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Re: Race, intelligence, and anti-racist prejudice (Was: Genetic Evolution)
George Boggs (gboggs@atqm.advtech.uswest.com)
24 Feb 1995 15:58:16 GMT
In article <octaviaD4I30H.E6L@netcom.com>, octavia@netcom.com (Kaa
Byington) wrote:
>
>
> It looks to me like the correlation is with poverty, which is the
> underlying cause of all those things.
You are referring to one of the interesting things that H&M had to say.
Before I go on, let me include your next statement, which says...
>
> A lesson from the first day of Statistics class: There is a perfect
> correlation between ice cream sales and drownings. When one goes up, the
> other goes up. Year after year. Does that mean that buying and eating
> ice cream causes drowning? No. That's spurious causality. It means they
> both go up in summer.
>
Remember that it is your *theory* that poverty is the root of many social
ills. Poverty is correlated with social ills, and it is you who are
inferring causation - take some of your own advice, here. It so happens
that both SES and IQ correlate with a number of social phenomena like crime
that we - or I, at least - would like to see reduced. It so happens that IQ
correlates higher, but neither SES nor IQ have eye-popping correlations.
One of the major lessons, IMO, to be taken from TBC is that the causes of
social dysfunction are not very well understood. Unfortunately, individuals
like yourself and government agencies do not seem to be willing to admit
this. Instead, year after year, the same dead horse gets beaten - i.e.,
poverty is the root of all ills - and the situation keeps getting worse.
When will you be willing to admit that you really don't understand what the
hell is going on, that whatever it is is extraordinarily complex, and we
need hundreds of little programs and experiments to begin to try and get a
handle on how to better help the disadvantaged.
G. Boggs
gboggs@advtech.uswest.com I'd rather be rich than stupid.
J. Handey
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