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Comment by Turing_Machine | Hacker News Reader

Yes, indeed. The stench of bullshit is quite strong there, as is with the claim that the tests were adopted with the purpose of "resegregating the schools".

The closest I've been able to find is a claim (without references of any kind) in Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, where the actual question involved a man "walking without his feet touching the ground". Clearly "bicycle" is a better answer for that question than "horse" (because your feet move in a quasi-walking motion when you're riding a bike, but not when you're riding a horse).

The "yelling" part appears to have been invented out of whole cloth. Also, I'm not sure where the notion that Native Americans were unfamiliar with wheeled conveyances in the 1920s came from.

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I would not comment on that particular anecdote, but the entire structure of literacy tests in the South during segregation was that an ambiguous or downright impossible test was written, and the testers applied it inconsistently. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_right...

Don't assume good faith.

These questions are indeed atrocious. The author's point would have been better served with these real examples. Over-exaggerating is like jumping the shark, and makes it difficult to entertain the premise.

Another point of difference in the Gould version of the...I'm just going to go ahead and call it an "urban legend"...and the Shaw version is that in the Gould version the Native American character is in the text of the question "An Indian who had come to town for the first time in his life...", while in the Shaw version the Native American character is the person being given the test, "...a young Native American boy..." Also Gould's version does not mention age or sex. Shaw's does. Neither gives a source. Both assume an incredible amount of naïveté on the part of the Native Americans by stating that they were unfamiliar with bicycles.

Until someone provides an actual citation to a first-hand witness, I'm going to go ahead and call this myth busted.

This particular test was created in France, and modified for American use by a Jewish professor at Stanford University in California.

It has no connection whatsoever with the "South".

I thought it was clear enough that I was making a general point about how tests can be applied, and illustrating it with an extreme example from the South.

In general, I think asking for clarification is better than being condescending.

Got it. Of course, your mini-lecture about "not assuming good faith" wasn't condescending at all.

I spent a fair amount of time researching this urban legend earlier today. I wasn't "assuming" anything.

Fair that it was abrupt of me to put it that way.

But to make clear what I was saying, I really should have responded to the parent, who says: "It's extremely hard to believe that even a malicious scientist could convince himself that a horse cannot be ridden into town."

My point being that a malicious test-giver could certainly deny that as a valid answer. I don't know that I believe that anecdote happened, but it is assuming good faith to think that it couldn't happen because no one would ever reject "horse" as an answer.

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