What the opponents of acknowledging racial differences are worried about is that the employer will also take the step of saying "This particular black applicant scored exceptionally well on the examination, but since I know that blacks in the aggregate have lower IQs, I'm going to treat my prior and the examination as separate bits of knowledge and scale my assessment of the candidate's intelligence downward from what the exam alone would suggest." As opposed to having the prior be swamped by the examination.
Observe that in the recent crisis, blacks and hispanics had two or three times higher default rate, even when controlled for income and credit rating. So had bankers applied that policy, they would have been right. A protected minority candidate with the same apparent credit worthiness as a white candidate is far more likely to default.
La Griffe du Lion has claimed that the same is true in academic achievement - that blacks with the same IQ and GPA as whites have lower levels of achievement, though I do not recall what evidence he presented for this claim.
Herrnstein and Murray on the other hand claimed that controlling for IQ, blacks had similar levels of accomplishment, though I seem to recall they were controlling for IQ and intact family
All three claims could be simultaneously true if we suppose that accomplishment reflects IQ and character, and that assessing an IQ indicator alone is not sufficient to swamp one's priors.
Observe that in the recent crisis, blacks and hispanics had two or three times higher default rate, even when controlled for income and credit rating. So had bankers applied that policy, they would have been right. A protected minority candidate with the same apparent credit worthiness as a white candidate is far more likely to default.
I am not convinced this situation is at all analogous. Consider the following three facts: 1) The geographical distribution of blacks, hispanics, and whites is not random -- there is considerable segregation by race; 2)I...
Today's post, Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? was originally published on 26 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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