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Hawking Searching For Africa's Einsteins
nuke-alwin writes "Stephen Hawking has traveled to South Africa in search of Africa's Einsteins. The project will create Africa's first post-graduate center for math and physics. The British government has unfortunately decided not to back the project, which is hoping to fight poverty by identifying the kind of talent that can create wealth." Neil Turok is deeply involved as well; he was recently named to head the Perimeter Institute in Canada, whose server we brought to its knees this morning.
Pandering to the blacks. This is Hawking's appology for being white.
I have an urge to make a comment about H-1B's, but I'll resist this time.
Table-ized A.I.
If race is irrelevant how do you explain the obvious widespread advanced technological achievements of certain races vs others who, if left untouched, would most likely still be living as primitives for the next thousand centuries? You can't blame the natural evolution of the people of any continent on "social conditions". The greatest determining factor in the course of any civilization/society is the intellect of its inhabitants.
Interesting that you use Johannesburg as an example of great place in Africa. It just so happens to be in South Africa, which until the mid '90s, was run by whites.
Fast-forward to present day, where things are not so rosy. From the Wikipedia link above:
Thousands of poor, mostly black, people, who had been forbidden to live in the city proper, moved into the city from surrounding black townships like Soweto. Many immigrants from economically beleaguered and war torn African nations flooded into South Africa, with Johannesburg the most Northerly major city and therein a logical choice. Crime levels rose, and especially the rate of violent crime. Many buildings were abandoned by landlords, especially in high-density areas, such as Hillbrow. Many corporations and institutions, including the stock exchange, moved their headquarters away from the city centre, to suburbs like Sandton. By the late 1990s, Johannesburg was rated as one of the most dangerous cities in the world.
I leave the obvious conclusion as an exercise for the reader.
OK. Name one thing that Stephen Hawking has invented that created any wealth other than the sales of his books and related articles.
Isn't Stephen Hawking the guy who, like Carl Sagan, David Deutsch, Kip Thorne and many others, believes that Einstein's GR does not forbid time travel? Yep. It remains that nothing can move in spacetime by definition. Surprise! This is the reason that Sir Karl Popper (or falsification fame) compared spacetime to "Einstein's block universe in which nothing ever happens". It is also the reason that Robert Geroch wrote the following in his book "Relativity from A to B":
There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes. [...] In particular, one does not think of particles as "moving through" space-time, or as "following along" their world-lines. Rather, particles are just "in" space-time, once and for all, and the world-line represents, all at once the complete life history of the particle.
Isn't it Hawking's job to understand and know these things? Read Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics to learn the truth about spacetime physics and time travel crackpots. It is time we stopped putting fallible humans on a pedestal and turn them into the superior gods that they are not.
For such intelligent people being involved with this, they sure do *not* have a grasp of basic statistical analysis and the well-documented distribution of IQ scores between demographic population groups.
If we assume the "Einstein-level IQ" they're looking for is around 160 (with any arguments about Einstein's scientific credibility aside for the moment):
Using Excel's NORMDIST function properly, this means that out of a population of 100,000 blacks and 100,000 whites:
3.35424599 people from the white group will have an IQ greater than or equal to 160
0.00093792910105250400 people from the black group will have an IQ greater than or equal to 160 (essentially meaning that out of even 100,000 black people, you are not likely to find one with an IQ that high).
If I increase the population size to 922,011,000 (population of Africa), then there are 8.6478 people with an IQ of at least 160.
So I have to ask, seriously, what do they hope to accomplish here? This isn't going to work the way they hope, just like every single other egalitarian dream that has been cooked up from decades past.
BTW, I got my standard deviation and averages from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence
The only problem with this calculation is that the average and SD for American blacks is a good bit higher than the ones for African blacks, so you can guess what that means for these calculations!
As if a bunch of ISLAMIC NIGGERS can think about anything other than killing each other for the white man's table scraps.
What a shocker, Jared Diamond (JEW) telling whites how all our accomplishments were based on geography and had nothing to do with hard work, morality, and intelligence. Next thing you know you'll tell us we should read other Hebrew anti-white propaganda like Howard Zinn.