Hacker News Reader

Here's an excerpt from the bio of the guy who runs the site: "Despite 35 years living in Seattle, I instinctively revolted against the suffocating left-coast culture of the Soviet of Washington, and came to revere the four great Germans who helped inspire the Reagan revolution: Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin."

However, he does link to real government sources (near the botton), so you can check to see if he weighs by ideology when posting numbers.

I applaud you for making an observation which could easily fuel an ad-hominem attack on an obvious partisan, and then holding back after observing that regardless of his biases, he is just tabulating official numbers.

When I see source and unknown reliability in the same post, my instinct is to check and make sure the person who said it knows where to find the tools to make that judgment on their own.

Sometimes they end up in disagreement with me, but I always prefer informed and still wrong to uninformed and wrong[1]. :)

[1]Which is not to say these numbers are wrong or right. I'm speaking generally.

To rephrase what you just said: Mexicans, because of their ethnicity, are less able to understand (for instance) mathematics, even when given the same amount of instruction, than people of the ethnicities that characterize the population of California circa the 1960s (i.e. predominantly white). Did I get that right?

Mexicans in general score lower on tests of English and math, both in Mexico and America. See for one example: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0883611.html#axzz0xaC7EpRR This data is well known and not-controversial. The reasons for the test score disparity are quite controversial.

My point is simple. You have a group A of 10 million that on average score 450 on the math SAT. You have a group B of 10 milllion that score 500 on average. If you randomly move 5 million from group A to group B, then statistically, the average score of group B will fall to ~481.

Thank you for the numbers. Point well made.

Ah, and a racist troll to boot! Hilarious!

In general if you look into correlations between education spending and test scores, there is very little correlation. If you look into the correlation of ethnicity and test scores, its very significant.

Good job, you just discovered that our standardized tests scores are biased in favor of white kids.

Which is why those ethnicities then go on to have perfect 4.0 GPAs and rack up countless patents & inventions and start tons of successful new companies, thus proving those standardized tests wrong in the most effective way possible.

Accept of course those standardized tests are the gatekeepers to the best schools, best programs, best networks, and likely even confidence and motivation.

A better way to show that standardized tests mean nothing is to have every student take them, but then store them away for the next 40 years. No one knows the results. And then in 40 years correlate the results of these tests with "life success". We've already seen with one similar measure "IQ test", which has little bearing on academic placement, that it turns out to have very little utility in predicting "life success". UPDATE: Link on IQ -- http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/06/high_iq_does_no.html

You are lying with statistics, albeit possibly unknowingly.

That article comes right out and says that IQ does not have an effect on life outcomes, if life outcomes are normed for educational attainment. It then goes on to say that IQ does not predict career success, if career success is measured by money and normed for career type. That's like saying air temperature has no effect on snow cover, if snow cover is corrected for season. And altitude.

Actually the analogy you made is very appropriate. If you do control for season and altitude, and snow cover is not correlated with temperature still, you have a problem.

But sticking with just the article. The point he makes is that its the educational attainment that people pay for, not the IQ score. Now you're saying, "But educational attainment is a product of IQ score". Possibly, but in controlling that factor you can attempt to tease out the extent at which it really is the educational attainment rather than simply the IQ.

A better way to put is that if IQ was in itself the key to life success then it wouldn't matter if you went to college or not. Rather, what the data seems to show is that those with high IQs seem to at least have the wisdom to know that educational attainment will be the key their life success. Quite possibly being tracked into by virtue of a higher IQ.

BUT the data should show that regardless of credential, higher IQ yields more success. But it doesn't show that.

Now there are a lot of factors that potentially come into play. And that was my original point. One can't look at SAT scores and then say, "those with high SAT scores do better in life", when there are so many comingling factors that complicate the equation, and are ridiculously difficult to control for in the real world.

And of course, no argument is complete with an anecdotal Feynman story.

Two grad students at CalTech were having a discussion about what Feynman's IQ must be. They bandied 180... maybe even to 200. When coincidentally Feynman walks right past them.

One of the students pipes up and meekly asks Feynman, "Professor Feynman, what is your IQ?"

Feynman turns around and responds, "120". The grad students have a look of disbelief. To which Feynman adds, "but its all in Physics".

I have previously addressed the issue of Feynman's IQ: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1251164

Any of which should only reduce the magnitude of the ethnicities' outperformance. Not eliminate it entirely. You don't need to go to Harvard to start Apple or Dell or Google. (To give an analogy, Asians are heavily discriminated against in higher ed; but when I look around, it seems to me that unlike blacks, they outperform.)

Yet none of those companies were founded even by poor white youths, much less black youths (even white females). Apple, founded by Jobs, who did an internship at HP as a high school student, and attended Reed. Google by Stanford grad students, Dell, son of a doctor and stockbroker, who went to UT Austin. Microsoft, two Harvard students.

The problem is that a young black kid raised where many are raised, SAT scores not withstanding, likely won't have the opportunities that those I listed had. Let me give a glimpse of Michael Dell's early life, from Wikipedia: "The son of an orthodontist and a stockbroker, Dell attended Herod Elementary School in Houston, Texas. In a bid to enter business early, he applied to take a high school equivalency exam at age eight. In his early teens, he invested his earnings from part-time jobs in stocks and precious metals. Dell purchased his first calculator at age seven and encountered his first teletype machine in junior high, which he programmed after school."

If you go into the inner-cities, this type of early life, even from the bright and ambitious will likely look very different.

And lastly, Asians are disciminated against in a very different way than Blacks are. They are discriminated in the belief that they excel at math and engineering. I've seen first hand, in elementary school, how powerful expectations are (and there is good data around this too).

Don't get distracted. I suspect that you would find an even stronger correlation with "home culture", but that's too hard to define and to measure.

Any ethnicity can have a scholarly culture, but for people starting out at the bottom, in a new society, it's less common.

There's also a selection bias against those who have not moved up in society. E.g. take a depressed area -- if the people with the gumption to improve their situation do so and leave, what's left? Right, concentrated fail.