black child is in one of these mythical underfunded public schools – move then to a charter – unless you are in montana, north dakota, south dakota or vermont. Maybe I am wrong – but I do not think these are bastions of underfunded minority schools.
AGAIN intelligence is heritable – there is absolutely nothing that you can do to change genetics today =- maybe you can gene splice tomorow.
But intelligent people succeed. those who are not dont. smart people are wealthy and marry other smart wealthy people and have smart kids.
less intelligent people are poorer average IQs decline with each qunitile. Gregor mendel told you hw this was going to work out 200 years ago.
I am far more interested in what science has consistendly claimed for 200 years – that what some poorly educated left wing nut does today.
Again you can test prep for zero dollars. If you wish to pay someone – you can do so for $100. Outside of east asians the benetis are negligable.
Nearly everyones score rises from PSATs to SATs and from the first SAT to the 2nd. After that there is very little improvement.
You keep pretending there is some magic fix for genetics.
There isn’t
Again – you rant about generational wealth and test prep but differences in IQ are fixed between 3-6 – kids are not in school yet.
No amount of test prep ios going to fix the fact that you are behind by the age of 3 – and in fact behind at birth – we just can not measurfe the IQ of infants.
You claim that is because the welthy hear 30M words by 3 – if that is beneficial it can be tested – you sort of by not really claim it has – it hasn’t.
Regardless – learning more words and talking to your baby costs nothing – so do it. Don;t shill for pther people to pay you.
You claim that test prep is a big deal
Khan academy offers SAT test prep -= free and Kahn academy is very good.
the college boards offers sample exams free
https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/practice/practice-tests
The 5 star princeton review top rated test prep is $500.
If you beleive thart works – get some billionare to fund a double blind study and lets see if that works.
Those of you on the left confuse what YOU think is a good idea with something proven to work.
Provide results from a double blind study that demonstrate a statistically significant and large benefit for poor minoities – and then and only tehn will I listen to the argument that test prep is a big deal.
Regardless a kid that can afford a $1000 iphone can afford a $499 test prepo from Princton – that is if it actually works.
” Nobody—literally nobody but you—is talking about cricket, sailing, or 30-million-word gaps as a gender split.”
Every single one of those claims came from a poster here on the left – not me.
I beleive most of them came from YOU.
regardless gtrl-g on your broweser will let you search.
“Cultural bias in testing”
More stupid word cgames.
” refers to linguistic phrasing, ”
Learn proper english – that is free.
The tests are in standard written english – the same english that was taught every where in the country until the left got ahold of things.
Start at home – speak standard english. You claim that matters on tests – probably does,. certainly does in life.
Regardless if you want to succeed you need to do what those you need something from want.
McDonalds will hire you if the only written or spoken culture you know is poor black.
But JP Morgan will not. If you want the best job – do what you need to get it.
If you are a poor parent – even poor white parents speak crap english today – LEARN and US standard english for your kids – and yourself.
There is massive evidence that a good vocabulary will help you in left – the most successful people have huge vocabularies.
Regardless you are again talking aof a problem of your own making that you can fix yourself.
I suggest watching Sydney Poitier in “To Sir with Love” while he was starting with kids about to graduate, and in england,
the principle is still the same – if you want to get ahead YOU adopt the culture of successful people.
Speech, manors, attire. only speech matters for the SATs – but the rest will matter for job interviews.
How many fortune 500 CEOs do you see with nose rings tattoos pink hair speaking unintelligibly.
Trump is virtually never seen without a suit and tie – yet he is viewed as authentic by working class america.
Adapt yourself to the part you want to acheive
We do not need some massive governmetn program to teach people to speak standard english.
I am libertarian – you do not wish to do tany of that – I am fine with it.
You want to shoot herion – I am fine with that too.
But the odds of your shooting herion and getting to even the middle class are near zero.
“regional dialect penalties”
Watch the news on TV – the US has a standard universal nationwide dialect – learn it. Costs you nothing.
“and socioeconomic stratification built into the questions themselves.”
Would that translate to “I have run out of bad claims” or is it “cricket” in disguise.
“Because Black men and Black women generally grow up in the same communities, attend the same schools, and experience the same socioeconomic realities” So now you are blaming blacks for their own culture ?
Regardless, as generations of immigrants to the US have learned, if you want to succeed learn THIS culture.
The most rapidly successful immigrant groups force their children to read write and speak standard english AT HOME, even when their parents english was poor.
Every thing you claim is culture – CAN BE LEARNED, at no cost.
aside from left wing nut newspeak like “socioeconomic stratification” – everything else you have listed is free or cheap.
As I have said repeatedly – future success is based on the choices you make – rick or poor, black or white.
Many people with low intelligence make poor choices – and they do not succeed.
” Yet, whenever you provide a marginalized group with the same funding, resources, and elite test-prep as their wealthy peers, the gap vanishes.”
Nope, you have listed a bunch of things “culture” – aside from the meaningless gobbledy goop – all of them are things you can change for free or cheep.
So quit whining and do it. We do not need to remake society, we do not need to throw money at a problem people can change on their own.
Right more gobbledy gook – “innate human worth” is a DELIBERATELY meaningless phrase.
First it contains worth – that means Money – if I try to establish a money value for a human your going to go ape$hit – so you do not actual want to place a value. You are trying to pretend everything is both equal and infintite – it is not.
Even obama care is not going to spend more than 250K to save your child dying with cancer.
Regardless SATs do not measure and are not intended to measure “inanate human worth” – they are designed to measure intelligence – because THAT predicts success at college and in life. Somebody is going to spend a fortune on your college education – unless it is YOUR money – they are going to want some asdsurance you are going to succeed. Colleges are not there to accept students who are going to fail.
There is NOTHING that better predicts success at college and in life than the SAT – but you are free to find something.
If you want to manufacture a test of “innate human worth” for your eulogy – go for it.
Colleges should care about the odds of your succes – you shoudl care about the odds of your success.,
Employers care about he odds of your success.
Colleges are in the education business – not the innate human worth business. JP morgan is in the banking business -0 not the innate human worth business.
One last hard truth.
Elsewhere I have provided a list of thing that anyone can doo to assure success in life.
I have also pointed out that everything you claim the poor need to succeed on the SATs they can do themselves.
But in truth it is likely they can’t – why ?
Because they are not intelligent enough to do so.
I can not play a single musical instrument well. It is not a skill that I have, No amount of practice will get me from abysmal past pretty damn bad.
No amount of desire will change that.
I was blessed in myriads of ways at my birth – I did not earn those blessings. One of those was being born in the best country in the world.
That is mine by right – but it is not something I earned. whatever you may think of my intelligence – it is innate – I did not earn it.
But I was also cursed at birth – one of those curses is that no matter how great my love of music is – I can not make music anyone would want to listen to.
That is not fair – it is life.
It is not fair I was blessed.
it is not fair I was cursed.
The people who are going to get out of poverty – and there are plenty – will do so no matter what.
The poor who are going to succeed at college are going to no matter what.
They are near certain to have higher SATs than their peers who do not get out.
Earlier EB posted that he was a merit scholar and that getting out and to college changed his life.
This was not magic – he got a scholarship and went to college because he was intelligent enough to do so.
College changed his life. But it would not have done so but for his intelligence.
Contra what I suspect he beleives – he was intelligent and college or not he was highly likely to succeed.
So will his children. He is likely in one of those magic zip codes.
it is intelligence – combined with hard work that gets you there. Not magic.
It is not the SAT score that changes your life – it is YOUR INTELLIGENCE that changed your life – the SAT score is just a visible sign of that intelligence that causes colleges to bet on you.
That was an unearned blessing.
“Flowers for Algernon” is a wonderful story – it is also a myth.
When you actually find the way to raise intelligence – call me – I will invest.
Until then quit stealling money to do schiff that wont work and probably will make things worse.
My percentages are not broken – nor is my math they are within a margin that is acceptable becase I ACCEPT THAT.
If you wish to claim that that margin is too great to sustain my point – then YOU need to prove that counter claim.
Nitpicking rough estimates – and worse doing so badly is not an argument.
And once again
READ WHAT I ACTUALLY WROTE.
You altered what you quoted – carefully omitting the last element.
That is called LYING.
You do not get to redefine reality just because your math got embarrassed in front of the entire forum. Saying an error is “acceptable because I accept that” is the definition of intellectual cowardice.
You missed the mark by a factor of nearly 10x. That isn’t a “rough estimate” or a “margin of error.” That is a complete, structural failure of your entire premise. You built a skyscraper of an argument on a foundation of fake numbers, and now you’re mad that the wind blew it over.
You are screaming that I need to “prove a counter-claim.” No, I don’t. You made a definitive statement about demographic data, and the official College Board data proves your statement is a total fabrication. You do not get to pull fake statistics out of thin air, demand everyone accept them as gospel, and then claim it’s our job to write a dissertation debunking your imagination. The burden of proof belongs to the person making the claim. Produce the data showing Black women score near the White average, or admit you made it up. (Hint: You won’t, because it doesn’t exist).
Accusing me of “altering quotes” and “omitting the last element” is a textbook evasion tactic. You are screaming “Liar!” at the wall hoping the audience won’t notice your argument just collapsed. No matter what “last element” you think saves you, it doesn’t change the hard, mathematical reality: Black women do not score near the White average, and the gender gap is a fraction of the racial/socioeconomic gap.If anyone is lying here, it’s the person staring at \(15 > 144\) and trying to convince the room that the math works out.
You have not provided college board data. I went back and checked – the college board is not providing data on the breakdown between race AND gender.
They do not appear to ever have.
I got my data from google – but I can not find a CollgeBoard source for it. Maybe it is right maybe not.
But just as there is no college board source for my data – there is none for yours.
College board breaks down results many ways – including race and gender but NOT race/gender
I can not prove my claim or find the origianl source – but I also can not find any evidence that your claim is correct either.
What i have found is that black women are admitted to college at nearly 3 times the rate of black men. 14% of admissions rather than 5%.
Black women have an average college GPA of 3.1 Black men have an average college GPA of 2.69.
Black men also have a 46% expulsion rate and when they do manage to graduate they average 6 years for a 4 year degree.
I do not have exactly matching data for black women – but they have a low expulsion rate, and a much higher graduation rate.
In fact their overall college performance is very close to that of White men.
As I said before SAT’s predict success – at college and in life.
If black women have very similar success rates to white men at college they likely have just slightly lower SATs than white men.
White women generally do better than white men in college – outside of STEM fields – but they are gaining in stem fields.
The majority of college graduates today are women. the majority of college graduates in STEM will eventually be women.
White women perform slightly worse than white men on SATs – but the perform slightly better in college.
Black women perform as much as 3 time better than black men at college.
There are very real differences between black men and black women that are not present between white men and white women.
We are also finding very radical political differences between black men and black women. Trump won more than double the number or black men than black women. The gender gap on whites was the opposite and small. Trump won married white women but lost single white women – but not 2:1
“You claim that prep industries only “marginally improve” performance. This is false. Controlled studies show that targeted test preparation, high-quality tutoring, and repeating the exam consistently raise scores by significant margins. If the tests were purely measuring unchangeable, un-trainable IQ, the multi-billion-dollar test prep industry would have zero statistical efficacy.”
If you are east asian private SAT prep courses have been found to result in as much as a 200pt increase in your SAT score. Only East Asains have been found to significantly benefit. Self Study produces about 60% of the same benefit.
Regardless this is a diminishing returns issue – If you scored 1500 before taking a prep course you are not going to score an impossible 1700 after, Nor are you going to score a perfect 1600. You will be lucky to get a 30 pt bump. While if you scored 800 the first time – you could get a 200pt bump from test prep.
Further more than 50% of the gain between the first test and the 2nd is just the automatic 90pt bump that most people get from a retake – that occurs whether you do test prep or not.
But again these are averages and they are diminishing returns – the higher your initial score is the less impact there will be.
It takes a remarkable amount of confidence to throw around numbers that can be debunked with a simple look at actual data.
Where on earth are you getting your data? According to the College Board and independent psychometric studies, the average increase for a student retaking the SAT without targeted intervention is roughly 40 points, not an “automatic 90-point bump”. You just doubled the actual statistic to make an un-coached retake seem like magic so you could minimize the massive, measurable role that wealth and resource access play in coaching.
Claiming that private SAT prep only benefits East Asians to the tune of 200 points is structurally and scientifically ridiculous.The Reality of Test Prep:
Private tutoring teaches standardized test mechanics, pacing, elimination strategies, and content review. These are universally applicable cognitive and testing skills.
The reason East Asian demographics frequently see high returns on intensive prep isn’t due to unique biology; it is because of intense cultural and economic investments in rigorous “hagwon” (cram school) structures.
You contradict yourself. If the SAT were a pure, unchangeable measure of innate biological intelligence (as you tried to argue earlier), the test-prep industry would have a 0-point effect on everyone, regardless of their heritage. By admitting that intensive coaching can cause a massive 200-point shift for a group of human beings, you have completely destroyed your own premise that the test measures static, un-trainable traits.
Congratulations on discovering the concept of a score ceiling. Yes, someone with a 1500 can only improve by a maximum of 100 points, while someone with an 800 has 800 points of room to grow. This is basic mathematics, not proof of a biological IQ bottleneck.The fact remains: if a student who scores an 800 can pay a premium tutor to jump 200 points to a 1000, the test is measuring their access to that tutor, not a fixed biological capacity. You are desperately trying to turn a well-documented economic advantage into a racial variable because your initial argument about racial score gaps has already been statistically obliterated.
This was not my original source – that was a table of average sores for first and 2nd SATs
But this confirms what I have said.
https://learnattic.com/sat/retake-sat/
Note the biggest gains are from people who screwed up the first time and know it.
They did not finish. They did not prepare, they were very anxious. they guessed.
Contra your claim these are things that LESS intelligent people are likely to have done
If as you claim there is a magic advantage to zip codes – the elite – KNOW they are intelligent – possibly more so than they are.
They spent their lives being more confident than everyone else – and being told they were better than everyone else.
They are less likely to be anxious, less likely to be unprepared the first time, more likely to finish, and less likely to just guess.
As a result they can expect very little improvement on a retake. My first and 2nd SAT total scores are EXACTLY the same, but my math went down by 10 and my reading went up and since your reported score – atleast then is your combined best scores I had a very small increase in what is reported to colleges.
Regardless it was impossible for me to get a 200pt improvement much less 300 or 350.
You claim college board data has different results – PROVE IT.
You are the repetedly caught liar – the burden of proof is on you.
Regardless Cllege Boards does not know what your test prep was before the 1st or 2nd takes. They can not tell you if prep courses are worthwhile
You have to trust the claims made by those courses.
Further your claim that I over estimate the benefits of a retake deflate your claim of benefit from prep courses.
It is far more likely that people take a prep course AFTER the first test, not before. Particularly if you are afluent.
Why would someone who has been rewarded all their lives and has every reason to beleive they are going to do well
both to spend money and more importantly time on a prep course – when they could be off at spring brake in FL.
I am exaggerating – but the point is taken. My son – an actual east asian. preped like a mad man for the first SAT and did not retake them.
Because that is the difference between asian children and white ones – beleive me – I have two asian children I KNOW.
Even when you do NOT pressure them – they are sure there is massive pressure on them – they are afraid of letting you down, their race down, their birth mothers who likely abandon them down. Yes asian children with asian parents are driven by “tiger moms” – but adopted asian children are driven far more than whites.
Is that cultural ? My children are not part of east asian culture – yet they have the same traits – just slightly muted.
Anecdotal – but as the parent or two east asian kids – I know ALOT of adopted east asian kids.
——————————
X I am tired of having to look up proof of your stupid BS.
Worse still you would claim if I rounded a number by 1pt is was a massive error that discreditred everything.
You are just a massive liar. I have repeatedly proven your claims wrong.
But worse still – EVEN IF TRUE – your arguments fail.
If hearing 30m words before 4 boosts your intelligence – then talk to your kids – alot.
Improve your own vocabulary – it costs nothing.
If knowing standard written english helps – then learn standard written english – it costs nothing.
I am not sure how a regional dialect matters on the SATs – the SATs are not oral.
But if you think learning the main stream media generic US dialect will help – then do it – costs nothing.
If diet helps – eat healthy – again it costs nothing. Blueberries are supposed to be good for cognition – you can get them year round and their cheap.
You can make blueberry slushies. Regardless the differences in diet from the rich to poor are choices not driven by money.
RFK Jr. is trying to get everybody to eat better – IT COSTS NOTHING.
All you are left with is magical zip codes and phrases without meaning.
You have wasted massive amounts of words – are you up to 30M yet – repoeating the same nonsense over and over.
That is a sign of a low IQ – are you some poor teen looking for a free ride ?
Regardl;ess, you lost this before you started.
The data is against you and been consistent since Darwin. Left wing nut efforts to scream racist racist racist – have not changed the data.
The only studies that are even a tiny bit different HIDE race from the study.
Regardless east asian prove that it is genetics not economics OR that the effects of economics are so large they last hundreds of years.
But honestly it does not matter. I would guess that poor whites has the same IQ as poor minorities – people are poor for a reason.
But there is hope – regression to the mean means there are high odds that the children of the poor will be smarter than their parents.
While the children of the rich will be less smart.
If poor children are smarter than their parents – which is what regression to the mean means – they do not need your money bombing them.
“Also, You mention that a person with a 100 IQ today is more intelligent than a century ago due to deviations from the mean.”
NO I DID NOT SAY THAT – nor would I.
” This is a complete inversion of the Flynn Effect. The Flynn Effect proves that raw scores rose over the 20th century because of environmental factors—better nutrition, increased schooling, and exposure to technology”
Partly correct – and I SAID THAT.
There is negligible benefit to better schooling or exposure to technology. Nutrition is without a doubt a factor in higher average intelligence.
BTW the reporting on the “flynn effect” is logical garbage. Intelligence has risen – albeit not consistently over time.
IQ SCORES have not – because the definition of an IQ of 100 is CURRENT average intelligence.
Your frantic backtracking is genuinely embarrassing. You are denying your own words in the exact same breath you use to double down on them. Let’s hold up the mirror so you can see your own logical trainwreck.
You screamed, “NO I DID NOT SAY THAT – nor would I,” regarding the idea that people today are more intelligent than a century ago. Then, literally two sentences later, you wrote: “Intelligence has risen – albeit not consistently over time.”
Do you read your own text before hitting reply? If average intelligence has risen over time, then a person with average intelligence today is more intelligent than an average person from a century ago. By your own explicit admission, you did say it, you do believe it, and your angry denial is just a clumsy reflex because you realized your premise is trapped in a corner.
You claim that the reporting on the Flynn Effect is “logical garbage” because an IQ of 100 is always pegged to the current average. Congratulations on explaining the most basic rule of psychometric normalization—everyone knows IQ scores are norm-referenced.
But you completely missed the entire point of James Flynn’s life’s work. The Flynn Effect isn’t about the normalized score of 100; it is about the raw scores. If you give a modern population an IQ test from 1920, their average raw score skyrockets. James Flynn explicitly argued that this raw score explosion was not a rise in innate genetic intelligence, but rather an explosion in abstract problem-solving skills driven precisely by the things you want to dismiss: mass schooling, literacy, and technologically complex environments.
Claiming there is a “negligible benefit” to schooling or technology on cognitive test performance is scientifically illiterate.
The Evidence: Decades of natural experiments—such as countries raising their mandatory school-leaving age—show an immediate, permanent jump in average adult IQ scores for those extra years of schooling.
The Logic: Standardized tests (including the SAT and modern IQ matrices) heavily rely on abstract logic, hypothetical reasoning, and spatial manipulation. These are not things you get from eating a steak; they are cognitive habits trained by formal schooling and digital environments.
You are desperately trying to isolate “nutrition” as the only environmental factor because you know that admitting education and technology shift cognitive curves completely destroys your fantasy of a fixed, biologically determined hierarchy.
Stop arguing with your own comments and go read an actual book on psychometrics.
X
Finding a factor in intelligence that is within human control is the holy grail of the social sciences.
NO SUCH FACTOR HAS EVER BEEN FOUND.
If it had been we would be able to make everyone super intelligent.
While nutrition is absolutely a controllable factor – it is also of diminishing returns.
Nutrition globally has improved – and Intelligence has followed.
but we have come very close to maxing out the gains from nutrition.
There is no pill to make you more intelligent.
Nor does education or exposure to technology increase intelligence – tests of the IQ’s of 3-6 year olds do not show much change at older ages.
I linked a video that was titled something like the AI skills that will make you more valuable.
But for the most part it was NOT about AI. It was a lesson in critical thinking.
ONE of the points in the video – something you CONSTANTLY fail, was – when you are presented with a claim – whether a random claim or one purportedly by experts,
ALWAYS think “what else must be true for that to be true ?” or “What else must be false for that to be true ?”
Basically you are looking at the claim and determining whether it is supported or contradicted by other things that you either know to be true,
or that are required to be true (or false)
Better education and exposure to technology FAIL THAT TEST.
Numerous studies are reporting either a reversal or stagnation in the improvement of IQ in developed countries in the 21st century and possibly the late 20th century.
That requires that either “exposure to technology” only provides a flat rate one time bump. Or it is a false claim.
Take your pick – I do not care – regardless that aspect of the “flynn effect” is either falsified or at best not ongoing.
Education is more complex – improvement in intelligence through most of the 20th century
DOES correlate to improved education AND decline or stagnation in intelligence in the late 20th and 21st centuries DOES correlate to decline in education.
But the fact that measure of IQ before school and after do not show changes discounts education.
Regardless the flynn effect claim that education improves intelligence is at best a possibility – not anything proven by data.
While the benefits of nutrition are proven – but diminishing returns, and the benefits of exposure to technology are even less well established – in FACT massive amounts of data are coming out that exposure of children to technology STUNTS their intellectual development.
This is so well accepted that the left AND the right are rushing to pass laws that make it easier to age restrict access to technology.
The data on this is so solid that it is a surprisingly bipartisan issue.
You just spent half your comment lecturing me on a basic critical thinking framework—“what else must be true for that to be true?”—and then immediately failed your own test in the very next paragraph.
Let’s apply your video’s exact logic to your claims and watch them completely implode.
You claim that “No factor in intelligence within human control has ever been found,” and that education has “negligible benefit.
Okay, let’s look at what else must be true for your claim to be correct:
If education cannot change cognitive ability, then a child who misses three years of school due to a war or a pandemic should score identically on an abstract logic test to a child who stayed in school.
Except, they don’t. Decades of natural experiments (like Norway increasing mandatory schooling by two years in the 1960s) show a permanent, irreversible 3 to 4 point IQ jump per year of extra school across the entire population.
By your own video’s logic, because school dropouts and disruptions heavily depress adult cognitive scores, your claim that education has zero impact on intelligence is empirically falsified.
You claim that “measures of IQ before school and after do not show changes.
Again, let’s ask:
What else must be true? For that to be true, early childhood interventions like Head Start shouldn’t change cognitive profiles.
But in the exact same breath, you claim that “exposure of children to technology STUNTS their intellectual development.”
Do you seriously not see the glaring, catastrophic contradiction here? If a child’s environment (like looking at a smartphone) can stunt their intelligence, then their intelligence is mutable and reactive to human-controlled environments. You cannot argue that intelligence is a fixed, untouchable genetic rock when it fits your racial narrative, but then turn around and argue that an iPad can magically degrade that same rock. Pick a lane. Either the environment can change cognitive outcomes, or it can’t.
You point to the stagnation and reversal of IQ scores in the 21st century as proof that technology and education claims are false. Once again, your analysis is lazy.
The stagnation of the Flynn Effect in developed nations is well-documented, but psychometricians point to a phenomenon called ceiling effects and resource saturation. Just like nutrition, once a society achieves near-universal literacy, mandatory secondary education, and total tech saturation, you hit a baseline.
The fact that scores stop rising after a society is fully modernized doesn’t mean modernization didn’t cause the rise in the first place. It means you can’t get a “one-time bump” twice.
Your ultimate strawman is the claim that if we found a controllable factor, “we would be able to make everyone super intelligent.”
This completely ignores the concept of variance. Recognizing that nutrition, wealth, and intensive schooling can raise someone’s score by 15 points does not mean you can scale it infinitely to turn everyone into Einstein. It simply means that human intelligence exists within a biological reaction range, and environmental factors dictate whether a person hits the absolute ceiling of their genetic potential or drops to the floor.
Standardized tests like the SAT don’t measure a pristine, unchangeable biological blueprint. They measure how much of a student’s potential was unlocked by their ZIP code, their family’s wealth, and their access to elite schooling.
Your attempt to weaponize “critical thinking” just highlighted your complete inability to practice it.
“You took the mention of “cricket” literally to brag about your own test history”
Nope – I have never revealed my IQ or SAT scores. Unlike Bug I am not making arguments as appeals to authority.
OCCASIONALLY I make appeals to my own experience – I have never seen “cricket” in a standardized test.
I have also never seen “regatta” which someone else mentioned.
As another posted mentioned – The Testing services have spent the past 60 years trying to get rid of the slightest HINT of cultural favor in their tests.
They have done so to placate the left.
But they have also done so to maintain the value of their tests.
Schools, employers, …. WILL NOT USE tests that produce skewed results.
If College admissions tests were not predictive of college success without any racial factor – no one would be defending them no one would be using them.
As with everything in the free market – produces MUST meet the demands of consumers.
While no such consequential flaw was found in standardized tests – you woulkd have to be a moron to beleive that the test companies would not rapidly fix that if it was found.
Again – “what else must be true (or false) for some assertion to be true ?”
The claim that standardized tests were and remain culturally biased REQUIRES that the creators of the tests are so racist that they would go out of business rather than remove bias.
I will guarantee you that if ECT could produce a test that would score minorities higher (and asians lower) AND accurately predict success in college – they would do so in a heart beat. Colleges are the primary consumer of SAT’s – they are the “customer” – we have seen many left wing nut colleges abandon standardized tests.
If the test company’s could change that – they would.
The reason for Jim Crow laws in the south was because people on their own without the force of law behind it valued commerce over racism – and they still do.
Almost no business in existance – not today – not in 1900 will screw over a race of people if that costs them business.
ECT would fix any bias in standardized tests if it was there.
If you do not understand that – then you are a moron.
Your reading comprehension is in absolute shambles. You started your comment with a desperate, defensive sprint to deny that you revealed your IQ or SAT scores—proving you didn’t even understand the sentence you were replying to.Nobody said you revealed your scores. The phrase “to brag about your own test history” was explicitly calling out your defense of your faulty math estimation methods from earlier in the thread. You completely hallucinated an attack on your IQ scores because you were too busy panicking to actually read the words on your screen. Talk about a self-own.
You are back with your favorite question: “What else must be true for some assertion to be true?”You claim that for standardized tests to remain culturally biased, the creators of the tests must be “so racist that they would go out of business rather than remove bias.”
Let’s apply actual logic and look at what else must be true for your fantasy to work:
For your argument to be true, “bias” would have to mean the test creators are sitting in a room maliciously giggling while writing questions about yacht clubs.
In reality, systemic and psychometric bias means the test is calibrated to predict a specific outcome (first-year college GPA). Because the single greatest predictor of college GPA is high school resource quality and family income, the test must reflect those socioeconomic advantages to remain “predictive.”
The College Board doesn’t have to be cartoonishly racist to go out of business; they just have to keep selling a product that reflects the deeply unequal reality of the American school system. If they “fixed” the test to completely remove the reflection of wealth and zip codes, the test would lose its predictive validity for a stratified university system.
You claim that “producers MUST meet the demands of consumers” and that universities are the “customer” demanding an unbiased test.
Once again, you are completely blind to reality. Over the last several years, hundreds of universities—including the entire University of California system and elite Ivy League schools—went test-optional or test-blind. Why? Because the universities themselves realized the test results were too heavily skewed by family income and luxury test-prep rather than raw academic merit.
If the “free market” and the “customers” were universally thrilled with the SAT, the College Board wouldn’t be frantically scrambling to redesign the test digitally to stop their massive bleed of university clients. The market is actively pushing back against the test’s flaws, and you are acting like it’s 1985.
Your claim that “almost no business in existence—not today—not in 1900 will screw over a race of people if that costs them business” is a level of historical illiteracy that borders on performance art.
Jim Crow laws weren’t forced upon unwilling, profit-maximizing white businessmen who secretly loved equality. White business owners, real estate developers, and banks actively lobbied for and enforced segregation, redlining, and race-based wage disparities because keeping Black Americans systematically disenfranchised directly protected their own wealth, monopolies, and social capital.
You are trying to use an idealized, fairytale version of free-market capitalism to hand-wave away a century of documented systemic economics.
The test companies don’t “fix” the socio-economic bias because the bias is the point. The test measures accumulated educational privilege. If you don’t understand that basic economic and psychometric reality, then to use your own favorite word: you are a moron.
“The point about cultural bias isn’t literally about sports trivia; it is about language syntax, vocabulary selection, and socio-economic context that favors students from wealthy, English-speaking households who can afford private schooling.”
ROFL
sports trivia, language syntax, vocabulary, are all LEARNABLE
AND they are all removable.
If they were actual factors in test scores – the tests would REMOVE THEM
AND concurrently poor schools would TEACH those things.
The differences in test scores can ONLY be attributable to either
Factors we do not know,
or Factors we can not change
Otherwise we would have changed them.
I will be happy to hear from YOU some factor no one has ever thought of before.
But anything that has been proposed 50 years ago – has been falsified by the fact that the problem has not gone away.
BTW 10% of school children are in private schools – and more than half of those are catholic schools.
Regardless, if you actually beleive Private schools do so much better a job – then you should support school choice.
“Trying to use pseudo-psychology to claim that standardized tests are infallible, unchangeable metrics of human worth”
Have not done that. Just claimed that they were a very accurate predictor of success in college and later and that they are essentially IQ tests.
Are they either perfectly ? Nope, But contra the left – they are NOT deeply flawed. They are not the only factor that can be used to predict success.
But they are the single most important predictor that we have for students preparing to go to college. Perfect no – really really good, yes.
Perfect is unachievable. Further intelligence alone is NOT the only factor in future success – rarely intelligent people fail. Rarely less intelligent people succeed.
Your entire worldview hinges on a naive, fairy-tale belief that if a problem exists, it must automatically get fixed. Let’s look at how completely detached from reality your logic is.
You claim that because syntax and vocabulary are “learnable,” poor schools would just teach them and test companies would just remove them. This completely ignores how poverty works. Underfunded schools in impoverished zip codes are struggling to afford up-to-date textbooks, retain qualified teachers, and keep their buildings structurally safe. They don’t have the funding or resources to teach elite, hyper-specific test-taking syntax.
Furthermore, you blew right past your own massive self-contradiction. You just spent paragraphs screaming that syntax, vocabulary, and test-prep are learnable and that intensive courses can give students a 200-point bump. Then, in the very next sentence, you claim that score differences “can ONLY be attributable to factors we cannot change.”
Which one is it? If a wealthy kid can buy a 200-point score bump by learning test mechanics and advanced vocabulary from a private tutor, then the test is measuring wealth and access to coaching, not a fixed, unchangeable biological trait. You completely broke your own logic just to avoid admitting that resources matter.
You claim that any theory proposed 50 years ago has been “falsified” because the problem hasn’t gone away. By that absurd logic, because poverty, homelessness, and cancer still exist after 50 years of trying to fix them, the theories explaining why they happen must be false. Systemic disparities persist not because the explanations are wrong, but because fixing deeply entrenched socioeconomic segregation and funding inequalities is incredibly difficult and politically resisted.
Nice try trying to derail the thread into a debate about “school choice” and vouchers. Pointing out that 10% of kids go to private schools doesn’t change the core argument: wealthy families have access to vastly superior educational infrastructure, counselors, and luxury test-prep. Shifting the conversation to public vs. Catholic schools is a desperate smoke screen to avoid dealing with the actual economic stratification of test scores.
You claim the SAT is the “single most important predictor that we have for students preparing to go to college.”
This isn’t just an opinion; it is a factually debunked lie. Extensive, large-scale studies—including massive data tracking by the University of California system—have repeatedly proven that High School GPA is a significantly more accurate predictor of college graduation rates and long-term success than the SAT.
Why? Because a high school GPA measures four years of consistent work ethic, discipline, and performance. The SAT measures how well you performed on one specific Saturday morning after your parents paid for a prep course.The universities—the actual “consumers” you raved about earlier—know this. That is exactly why institutions like MIT, Dartmouth, and others who recently brought back test requirements explicitly stated they did so not because the test is a perfect IQ metric, but because they needed a way to identify top-performing students in severely underfunded high schools who didn’t have access to advanced AP classes. They are using it to adjust for environmental gaps, completely contradicting your theory that it measures a fixed biological hierarchy.
You are defending an outdated, broken metric using broken logic and fake data.
X
I do not have a dog in this fight.
I would be happy to find any way that works to eliminate these disparities.
For the past 60 plus years we have concurrently been trying to discredit the data,
and to try most every conceivable thing to make the disparities disappear.
Both public and private programs.
Over those 60 years you have failed to discredit the data – you have only made the evidence more robust.
And you have failed to find anything that corrects the disparities – aside from denying reality.
Every claim you and Bug have made – EVEN IF TRUE – is correctable.
As noted standardized tests have done everything in their power to remove any biases – it is in their interests to do so.
Still the differences remain.
Further EVERY claim you have made for the source of the biases is LEARNABLE.
Learn sports trivia, learn vocabulary, learn …..
We have thrown MASSIVE amounts of money at the problem.
The most expensive school districts in the country are also the worst performing.
All the things you claim are the source of the problem have remedies that have been tried and FAILED
Claiming you “don’t have a dog in this fight” right after spending pages fabricating statistics to defend a racial hierarchy is the peak of intellectual dishonesty. You are completely invested in your conclusion, which is why you keep ignoring the actual historical and economic data.
You claim that “the most expensive school districts in the country are also the worst performing” and that we have “thrown massive amounts of money at the problem.” This is a completely falsified talking point.
The Reality of Funding: In the United States, public schools are primarily funded through local property taxes. This means wealthy zip codes automatically generate vastly more funding per student than impoverished zip codes.
The Resource Gap:While a few high-poverty urban districts receive federal Title I subsidies that look large on paper, that money is entirely swallowed up by the massive overhead of handling concentrated poverty—such as specialized security, crumbling 100-year-old infrastructure repair, remedial literacy programs, and high teacher turnover costs. It does not buy the luxury AP courses, physics labs, and elite counseling found in wealthy suburban districts. You are confusing emergency triage spending with actual educational investment
You keep repeating like a broken record that vocabulary, syntax, and test mechanics are “learnable.”
Let’s apply your own favorite critical thinking question: What else must be true for that to be true?If these traits are fully learnable, then the test does not measure an unchangeable, innate, biological IQ. It measures what has been learned.If it measures what has been learned, then a student’s score is a direct reflection of the quality of their educational environment and their family’s ability to buy targeted test-prep.
By repeatedly screaming that the test content is learnable, you have completely surrendered your entire biological premise. You are admitting that the SAT is a measure of accumulated educational privilege and exposure, not a pristine metric of genetic capability.
You claim that 60 years of programs have “failed to find anything that corrects the disparities.” This is historically illiterate.
Whenever systemic interventions are actually sustained—such as the massive integration efforts of the 1970s and 1980s—the racial and socioeconomic score gaps narrowed dramatically. The gap only began widening and stagnating again when those programs were systematically defunded, dismantled, and housing segregation rebounded in the late 1990s and 2000s.
Furthermore, whenever you look at minority students from affluent, highly educated families with access to top-tier schooling, their scores look vastly different than those from underfunded environments.
The disparities persist because the underlying economic and structural disparities persist. We haven’t “failed” to fix the gap; our society has simply refused to fix the underlying wealth and housing segregation that creates it.
No one is “discrediting the data.” The data is perfectly clear. The College Board’s own spreadsheets show a near-perfect, linear correlation between a family’s household income and their student’s SAT score.
The only person denying reality here is you. You are looking at a test that tracks a family’s bank account and zip code, watching wealthy families literally buy 200-point score bumps through private coaching, and then trying to spin it as an immutable biological law.
Your argument isn’t supported by science, history, or economics. It’s just a desperate attempt to use broken math and debunked talking points to justify an unequal status quo.
The data is fine – it has produced the same results for 6 mnore than a century – If you could do something successful to correct that -you would have.
It is YOU – the left that have failed.
And the losers are the very people you claim to be helping.
Your entire argument has officially devolved into an ideological temper tantrum because your fake statistics and broken math were completely exposed.
You claim the data has produced the “same results for more than a century.” That is a flat-out, historical fabrication.
The SAT didn’t even exist a century ago in its current format, and the College Board didn’t begin tracking standardized racial demographic data until the 1970s. You are literally making up a timeline out of thin air.
The Gaps Have Not Been Static. As already noted—and as the historical record proves—the Black-White score gap narrowed by nearly half during the 1970s and 1980s when integration and school funding equity programs were actively enforced. The gap only widened again when those programs were dismantled in the 1990s.
To claim the results have been identical for a century isn’t just “fine data”—it is a complete, unadulterated rewrite of history to protect your narrative.
The moment your math was proven wrong, your “only East Asians benefit” claim was debunked, and your “SAT is the most important predictor” myth was shattered by actual university studies, you immediately bailed on the data and started screaming about “the left.”
This isn’t a partisan issue; it’s a psychometric and economic reality. The universities dropping these tests aren’t doing it out of political correctness—they are doing it because corporations and institutional researchers proved that the tests were measuring a parent’s bank account instead of the student’s actual long-term capability.
You claim the losers are the people we are trying to help. No. The real losers are the brilliant, hard-working students in underfunded zip codes who are locked out of opportunities because people like you want to pretend that a test heavily manipulated by luxury private tutoring is an infallible measure of human worth.
You don’t care about the data, you don’t care about consistency, and you clearly don’t care about the basic arithmetic you failed at the very beginning of this thread. You just want a pseudoscientific excuse to justify inequality.
The data has spoken, the universities have adapted, and you are left shouting partisan talking points at a reality that has completely left you behind.
“I find it hard to believe you were a Merit Scholar –“
John, all merit scholarships are not equal. The academic one, the National Merit Scholarship, is based on outstanding academic achievement. The other one is the Merit Scholarship, which is not financially based and includes athletics. Enigma had an athletic scholarship.
I’m sure of my own history, including being a National Merit Scholar (along with three members of my Sunday School class who all attended different schools) and working fro the Princeton Review which taught to the test. This is your problem, in order to justify your view, you have to deny mine.
being a national merit scholar requires being in the top 2% of PSAT scores.
If you actually were an national merit scholar – then you have an IQ of atleast 132 – which will barely get you into Mensa.
While an IQ of 132 does not impress m – Ted Kazynskis was 135. what is more troubling is that – you are NOT demonstrating that here.
You can make whatever claims you wish about yourself – it is difficult to impossible to prove them here – which is ONE of the reasons I mostly do not make such claims.
Further it is an appeal to authority which is a fallacy.
are you a national merit scholar – that is not evidenced by your arguments here.
Are you an enigma – nah. I have never found your arguments interesting or challenging and you do not seem to have any clue how much you do not know,
nor are you very good at critical thinking – though you appear to be significantly better than X/George who I would be shocked if he had an IQ over 100.
Regardless I do not care if you were a national merit scholar – if you were in the top 2% or the top 0.25%.
I care whether you make valid arguments with solid data – and you do not.
Maybe I over estimate the intellectual ability of those with an IQ of 132. Again that is the same as Ted Kazinsky aside from his obvious mental health issues – I did not find his intellect impressive.
I get that you are surrounded by people that have to lie to feel better about themselves but I’m not one. Before you go there, I didn’t pay anyone to take my tests to get into a school like your president. I value your assessment of my intelligence not at all, your idea of a convincing argument is to respond to a sentence with several paragraphs. Multiple times you’ve suggested if not outright claimed I’m a liar about something easily provable. Did you think I had no record? I do confess that this article was written for the school newspaper by a good friend of mine.
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/QgrcJHsBmGJcjNqzgGNkdtNbBhGjPJDQBpB?projector=1&messagePartId=0.1
Even the math section?
Didn’t apply as much to the math section though some of the word problems could be tricky.
enigma:
(1) Looks like you lifted the “cricket” example from the Internet “practice” set, which does NOT represent any real questions on the test.
(2) absolutely NO knowledge or familiarity with cricket is required to answer the questions posed. All the information needed to answer is contained in the paragraphs leading up to the questions.
(3) https://brainly.in/question/56419328
(4) thanks anyway.
Lin, you are completely missing the entire point of the psychometric argument to protect your bias. Posting a link to a reading comprehension passage about cricket from a homework-help site doesn’t prove what you think it does. It actually proves the point enigma is making.
You claim that because the text block gives you the information, no outside knowledge is required. That is false. Psychometricians prove that if a passage uses vocabulary, idioms, or structural framing familiar to an elite or specific culture (like sports metrics, sailing terms, or upper-class hobbies), a student from that background will read and decode the text significantly faster and with less cognitive load than an outsider. The bias isn’t about “hiding facts”; it is about systemic speed and decoding advantages.
The link you posted (brainly.in/question/56419328) is from a localized exam in India, where cricket is a national obsession. Passing a reading test in India about cricket in India is highly intuitive because the entire culture understands the sport’s basic premise. If you gave that exact same reading passage to an underfunded student in inner-city Chicagowho has never seen a cricket match, they would spend extra cognitive energy trying to visualize the basic context instead of focusing purely on the logic.
Ah, no.
There is nothing specific to cricket in that link that someone could answer the questions. For that matter you could swap out cricket and replace it with just about any other two team sport and the questions would apply equally.
Precisely.
X: I provided the specific link. Please review it and cite, with specificity, the vocabulary, idioms, or structural framing familiar to an elite or specific culture (like sports metrics, sailing terms, or upper-class hobbies) contained therein, without explanation or definition of the term so employed.
Thank you in advance.
apology, I forgot to put quotation marks around your AI sentence, “vocabulary, idioms, or structural framing familiar to an elite or specific culture (like sports metrics, sailing terms, or upper-class hobbies),”
Lin,
The link you posted (brainly.in/question/56419328) contains an exact reading comprehension passage that begins: “When we think of the game of cricket, we come to the conclusion that it is primarily a game that depends on outstanding physical activities…”
This is not a random internet practice set. This is a verbatim question lifted directly from the CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) Class 10/12 English Board Exams in India,where cricket is the national sport and a ubiquitous cultural touchstone.
While it is true that technically “all the information needed to answer is contained in the paragraph,” a student in India who grows up breathing, watching, and playing cricket will glide through that text effortlessly. Their brain does not have to waste cognitive energy decoding what the sport is, how it functions, or what emotions are tied to it.
: If you hand that exact same reading passage to an underprivileged, inner-city American student who has never seen a single second of cricket, their brain must actively expend extra cognitive energy and working memory just to visualize and contextualize the unfamiliar scenario.
This is the exact psychometric definition of reading comprehension bias. It isn’t about requiring trivia; it is about cognitive pacing and familiarity. The test creators in India chose a cricket passage precisely because it is culturally seamless for their demographic. When American tests use passages that assume familiarity with socioeconomic contexts common only to wealthy, suburban households, they are doing the exact same thing.
You proudly stated that “absolutely NO knowledge or familiarity with cricket is required to answer.”
No kidding. That has been our point the entire time. Psychometric bias does not mean a question says: “Value of X = how many runs did Virat Kohli score yesterday?” It means the structural framing, vocabulary density, and contextual familiarity create an uneven playing field that penalizes students from different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.
You searched the internet for a “gotcha” link, failed to realize you were pulling a standardized exam question from India, and accidentally provided a textbook example of how national testing boards leverage domestic cultural themes to build reading passages.
So YOUR claim is
We have known about this problem for 60 years,
There are many ways to fix this problem
The left wing nut educational system
and the standardized testing industry have refused to do anything to correct the problem because of ….. racism ?
How much of an idiot do you think everyone else is ?
Please make a SINGLE claim about the disparity in SAT scores that can not EASILY be corrected MULTIPLE ways if true ?
Every single claim you have made has MANY EASY ways to correct.
If you told me before the SATs that knowing about cricket and sculling would boost my scores by 200 pts – or even 10pts – I would become an expert.
Left winbg nuts have controplled the education system in the US for 60 years.
Your still trying to blame the KKK.
None of the details matter.
Either the problem not in something that humans can change
or we have not found the root problem
or the left wing nuts controlling the educations system are incompetent.
or the left wing nuts controlling the education system are crypto racists.
No matter what – YOU are full of schiff as always
You ask for a single claim that cannot be easily corrected multiple ways. Okay, let’s take the single most powerful predictor of SAT score disparities: Concentrated Socioeconomic Segregation../b>
How do you “easily fix” the fact that public school funding in America is structurally tied to local property taxes?
To “fix” that, you would have to completely dismantle the municipal tax structures of all 50 states, forcibly redistribute property tax revenues from wealthy suburbs to inner cities, and completely desegregate housing across the country.
There is nothing “easy” or “simple” about that. It requires massive political will, trillions of dollars in structural reorganization, and decades of legal battles.
The problem isn’t that the system is “maliciously racist” or “refusing to fix it because of the KKK.” The problem is that the wealthy—regardless of their politics—vehemently resist changing the property tax laws and school zoning boundaries that give their children a massive, compounding educational advantage.
You write: “If you told me before the SATs that knowing about cricket and sculling would boost my scores… I would become an expert.”
Do you even hear yourself? You are explicitly admitting that the material on the test is entirely learnable and game-able through preparation.
If a wealthy family can pay a luxury tutor $200 an hour to teach their child the exact advanced vocabulary, syntax patterns, and test-taking mechanics that elevate a score, then the test is measuring the family’s bank account, not a fixed, unchangeable biological trait.
You cannot argue in one breath that the test is an objective, immutable measure of innate biological IQ, and then argue in the next breath that someone can just “become an expert” and boost their score by changing their habits. You completely broke your own logic just to make a point about cricket.
Your frantic pivot to screaming about “left-wing nuts controlling education” is a transparent admission that you have lost the structural argument. School performance is not dictated by ideological fairy dust; it is dictated by resources, stability, and generational wealth.
An underfunded school in a high-poverty neighborhood faces high teacher turnover, unsafe facilities, trauma, and a lack of advanced placement (AP) curriculum.
It doesn’t matter who is running the school board; if the students are dealing with food insecurity and the school cannot afford physics textbooks or intensive SAT-prep electives, their scores will reflect that deficit.
You claim there are only three options: it’s unchangeable, we haven’t found the root problem, or the educators are incompetent.
You are entirely wrong. We have found the root problem, and the data is overwhelmingly robust: Standardized test scores are a near-perfect reflection of accumulated educational privilege.
The reason the problem hasn’t been “fixed” isn’t because of a secret conspiracy. It’s because fixing it requires addressing deep, structural economic inequalities that our society chooses to ignore. That is exactly why universities—the actual “consumers” you praised earlier—are bypassing the SAT entirely and looking at High School GPA, which measures four years of sustained effort rather than a single Saturday morning shaped by wealth.
Stop hiding behind partisan rants and grade-school insults. If you can’t handle the basic economics of public school funding, you have no business pretending you understand the data.
I didn’t “lift” a question from anywhere, just recalled my experience.
I just looked it up on the SATs. There is an entire section on Cricket and flatware settings in formal dinning at country clubs.
Dinning? Like dinner? Lunching?
No, dunning as when they present the bill. After taking inventory of the flatware at the end of the meal.
The ACT has sections on line dancing, etiquette for high tea, badminton and backgammon.
Just on the minute chance that you are taking a break today form being the lying sack of shit you invariably are here, do you have a link to back that up?
Enigmainblack, while I often disagree with you, congratulations on you making National Merit Semifinalist. That’s quit a feat.
I didn’t appreciate it at the time, I took the test and did well. Then I started getting information from colleges from across the country. I grew up in Big Ten country and went to high school two blocks from the University of Minnesota. I knew the schools with major football and basketball programs along with some of the Ivy League schools. I mentioned elsewhere that three members of my Sunday School class were also National Merit Scholars. One girl went to Wellesley; another went to Spelman College and the other Northwestern. I went to Fisk University. Going away to school was a blessing when compared to my high school friends that stayed home.
I have slammed your arguments – and I am not backing away from that.
But it appears that you have done reasonably well in life – and you are entitled to Kudos for that.
Success – small or large is rarely luck – as I have asserted in this debate – Intelligence has the strongest correspondence to success that exists in the social sciences – and standardized tests – like the PSAT and SAT are very strong proxy’s for measures of intelligence.
I am hard on the intelligence of many posters here – including you. Throughout my entire life I have had difficulty understanding that things like logic that come incredibly easily and natural to me do not to everyone. I overestimate the intelligence of other people and as a result have high expectations of them and get disappointed.