Comment on Open thread, Oct. 03 - Oct. 09, 2016

Tue, 11 Oct 2016 20:38:20 GMT

Is this sort of discrimination not consequential in your view?

I don't know about the study, I have a generic suspicion of social sciences studies, especially ones which come to highly convenient conclusions, and hey! they happen to have a what's politely called "replication crisis". I am not interested enough to go read the study and figure out if it's valid, but on my general priors, I believe that people with black names will get less callbacks. However it seems to me that people with names like Pham Ng or Li Xiu Ying will also get less callbacks. People certainly have a bias towards those-like-me, but it's not specifically anti-black, it's against anyone who looks/feels/smells different.

can you imagine a scenario in a society where a high IQ group of people was discriminated against to the extent where they couldn't overcome the discrimination, despite their advanced higher IQ?

Sure.

How would the circumstances be different than what blacks have faced in the U.S.?

Um, the IQ would be different? It's not a mystical inner quality that no one can fathom. It's measurable and on the scale of large groups of people the estimates gets pretty accurate.

On the clearly visible level there would be very obvious discrimination -- quotas on admissions to universities, for examples. These discriminated-against people would be barred from reaching high positions, but at the level they would be allowed to reach they would be considered very valuable. Even if, for example, such people could not make it into management, managers would try to hire as many of them as possible because they are productive and solve problems.

As to similarities, I was about to write that the discriminated-against will never rise to the highest positions in the society, but oh look! there is that Barack Hussain fellow...

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