>We've seen how the SAT was renormalized to try to hide the fact that scores have been declining,
Excuse me? What is this?
The SAT is a norm referenced test. It is renormed all the time, not for any political reason, but because it is a norm referenced test.
It's never been much use for comparing trends over time, because of this. Norm referenced tests are not static. They change all the time. The material on them changes, both to preserve the norm (by definition it must do this) and to reflect changes in the national curriculum (as it is perceived by test makers).
Also, takers of the SAT are self-selecting, making it not even remotely appropriate for comparing different years. E.g. more people go to college, so more people take the SAT, and the average score drops (since more people with "average" skills are taking the test).
> Weed 'em out earlier is what I think we should do.
Unless you propose exterminating them, too, this doesn't address the issue. They are part of our society & it is very much in our interest to get them into our economy in a productive way. Otherwise we pay for it later when they can't get jobs, etc. Bluntly, aside from it being reprehensible, we can't afford to let huge numbers of our population just slip into ignorance.
Besides, the largest problems faced by our schools are not student disruptions. The problems have much more to do with $20 per student yearly classroom budgets, lack of teacher training, etc.
For example, most states never train their teachers in new curriculum at the time the state adopts new curriculum. The teachers merely get this fat document dropped on their desk, having had almost no part in it development. Frequently they don't have the training to effectively apply that curriculum, or don't get what exactly it's driving at, since they had to part in making it.
We need to invest in such training if we want curriculum documents to be more than door stops.
>AFAIK, the major unions all oppose any form of merit pay
I'm not sure that's true. Most merit pay programs that have been proposed have been based on norm reference test score results, which is a Bad Idea (tm), for all the usual reasons that norm referenced tests fail to measure anything useful.
I would be curious to see how the unions would react to a merit scale based on something else (e.g. criterion based testing).
There's ample evidence that SAT scores are racially biased. In fact, there is data showing that asking someone who feels threatened as a race to fill out a racial profile before a test impacts their test score. So there's a documented direct mechanism.
> anybody here ever read "The Bell Curve"? Interesting stuff, and it's massively documented compared to the usual PC attacks on it.
Being documented, by itself, is not enough. And the attacks on it are not generally PC, but rather regard basic data & analysis techniques. The authors live with a delusion that you can take bad data, apply enough math, and get good results.
Stephen J Gould has published a bit on "the bell curve" in particular, though The Mismeasure of Man refuted all of their arguments before they bothered to publish their book. New copies of "The Mismeasure of Man" include his essay speaking directly to "The Bell Curve".
Every parent is against social promotion until it's _their_ kid. And the problems are not generally low income kids -- social promotion is entrenched by those with the influence and power to keep it that way: the doctor's kid, the lawyer's kid, the football star, etc. All these folk are against social promotion until one of their kids fails. Then the teacher is fired, the student goes on, and the next teacher knows better than to fail someone if they want to keep their job.
>This isn't teaching me anything after I learn how to do a few.
Exactly! This is a huge problem. Educators are aware of this problem. You will see it in the literature as the debate between "back to basics" or "list of facts" teaching (what you're complaining about) and more inquiry based teaching methods.
The "back to basics" movement is very political. The reason you still see this sort of trash in our schools is all about politics, not about educators.
> You claim that the teachers work harder than techs? I don't see many teacher cars in parking lots till midnight (or even 5 PM for that matter) like I do in the office park where I work
Not generically. Rather, I claim it's not uncommon. In teaching there's little reward even if you work hard. In tech fields the rewards are high even if you hardly work.
Merit based pay might fix this, however so far the people who have proposed this for education want to base merit on really stupid things, like norm reference test score results.
> the teachers work less than half of the days of the year and go home long before 5:00 PM
... long before 5:00 PM so they can cook dinner for their family and then stay up until 2am grading papers. (speaking, again, from the teachers I know personally).
It's been pointed out previously that working only part of the year is a myth. Tons of preparation goes into being ready for the school year.
You are the one spouting garbarge. In my first hand experience the yearly *bonus* of a tech job in the bay area is over half the yearly salary of a teaching job in the area -- even when the teacher is more highly trained and works harder than the tech.
Then consider a $10-20 per student class budget for the entire year, and you find teachers spending their already pathetic income on classroom materials.
And what do you base this crap on? Norm referenced test scores? There's a glaringly obvious problem of sample sets when comparing public & private schools. In short, higher average test scores of private school students do not imply that your child will learn more or perform better on tests (two different problems, btw) than they would by attenting a public school.
In reply to this, and the other reply on the same subject (re: asians), there are at least two reasons this argument doesn't work, one of them which is fairly obvious: the sample set is bad.
Asians are recent immigrants, so they both self-select, and are selected by U.S. immigration policy. That is, it tends to be the richer and more intelligent that make it to the U.S., and U.S. immigration policy attempts to select more skilled immigrants.
To make this comparison you have to first select by similar criteria whites & blacks before doing the comparison. Without a valid sample set your data is spoodge. There is no evidence of either a genetic or a cultural advantage of Asians, as there's no evidence of any advantage at all.
The second reason, which is more direct, is there is data showing that minorities who feel at risk because of their minority status perform less well on tests if they are asked about their ethnicity before taking the test. There's no definative theory why this is (AFAIK), but self-reporting indicates that filling out this information reminds the student of stressful racial issues, makes them doubt whether the test will be fair, etc., and their performance suffers.
Minorites who are not at risk due to their race, e.g. Asians, don't show this effect.
... all of which presents a further difficulty to testing. It's fairer to at-risk minorities to test them w/o having them fill out race info, but then it becomes very difficult to verify that tests are not racially biased.
Ok, I'm getting some idea of the issue, but a real example would be cool.
>It is no slower than C if you know what you are doing
Yeah, it's that "knowing what you are doing" bit that gets me. It always seems that you have to pay a huge amount of attention to what the compiler is trying to hide from you (creating temporary variables, etc.), which kinda defeats the purpose, and ultimately is mounds harder than just coding in C. (In my limited experience;)
>Well, C++ is the only known cure at the moment, AFAIK.
Can you elaborate on this point? (I don't code gui's, so I know nothing about gui specific problems. But I've always found C++ pretty slow & useless.) What's the scoop? What is an example of the problem & how does C++ solve it?
Yeah, that's clear. There is a huge problem of perception. In the long run it would definately be better to develop better testing paradigms, but unfortunately the testing practices in America seem to be getting worse, not better. Few have taken the time to investigate the validity of the tests we regularly administer to students.
>Wasn't it only introduced this decade?
No, it's been with us for three decades or so. It was one of the later civil rights acts. '64? Something like that.
>The priorities are different. And we can't fix these from the outside.
The priorities are different, but perhaps not for obvious reasons. Malcolm X wrote about white people being annoyed when black people got anything "nice", in particular a nice car. The truth is the whites were not annoyed by the car, but by what they saw as a waste of money. In the same position they would have saved for a house, etc.
Part of the problem is blacks don't see or don't have larger opportunities -- e.g. the loan issue I keep raising (that banks have been repeatedly found to offer worse loans to blacks, even blacks with identical financial histories). Saving for a house is not as realistic if the banker is holding you to a different standard.
If no one they know has gotten into a good school, it's not exactly on their mind to be preparing for a good school by investing in a computer. In contrast they may know of someone who went from the ghetto to professional basketball, so buying good shoes may look like a wise investment.
The issue really is about making opportunities as well as educating people about them. We are not helpless to do this from the "outside". We can work to eliminate racially biased loan practices, etc., as well as fostering out-reach programs which teach kids about preparing for good schools and good jobs. We can work to eliminate racially biased admissions practices. If the admissions process is thought to be racist, many blacks won't even apply.
It is in everyone's best interest to do this quickly and effectively, because of the social costs of decaying inner cities.
>If you want to offer that the poor are still poor compared to the rich, than that is a universal constant that has haunted us for all of history.
Well... perhaps consistent, but not constant. The relative poverty of the poor (relative to the rich) has varied hugely in this century, peaking before the depression, and shrinking fairly steadily until the 1980's. We're now about where things were before the depression: with the most wealth in the hands of the least number of people.
>We would start with getting the fuck out of the country and giving it back to the natives.
As I already said, no one is proposing that, so it's beside the point to accuse people of it.
You allow that we've taken land, e.g., from the natives, but then persist in this myth that we somehow earned it?
White ownership of land throughout the west & mid-west is directly because of racist practices, not because of any sort of meritocracy. These arguments about equal opportunity are nonsense. Given family farms for blacks a hundred years ago, and subsequent leveraging of that wealth into education & jobs -- as white families have been able to entrench themselves -- and you might be able to talk about equal opportunity.
Short of that, equal opportunity does not exist, unless we make some effort to provide it.
And the bottom line is, you really, really want to do this: it's going to be cheaper for you than paying the taxes to feed them, build the housing projects, mop up after the crime, keep them in prison, pay the uninsured emergency room visits, and all of the other woes of our inner cities.
Give them training, and a good job, and everyone wins.
>This is true. Such policies as affirmative action have perpetuated themselves into making more problems. They are only short term solutions to appease a certain political group.
No, this is false. There is an economics paper I've referred to elsewhere, "Continuous vs. Episodic growth" which compiles data on the economic status of blacks yearly since they were freed. In short, the status of the black community has not changed *at all* except after specific events, e.g. their migration from the south, WWII, and the passing of affirmative action. Otherwise, their economic status has been as flat as a pool table. Affirmative action is the only public policy besides entering a world war which has moved the black community toward the national average, and its effect has been long-lasting, not short-term.
And btw, affirmative action is not about lowering the boundaries. It's about correcting for measures (e.g. norm referenced test scores) which are known to be racially biased.
>As for the rich american families, they are there for a reason. They were smart enough to realize when they could make a profit, and they did
Or, more accurately, the government gave them free land based on their race, banks gave them better loan opportinities, based on their race, they were given better schools, based on their race, and they were given better jobs based on their schooling.
>Show me the documents
You might start with "Continuous vs. Episodic Growth: the case of blacks" (I believe that's the title, I don't have the author's name at the moment). It's a paper by an economist which didn't believe this bias existed, until he compiled the data. There are many others. You might also look into the history of sting operations on banks, realtors, etc., regarding their giving less favorable loans to blacks.
>As for that, I'd just have to say you're wrong. Most high paid jobs are high paying for a reason, it takes skill. Otherwise it wouldn't be high paying.
Dream on. To paraphrase a fortune on the Caltech undergraduate computer lab "Want a carreer paying over $100k to surf the web and write email? Consider computer science."
>Your analogy is flawed. Nothing I own was ever the property of any minority, what was the property of someone else was purchased legally for a fair some of their choosing.
This misses the point, again. Steps people are taking today to bring minorities into the mainstream generally do not attempt to correct wrongs of the past, since, as you correctly point out, it can't be done. Rather, they try to address the widespread economic racism that has been demonstrated to exist in the U.S. E.g. the sting operations at realtors which have repeatedly established that blacks with identicle economic records are offered less favorable loan terms.
>BUT, if your great great grandfather stole my great great grandfathers horse and buggy, I'm not going to try to charge your daughter the cost of the horse and buggy. That would be ludicrous.
It's only ludicrous because of the "buggy" part. If we're talking about righting wrongs that happened in reality -- rather than your silly example -- we would start by taking land away from white families that got them from land grants which excluded blacks. The economic make-up of America would be a bit different if black families owned significant portions of the west and midwest.
Before accusing anyone of trying to correct wrongs of the past, remember that in America that would begin with taking land from white families and giving it to black families.
No one is proposing that.
(btw, I'm not suggesting your family has land, but rather that there is this bias in land holdings directly caused by racist land grants, among many other racist practices).
>there are more poor white people that there are black people total.
no shit. And there are many, many more white people than black people in the U.S. So the difference is in one case color is a primary indicator of your economic status, and in the other case it isn't.
In every age those in power have used bullshit arguments about why that ordering is the "natural" ordering. Kings and nobelmen invoked the will of god. Rich American families invoked bullshit science (IQ testing, etc. See _The Mismeasure of Man_ by SJ Gould).
Now squid proposes ability and gumption.
I hate to break this to you, but most high paid technology jobs are hardly rocket science. It's almost criminal how easy many of them are. People in the inner cities could and would do these jobs if they had the training and opportunity.
Widespread economic racism in America has been very well documented, even by economists who started out believing racism couldn't exist in a free market. If you need money to get on the net & light skin to get money, the equation is fairly obvious.
The only reason./ers are sitting here browsing the web while others sit in the inner city is those in the inner city have poor schools, few resources, and no realistic expectation of good jobs. I promise they can browse the web as well as you can.
In response to other posts, a few miracle stories of success are hardly relevant. The issue is bringing the average inner city person into the mainstream, not getting half a dozen geniuses.
And regarding the "nanny state", if you don't support efforts to move these people into the mainstream, you *will* end up supporting them via taxes.
> There is no method by which we can rationally know about the validity of any historical event.
No, this is just wrong. Scientific method tells us there are trees that are centuries old. We rationally know the trees grew over those centuries, even though 1) no one was there to see it, and 2) it hasn't been repeated in a lab.
(A common misconception about science is these two things are necessary for valid science. They aren't.)
Unless you meant "rationally" in the sense that there is no doubt, no other possibilites -- e.g. aliens constructed the tree & left it there. There is nothing we know beyond *all* doubt (e.g. we don't know beyond all doubt that the world we perceive is real), but there are many things we know beyond all reasonable (rational) doubt -- including many things about historical events.
>The so called sedimentary levels that were formed over time are bogus. They're different depending upon where in the world you look. (they're in different orders).
Tell that to Exxon.
Another vote for "what are you smoking". Before the theory of evolution was even developed, oil companies discovered that the sedimentary levels, and the fossils they carried were always in the *same* order, and could use it to determine where to find oil. Finding oil during the last two centuries has been almost exclusively based on this one observation. It was the search for oil that led to the understanding of the fossil record and the development of evolutionary theory.
Apparently the gas you put in your car is an evolutionist myth. Better run your car on wood.
The only places where the sedimentary levels vary are where they are turned on end, flipped over, etc., by continental movement, and the relative positioning is maintained (i.e. the record is the same read upside down, once you figure out what orientation it's in).
HunterZ -- You, as the dozens of folk who have posted before you saying the same thing, are overlooking what the word "theory" means, and with it the entire process of scientific discovery. Evolution is taught as theory, as gravity is taught as theory. There have been many, many posts on this subject, and it might have been prudent to read them before posting.
Darwin did not propose choping off a wing would make decendents wingless. In fact, his theory predicted the opposite. His theory predicted the existance of a mutable genetic material, which has proven to be true. Since chopping off a wing does not affect the genetic material, it has no effect on offspring.
Whoever taught you otherwise didn't know the theory of evolution.
The reason no alternate theories are taught is none have been proposed. As it stands, creationism is not a theory because it has made no correct predictions, and is supported by no evidence. Evolution has made dozens or hundreds of accurate predictions, the first being the existance of a mutable genetic material.
Again: it's in Dawkins. Look it up. The short story is the algorithm you're describing mathematically is not evolution, in particular because it lacks selection.
Slashdot Mirror
>We've seen how the SAT was renormalized to try to hide the fact that scores have been declining,
Excuse me? What is this?
The SAT is a norm referenced test. It is renormed all the time, not for any political reason, but because it is a norm referenced test.
It's never been much use for comparing trends over time, because of this. Norm referenced tests are not static. They change all the time. The material on them changes, both to preserve the norm (by definition it must do this) and to reflect changes in the national curriculum (as it is perceived by test makers).
Also, takers of the SAT are self-selecting, making it not even remotely appropriate for comparing different years. E.g. more people go to college, so more people take the SAT, and the average score drops (since more people with "average" skills are taking the test).
> Weed 'em out earlier is what I think we should do.
Unless you propose exterminating them, too, this doesn't address the issue. They are part of our society & it is very much in our interest to get them into our economy in a productive way. Otherwise we pay for it later when they can't get jobs, etc. Bluntly, aside from it being reprehensible, we can't afford to let huge numbers of our population just slip into ignorance.
Besides, the largest problems faced by our schools are not student disruptions. The problems have much more to do with $20 per student yearly classroom budgets, lack of teacher training, etc.
For example, most states never train their teachers in new curriculum at the time the state adopts new curriculum. The teachers merely get this fat document dropped on their desk, having had almost no part in it development. Frequently they don't have the training to effectively apply that curriculum, or don't get what exactly it's driving at, since they had to part in making it.
We need to invest in such training if we want curriculum documents to be more than door stops.
>AFAIK, the major unions all oppose any form of merit pay
I'm not sure that's true. Most merit pay programs that have been proposed have been based on norm reference test score results, which is a Bad Idea (tm), for all the usual reasons that norm referenced tests fail to measure anything useful.
I would be curious to see how the unions would react to a merit scale based on something else (e.g. criterion based testing).
>Good god. That's about as bad as race norming.
There's ample evidence that SAT scores are racially biased. In fact, there is data showing that asking someone who feels threatened as a race to fill out a racial profile before a test impacts their test score. So there's a documented direct mechanism.
> anybody here ever read "The Bell Curve"? Interesting stuff, and it's massively documented compared to the usual PC attacks on it.
Being documented, by itself, is not enough. And the attacks on it are not generally PC, but rather regard basic data & analysis techniques. The authors live with a delusion that you can take bad data, apply enough math, and get good results.
Stephen J Gould has published a bit on "the bell curve" in particular, though The Mismeasure of Man refuted all of their arguments before they bothered to publish their book. New copies of "The Mismeasure of Man" include his essay speaking directly to "The Bell Curve".
>No social promotion,no grading on a curve
Every parent is against social promotion until it's _their_ kid. And the problems are not generally low income kids -- social promotion is entrenched by those with the influence and power to keep it that way: the doctor's kid, the lawyer's kid, the football star, etc. All these folk are against social promotion until one of their kids fails. Then the teacher is fired, the student goes on, and the next teacher knows better than to fail someone if they want to keep their job.
>This isn't teaching me anything after I learn how to do a few.
Exactly! This is a huge problem. Educators are aware of this problem. You will see it in the literature as the debate between "back to basics" or "list of facts" teaching (what you're complaining about) and more inquiry based teaching methods.
The "back to basics" movement is very political. The reason you still see this sort of trash in our schools is all about politics, not about educators.
> You claim that the teachers work harder than techs? I don't see many teacher cars in parking lots till midnight (or even 5 PM for that matter) like I do in the office park where I work
Not generically. Rather, I claim it's not uncommon. In teaching there's little reward even if you work hard. In tech fields the rewards are high even if you hardly work.
Merit based pay might fix this, however so far the people who have proposed this for education want to base merit on really stupid things, like norm reference test score results.
> the teachers work less than half of the days of the year and go home long before 5:00 PM
... long before 5:00 PM so they can cook dinner for their family and then stay up until 2am grading papers. (speaking, again, from the teachers I know personally).
It's been pointed out previously that working only part of the year is a myth. Tons of preparation goes into being ready for the school year.
>Do some homework before spouting-out garbage.
You are the one spouting garbarge. In my first hand experience the yearly *bonus* of a tech job in the bay area is over half the yearly salary of a teaching job in the area -- even when the teacher is more highly trained and works harder than the tech.
Then consider a $10-20 per student class budget for the entire year, and you find teachers spending their already pathetic income on classroom materials.
>They are horrible
And what do you base this crap on? Norm referenced test scores? There's a glaringly obvious problem of sample sets when comparing public & private schools. In short, higher average test scores of private school students do not imply that your child will learn more or perform better on tests (two different problems, btw) than they would by attenting a public school.
In reply to this, and the other reply on the same subject (re: asians), there are at least two reasons this argument doesn't work, one of them which is fairly obvious: the sample set is bad.
Asians are recent immigrants, so they both self-select, and are selected by U.S. immigration policy. That is, it tends to be the richer and more intelligent that make it to the U.S., and U.S. immigration policy attempts to select more skilled immigrants.
To make this comparison you have to first select by similar criteria whites & blacks before doing the comparison. Without a valid sample set your data is spoodge. There is no evidence of either a genetic or a cultural advantage of Asians, as there's no evidence of any advantage at all.
The second reason, which is more direct, is there is data showing that minorities who feel at risk because of their minority status perform less well on tests if they are asked about their ethnicity before taking the test. There's no definative theory why this is (AFAIK), but self-reporting indicates that filling out this information reminds the student of stressful racial issues, makes them doubt whether the test will be fair, etc., and their performance suffers.
Minorites who are not at risk due to their race, e.g. Asians, don't show this effect.
... all of which presents a further difficulty to testing. It's fairer to at-risk minorities to test them w/o having them fill out race info, but then it becomes very difficult to verify that tests are not racially biased.
Ok, I'm getting some idea of the issue, but a real example would be cool.
;)
>It is no slower than C if you know what you are doing
Yeah, it's that "knowing what you are doing" bit that gets me. It always seems that you have to pay a huge amount of attention to what the compiler is trying to hide from you (creating temporary variables, etc.), which kinda defeats the purpose, and ultimately is mounds harder than just coding in C. (In my limited experience
>Well, C++ is the only known cure at the moment, AFAIK.
Can you elaborate on this point? (I don't code gui's, so I know nothing about gui specific problems. But I've always found C++ pretty slow & useless.) What's the scoop? What is an example of the problem & how does C++ solve it?
>At least it has in many people's minds
Yeah, that's clear. There is a huge problem of perception. In the long run it would definately be better to develop better testing paradigms, but unfortunately the testing practices in America seem to be getting worse, not better. Few have taken the time to investigate the validity of the tests we regularly administer to students.
>Wasn't it only introduced this decade?
No, it's been with us for three decades or so. It was one of the later civil rights acts. '64? Something like that.
>The priorities are different. And we can't fix these from the outside.
The priorities are different, but perhaps not for obvious reasons. Malcolm X wrote about white people being annoyed when black people got anything "nice", in particular a nice car. The truth is the whites were not annoyed by the car, but by what they saw as a waste of money. In the same position they would have saved for a house, etc.
Part of the problem is blacks don't see or don't have larger opportunities -- e.g. the loan issue I keep raising (that banks have been repeatedly found to offer worse loans to blacks, even blacks with identical financial histories). Saving for a house is not as realistic if the banker is holding you to a different standard.
If no one they know has gotten into a good school, it's not exactly on their mind to be preparing for a good school by investing in a computer. In contrast they may know of someone who went from the ghetto to professional basketball, so buying good shoes may look like a wise investment.
The issue really is about making opportunities as well as educating people about them. We are not
helpless to do this from the "outside". We can work to eliminate racially biased loan practices, etc., as well as fostering out-reach programs which teach kids about preparing for good schools and good jobs. We can work to eliminate racially biased admissions practices. If the admissions process is thought to be racist, many blacks won't even apply.
It is in everyone's best interest to do this quickly and effectively, because of the social costs of decaying inner cities.
>If you want to offer that the poor are still poor compared to the rich, than that is a universal constant that has haunted us for all of history.
Well... perhaps consistent, but not constant. The relative poverty of the poor (relative to the rich) has varied hugely in this century, peaking before the depression, and shrinking fairly steadily until the 1980's. We're now about where things were before the depression: with the most wealth in the hands of the least number of people.
>We would start with getting the fuck out of the country and giving it back to the natives.
As I already said, no one is proposing that, so it's beside the point to accuse people of it.
You allow that we've taken land, e.g., from the natives, but then persist in this myth that we somehow earned it?
White ownership of land throughout the west & mid-west is directly because of racist practices, not because of any sort of meritocracy. These arguments about equal opportunity are nonsense. Given family farms for blacks a hundred years ago, and subsequent leveraging of that wealth into education & jobs -- as white families have been able to entrench themselves -- and you might be able to talk about equal opportunity.
Short of that, equal opportunity does not exist, unless we make some effort to provide it.
And the bottom line is, you really, really want to do this: it's going to be cheaper for you than paying the taxes to feed them, build the housing projects, mop up after the crime, keep them in
prison, pay the uninsured emergency room visits, and all of the other woes of our inner cities.
Give them training, and a good job, and everyone wins.
>This is true. Such policies as affirmative action have perpetuated themselves into making more problems. They are only short term solutions to appease a certain political group.
No, this is false. There is an economics paper I've referred to elsewhere, "Continuous vs. Episodic growth" which compiles data on the economic status of blacks yearly since they were freed. In short, the status of the black community has not changed *at all* except after specific events, e.g. their migration from the south, WWII, and the passing of affirmative action. Otherwise, their economic status has been as flat as a pool table. Affirmative action is the only public policy besides entering a world war which has moved the black community toward the national average, and its effect has been long-lasting, not short-term.
And btw, affirmative action is not about lowering the boundaries. It's about correcting for measures (e.g. norm referenced test scores) which are known to be racially biased.
>As for the rich american families, they are there for a reason. They were smart enough to realize when they could make a profit, and they did
Or, more accurately, the government gave them free land based on their race, banks gave them better loan opportinities, based on their race, they were given better schools, based on their race, and they were given better jobs based on their schooling.
>Show me the documents
You might start with "Continuous vs. Episodic Growth: the case of blacks" (I believe that's the title, I don't have the author's name at the moment). It's a paper by an economist which didn't believe this bias existed, until he compiled the data. There are many others. You might also look into the history of sting operations on banks, realtors, etc., regarding their giving less favorable loans to blacks.
>As for that, I'd just have to say you're wrong. Most high paid jobs are high paying for a reason, it takes skill. Otherwise it wouldn't be high paying.
Dream on. To paraphrase a fortune on the Caltech undergraduate computer lab "Want a carreer paying over $100k to surf the web and write email? Consider computer science."
>Your analogy is flawed. Nothing I own was ever the property of any minority, what was the property of someone else was purchased legally for a fair some of their choosing.
This misses the point, again. Steps people are taking today to bring minorities into the mainstream generally do not attempt to correct wrongs of the past, since, as you correctly point out, it can't be done. Rather, they try to address the widespread economic racism that has been demonstrated to exist in the U.S. E.g. the sting operations at realtors which have repeatedly established that blacks with identicle economic records are offered less favorable loan terms.
>BUT, if your great great grandfather stole my great great grandfathers horse and buggy, I'm not going to try to charge your daughter the cost of the horse and buggy. That would be ludicrous.
It's only ludicrous because of the "buggy" part. If we're talking about righting wrongs that happened in reality -- rather than your silly example -- we would start by taking land away from white families that got them from land grants which excluded blacks. The economic make-up of America would be a bit different if black families owned significant portions of the west and midwest.
Before accusing anyone of trying to correct wrongs of the past, remember that in America that would begin with taking land from white families and giving it to black families.
No one is proposing that.
(btw, I'm not suggesting your family has land, but rather that there is this bias in land holdings directly caused by racist land grants, among many other racist practices).
>there are more poor white people that there are black people total.
no shit. And there are many, many more white people than black people in the U.S. So the difference is in one case color is a primary indicator of your economic status, and in the other case it isn't.
In every age those in power have used bullshit arguments about why that ordering is the "natural" ordering. Kings and nobelmen invoked the will of god. Rich American families invoked bullshit science (IQ testing, etc. See _The Mismeasure of Man_ by SJ Gould).
./ers are sitting here browsing the web while others sit in the inner city is those in the inner city have poor schools, few resources, and no realistic expectation of good jobs. I promise they can browse the web as well as you can.
Now squid proposes ability and gumption.
I hate to break this to you, but most high paid technology jobs are hardly rocket science. It's almost criminal how easy many of them are. People in the inner cities could and would do these jobs if they had the training and opportunity.
Widespread economic racism in America has been very well documented, even by economists who started out believing racism couldn't exist in a free market. If you need money to get on the net & light skin to get money, the equation is fairly obvious.
The only reason
In response to other posts, a few miracle stories of success are hardly relevant. The issue is bringing the average inner city person into the mainstream, not getting half a dozen geniuses.
And regarding the "nanny state", if you don't support efforts to move these people into the mainstream, you *will* end up supporting them via taxes.
> There is no method by which we can rationally know about the validity of any historical event.
No, this is just wrong. Scientific method tells us there are trees that are centuries old. We rationally know the trees grew over those centuries, even though 1) no one was there to see it, and 2) it hasn't been repeated in a lab.
(A common misconception about science is these two things are necessary for valid science. They aren't.)
Unless you meant "rationally" in the sense that there is no doubt, no other possibilites -- e.g. aliens constructed the tree & left it there. There is nothing we know beyond *all* doubt (e.g. we don't know beyond all doubt that the world we perceive is real), but there are many things we know beyond all reasonable (rational) doubt -- including many things about historical events.
>The so called sedimentary levels that were formed over time are bogus. They're different depending upon where in the world you look. (they're in different orders).
Tell that to Exxon.
Another vote for "what are you smoking". Before the theory of evolution was even developed, oil companies discovered that the sedimentary levels, and the fossils they carried were always in the *same* order, and could use it to determine where to find oil. Finding oil during the last two centuries has been almost exclusively based on this one observation. It was the search for oil that led to the understanding of the fossil record and the development of evolutionary theory.
Apparently the gas you put in your car is an evolutionist myth. Better run your car on wood.
The only places where the sedimentary levels vary are where they are turned on end, flipped over, etc., by continental movement, and the relative positioning is maintained (i.e. the record is the same read upside down, once you figure out what orientation it's in).
HunterZ -- You, as the dozens of folk who have posted before you saying the same thing, are overlooking what the word "theory" means, and with it the entire process of scientific discovery. Evolution is taught as theory, as gravity is taught as theory. There have been many, many posts on this subject, and it might have been prudent to read them before posting.
Darwin did not propose choping off a wing would make decendents wingless. In fact, his theory predicted the opposite. His theory predicted the existance of a mutable genetic material, which has proven to be true. Since chopping off a wing does not affect the genetic material, it has no effect on offspring.
Whoever taught you otherwise didn't know the theory of evolution.
The reason no alternate theories are taught is none have been proposed. As it stands, creationism is not a theory because it has made no correct predictions, and is supported by no evidence. Evolution has made dozens or hundreds of accurate predictions, the first being the existance of a mutable genetic material.
Again: it's in Dawkins. Look it up. The short story is the algorithm you're describing mathematically is not evolution, in particular because it lacks selection.