I haven't been posting much lately, for any of those of you who read this blog. Here's some food for thought. --
One is the product of a civilization which has gone through all its ups and downs, of floods and famine and pestilence, breeding a people with very intense culture, with a belief in high performance, in sustained effort, in thrift and industry. And the other people- more fortunately endowed by nature with warm sunshine and bananas and coconuts, and therefore not with the same need to strive so hard. Now, these two societies really move at two different speeds.
It's like the difference between a high revolution engine and a low revolution engine.
-Lee Kuen Yew on the differences between the Chinese and the Malays, March 24, 1965Let us not deceive ourselves; our talent profile is nowhere near that of, say, the Jews or the Japanese in America. The exceptional number of Nobel Prize winners who are Jews is no accident. It is also no accident that a high percentage, sometimes 50%, of faculty members in the top American universities on both the east and west coasts are Jews. And the number of high caliber Japanese academics, professionals, and business executives is out of all proportion to the percentage of Japanese in the total American population.
-Lee Kuan Yew, "The search for Talent," 1982
I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that's the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution. People have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different inter mixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils. I didn't start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I've come to. When we were faced with the reality that, in fact, equal opportunities did not bring about more equal results, we were faced with an ideological dilemma.
In other words, this bell curve, which Murray and Herrnstein wrote about, became obvious to us by the late '60s. The bell curve is a fact of life. The blacks on average score 85 on IQ and it is accurate, nothing to do with culture. The whites score on average 100.
Asians score more... The Bell Curve authors put it at least 10 points higher.
There are realities that, if you do not accept, will lead to frustration because you will be spending money on wrong assumptions and the results cannot follow. All the bright young men became Catholic priests and did not marry. Bright priests, celibate, produce no children. And the result of several generations of bright Fathers producing no children? Less bright children in the Catholic world.
You read Hong Lou Meng, A Dream of the Red Chamber, or you read Jin Ping Mei, and you'll find Chinese Society in the 16th, 17th century described. "So the successful merchant or the mandarin, he gets the pick of all the rich men's daughters and the prettiest village girls and has probably five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten different wives and concubines and many children."
And the poor laborer who is dumb and slow, he's neutered.It's like the lion or the stag that's outside the flock. He has no harems, so he does not pass his genes down. So, in that way, a smarter population emerges.
"When young London children called me a Chinaman or a Chink, it did not trouble me. If they meant it as a term of abuse, my business was to make them think differently one day."
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edit: The Bell Curve sounds quite controversial... The type of thing many people would love to hate. So I went off to dig criticism on it and find out just how credible is this idea...
So here it is, what people have to say about the Bell Curve.
QUOTE Howard Gardner"The Bell Curve is a strange work. Some of the analysis and a good deal of the tone are reasonable. Yet the science in the book was questionable when it was proposed a century ago, and it has now been completely supplanted by the development of the cognitive sciences and neurosciences. The policy recommendations of the book are also exotic, neither following from the analyses nor justified on their own. (p. 61)"
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Scholarly brinkmanship: ...
I became increasingly disturbed as I read and reread this 800 page work. I gradually realized I was encountering a style of thought previously unknown to me: scholarly brinkmanship. Whether concerning an issue of science, policy, or rhetoric, the authors come dangerously close to embracing the most extreme positions, yet in the end shy away from doing so. Discussing scientific work on intelligence, they never quite say that intelligence is all important and tied to one's genes; yet they signal that this is their belief and that readers ought to embrace the same conclusions. Discussing policy, they never quite say that affirmative action should be totally abandoned or that childbearing or immigration by those with low IQs should be curbed; yet they signal their sympathy for these options and intimate that readers ought to consider these possibilities. Finally, the rhetoric of the book encourages readers to identify with the IQ elite and to distance themselves from the dispossessed in what amounts to an invitation to class warfare. Scholarly brinkmanship encourages the reader to draw the strongest conclusions, while allowing the authors to disavow this intention. (p. 63)"
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On social policy:Though there are seven appendices, spanning over 100 pages, and nearly 200 pages of footnotes, bibliography, and index, one element is notably missing from this tome: a report on any program of social intervention that works. For example, Herrnstein and Murray never mention Lisbeth Schorr's Within Our Reach: Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage, a book that was prompted in part by Losing Ground. Schorr chronicles a number of social programs that have made a genuine difference in education, child health service, family planning, and other lightning rod areas of our society. And to the ranks of the programs chronicled in Schorr's book, many new names can now be added. Those who have launched Interfaith Educational Agencies, City Year, Teach for America, Jobs for the Future, and hundreds of other service agencies have not succumbed to the sense of futility and abandonment of the poor that the Herrnstein and Murray book promotes. (p. 71)"
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Concluding comments: It is callous to write a work that casts earlier attempts to help the disadvantaged in the least favorable light, strongly suggests that nothing positive can be done in the present climate, contributes to an us-against-them mentality, and then posits a miraculous cure. High intelligence and high creativity are desirable. But unless they are linked to some kind of a moral compass, their possessors might best be consigned to an island of glass bead game players, with no access to the mainland. (p. 72)"
