His best material has to be the observations about women….sheer quality.

I think it was on this blog I got chastised for my enui at political correctness. Chris Rock is the perfect example of why it’s mostly bogus; comedy is comedy. Whatever makes people laugh, say it. If it’s funny and devoid of malice then anybody of any gender, colour, race or religion will find it funny.

Re:… Chris Rock jokes…

For a slightly less PC take by Chris Rock look up his piece on the civil war between blacks – there are lots of versions of it on YouTube. (No-one white would ever be allowed to say any of this; I can’t even tell you the full title of the sketch!)

But it’s such an important sketch that President Obama even referred to part of it once (in some famous speech, or whatever; it was certainly in the news anyway).

Here’s one version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui6-Wc0PDc4

It’s funny as s**t!

Matthew

I suppose in the wake of ‘emailgate’ I really have no leg to stand on. This may be the point where I flip over my king and walk away from the board.

Fair observations, and well put. I’m compelled however to hold my ground on affirmative action; I’ll get into this when I’m home from work and have time.

26 posts so far? Not bad.

P.S. Just so I’m clear… you guys over at the RSA constitute the ‘cognitive elite’ who dominate society? Funny how most of the cognitive elite who I’ve met tend also to be the same people who can’t change a plug.

For some reason MT’s blog always reminds me of Chris Rock jokes. The best was his take on education; I’ll paraphrase as best I can.

An average classroom is 30 kids, 5 smart, 5 dumb, and the rest just average “C” students in the middle. Now, if you’re a black “C” student, its doubtful you can ever run a company. But if you’re a white “C” student, you can be president of the United States.

Here’s the apology that the New Yorker had to print – after Malcolm Gladwell reversed the actual views of the authors of ‘The Bell Curve’ to make them look like Nazis:

“CORRECTION: In his December 17th piece, “None of the Above,” Malcolm Gladwell states that Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in their 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” proposed that Americans with low I.Q.s be “sequestered in a ‘high-tech’ version of an Indian reservation.” In fact, Herrnstein and Murray deplored the prospect of such “custodialism” and recommended that steps be taken to avert it. We regret the error.”

To diametrically misstate one of the central arguments of The Bell Curve suggests that Gladwell hasn’t actually read it. (Or perhaps was too stupid to understand it, or just wanted to lie about it anyway). To make such a huge ‘mistake’ obviously suggests we can’t fully trust anything he writes, but we’ll leave that for now… (He tells us what we want to hear, so it would be hard to stop listening anyway!).

I actually find it interesting to read a libertarian/conservative book that warns about how the ‘cognitive elite’ – like us RSA members?! – have increasingly come to dominate society and how below-average cognitive ability is a growing handicap. And that unless something is done to heal this widening rift we may drift into an increasingly totalitarian custodial state (Which is – to repeat – something the authors were arguing against).

The final chapter is about how to build a society with “A Place for Everyone” – so that we can avoid increasing custodialism. I’m not saying I agree with it – just that I was fairly shocked to realise the book wasn’t actually somehow ‘Mein Kampf’ updated as we’re often led to believe (by popular liberal commentators like Gladwell), but was actually about possible solutions to the problems of cognitive stratification in modern society, that they argue is occurring, and how this stratification is destroying the ideal they support of a society with “the opportunity for everyone, not just the lucky ones, to live a satisfying life”.

Most critics of the book – including me – hadn’t read it and didn’t even know it was about this.

Bizarre really…

Or not, of course.

The current liberal response around this topic – in a 2009 debate in the journal ‘Nature’, with Steven Rose and others – is that any research around IQ differences between groups should simply be banned.

I guess that’s the liberal approach to science: ban any research that risks uncovering anything politically inconvenient…

Luckily a few people could still be found to argue against such a Lysenkoist view…

Matt

PS I though I read somewhere about some kind of legal battle over US law school academic data – which a Professor wants to analyse to gauge the effects of affirmative action, but the institution(s) are very cagey about letting this work go ahead. I think it was this professor who was concerned about high drop-out rates amongst minority students. I might be muddled on this…!

I’d be surprised if Gladwell hasn’t read The Bell Curve. By ‘noxious’ view I take it you mean the genetic / racial profiling approach to measuring intelligence in chapter 13?

It wasn’t just The New York Times and ‘liberal’ types who were a tad indignant about that. Part of The Bell Curve’s analysis is bases on the AFQT which has flaws in its testing. I think James Heckman (Nobel in Economics) talks about this; essentially the test was used to predict success in military training schools and mostly measure achievement and factual knowledge rather than ability. Not only that, but Murray removed from the AFQT score a respected timed numeracy test as it didn’t correlate highly enough with the other tests.

As for the affirmative action side, I’d have to get back to you with something more concrete Admittedly the one I’m thinking is a bit old, from 2000 and appeared in Law and Social Inquiry.

But you have a point. Some comparisons between minority and non minority grad students in the states show that whites get better grades. Which isn’t surprising if they also had higher test scores as undergrads. (An example of this at the University of Michigan sparked so much controversy it actually went to the Supreme Court) The revealing part of this however comes when you look at how those minority students fare after they graduate. Generally no worse than whites.

I think Gladwell’s point is that minority students, like ‘relativity’ tall basket players, need only be above a certain threshold in order to succeed. There’s a bigger picture here. They’re no less ‘qualified’ in terms of how they perform in the real world, only marginally behind with their academic credentials.

End of the day, if IQ was the be all and end all then Mr Taylor here probably wouldn’t have mistaken me for a woman.

Livy