Other findings included:
* Rates of diabetes among the South Asian (8.1 per cent) and black (8.5 per cent) groups were twice as high as among white (4.2 per cent) and Chinese (4.3 per cent).
* Obesity was five times more prevalent among white (14.8 per cent) and blacks (14.1 per cent) than Chinese (2.5 per cent). The prevalence of obesity among South Asians was 8.1 per cent.
* Black women were more likely to be physically inactive and obese than the overall population.
* South Asian and Chinese women were also less likely to participate in daily physical activity than the overall population.
In related racism…
Friend of the USA said: “Some of them are saying ( in their own words ) they know there is no such thing as race because the white race created the idea of race to oppress other races.”
No dude, I’m saying I can go look up the name of the guys in France, German and England who invented the concept of race in the 19th Century. Its on google, have a go if you like I can’t be bothered. They were -wrong-.
“Race” as a concept in science has been thoroughly, completely and profoundly debunked thanks to Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA. We now know that two populations of black Africans can be farther removed genetically than either is from white Europeans. Surface characteristics count for jack, the real story is protein markers and enzyme variations.
Population genetics is a highly developed science these days, with plenty of implications for medicine. How do you think they figured out these drug interactions?
Race as a concept is ancient history because its been disproven. There are no races. Don’t take my word for it, go look it up. You can find out if I’m right or wrong in five minutes.
“Since distributions apply only to populations, not to individuals, we must therefore hold that no individual may be judged according to any distribution measured across any population to which said individual may belong. Individuals must only be judged qua themselves.”
Even if this position is accepted, it does not invalidate population measures. Even Mill recognised this.
“Where the sentiment of nationality exists in any force, there is a prima facie case for uniting all the members of the nationality under the same government, and a government to themselves apart. This is merely saying that the question of government ought to be decided by the governed. One hardly knows what any division of the human race should be free to do if not to determine with which of the various collective bodies of human beings they choose to associate themselves.”
“Or that pre-democracy societies had a lower IQ and then changed?”
Greg Clark makes that case.
“Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, believes that the Industrial Revolution — the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 — occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. The change was one in which people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work. The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/science/07indu.html?_r=1
These are values that correlate with a higher IQ. The case was also made by Adam Smith. The wealthy replaced the poor in England leading up to the industrial revolution.
“Or that democratic societies that moved into totalitarianism (eg Germany) dropped their IQ?”
It’s probably safe to say German gdp/capita dropped drastically after WW1 because of external circumstances.
It is true, DJ, that the fact that “distributions apply only to populations, not to individuals” does not invalidate properly measured distributions of population metrics themselves, nevertheless, the simple reality of that quoted constraint does deny any and every form of a priori applicability of any and every particular avolitional population distribution to any particular individual per se. Your quote from Mill, excellent though it is, only applies to volitional population distributions, not to avolitional ones. That misunderstanding on your behalf is what invalidates your argument in regard of avolitional population distributions.
For example, if one wishes to argue that, say, a particular individual is particularly short, then no degree of appeal to any sort of faux authority of any sort of avolitional population distribution will suffice to convince of one’s argument: only measuring the actual height of the actual individual is relevant. One may use a distribution to argue that it is more likely that a member of an avolitionally short population is short; regardless, one must not attempt to do that sort of thing to argue that any particular individual is short.
Ergo it follows that while is is true that if one wishes to consider a population then one may consider said population’s distributions, one nevertheless remains necessarily constrained, if one wishes to consider an actual individual, to considering only the actual metrics presented by said individual. Were this not truly the case, it would then be possible to argue, for example, that shade from the sun is irrelevant to equatorially- derived albinos solely on the basis of the high melanin presentation of their geo-spatially associated population distribution, which would clearly be a ridiculous argument that no sane individual could logically venture to make.
it would then be possible to argue, for example, that shade from the sun is irrelevant to equatorially- derived albinos solely on the basis of the high melanin presentation of their geo-spatially associated population distribution, which would clearly be a ridiculous argument that no sane individual could logically venture to make.
True – no one would be such an idiot to make such an argument, so why argue against it?
The average height of an adult Dutch man is greater than the average height of an adult North Korean. Height is partially inherited, partially affected by environment. This is a statement so banal, so obvious, so consistent with casual observation not even a intellectual would muster linguistically complex arguments against it.
The average IQ of the Japanese is higher than the average IQ of Haitians. IQ is partially inherited. Go to it.
I know an adult Dutch man, Kevin. Tell me how tall he is.
I know an adult Dutch man, Kevin. Tell me how tall he is.
I get the feeling you think this is making some profound point. It isn’t.
I don’t know how tall he is – but with a probability of 68% his height is within one standard deviation of the average, and with a probability of 95% his height is within two standard deviations.
And saying you know a North Korean who is taller than your Dutch friend isn’t saying anything either.
Correct: you can’t answer my question because avolitional population distributions do not apply to individuals. Look, Kevin, I’ve made my argument, it stands. You can try to sucker-punch me into side-arguments, but I’m not buying. Moreover, having more than presumed upon Kate’s generosity in this discussion, I consider it to be inappropriate to get into a tail-argument with you at this late stage of the game. I stand by my claims, you are of course welcome to make other claims, however since your claims in no way obviate my claims, I’m going to leave it at that. Good day.
Vitruvius, Kevin — good news, you’re both right.
Kevin, it’s true that you, not knowing which Dutch man Vitruvius is referring to, cannot with absolute certainty state his height.
Vitruvius, it’s also true that Kevin, not knowing which Dutch man you are referring to, can make an educated guess as to the man’s height by resorting to what he believes to be the average height of Dutch men.
But who cares about height? Given that the social and individual ramifications of “height stereotyping” are fairly minimal, particularly in a non-contextualized intellectual exercise, it’s all fine and dandy to ballpark how tall Johannes might be.
But take an actual person (say, a man of African ancestry) in a common real-world situation (say, a job interview) and a personal characteristic that has far less meaning that “height” when aggregated as a population-level “average” but that nevertheless is commonly employed as a component of a population-based stereotype (say, intelligence, or work ethic), and you can start to see why resorting to an apparent population average in the assessment of an individual can have real and unjust consequences, and thus should be discouraged.
Yup.
Davenport: “…you can start to see why resorting to an apparent population average in the assessment of an individual can have real and unjust consequences, and thus should be discouraged.”
Reminds me of the P.J. O’Rourke bit – not sure if it’s an exact quote, but close enough: “People who tell you that you shouldn’t laugh at the blind are probably right. People who tell you that you can’t laugh at the blind are wrong, as anyone who’s ever heard the one about Helen Keller falling down a well and breaking three fingers calling for help can tell you.”
My point being that, while we need morally to use judgement about how to apply our judgement, that doesn’t mean that the information with which we form our judgements is meaningless. Honestly, we only function mentally by detecting patterns.
(Again, it has never been my personal observation that race has anything to do with intelligence. But surely the people who insist that race is a social construct – and yes, I understand that – will at least acknowledge the notions of “populations” and “degrees of consanguinity”.)
Really? It’s amazing how much a persons options decrease as they move away from the stereotype. Check out the selection in clothing if you are 6’3″+ in Canada … those knees against the seat in front in an airplane aren’t there because it’s more comfortable … same type of thing for the shortasses … I suppose … used to know, but I hit my head on tons of lamps that the shortasses hung to low.
As far as saying things about populations, and the individuals within it, it might depend what you are saying about them. I can’t prove it, but I don’t believe every homo-sapien has the same “innateness” hard wired … similar yes, but not the same.
Some time ago I was reading about phobias. Some percentage of the whole population fear snakes. I can’t find the article, but there is a population where no one fears snakes (I think it was snakes). Anyway, I read this as innate can be changed. I can’t believe that the Australian Aboriginals have the same brain wiring as me … 40-50 thousand years is a long time to remain static for all population groups.
Insert at the top of the last post:
Davenport : “Given that the social and individual ramifications of “height stereotyping” are fairly minimal … ”
DJ – you quoted:
“The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues”.
These have absolutely nothing to do with IQ but with societal values related to the correlation between population size and a requirement for surplus food production for that increased population.
Literacy only emerges in populations over half a million and more in size; you don’t need it before to store your knowledge base or to communicate.
Your outline of nationality has nothing to do with IQ or ‘race’.
The wealthy did NOT replace the poor, leading up to the industrial revolution; that’s an invalid argument. What developed was a middle class where more and more people were able to participate in a free economy. This had nothing to do with an ‘increasing IQ’ or with any IQ; it had to do with demographics, the increase in population and the need for an economic mode that could sustain this increase and enable individual innovations and a market economy. Nothing to do with IQ and everything to do with a rich biome that enabled a massive population increase.
It is absolutely invalid to attempt to correlate GDP to IQ. Not only because the former is a group statistic and the latter is an individual statistic – but – there’s no causal relationship!
Black Mamba: “Honestly, we only function mentally by detecting patterns.”
Sure, detecting patterns, mental categorization, labelling, attribute substitution, ingroup/outgroup biases – they’re all inevitable and necessary for making sense of a world that would otherwise overload our information-processing capacities. But the fact that detecting patterns is a “natural” cognitive phenomenon doesn’t mean that the patterns we detect are necessarily accurate.
Plus, all of that sociological, social psych, and cognitive science research tells us only how we tend to treat others; it tells us nothing about how we ought to treat them.
Yes, we all stereotype. No, we shouldn’t celebrate that fact, or pander to it. Most of the time, it’s relatively harmless. Sometimes it can be hilarious. Occasionally, it causes real and undeserved injustice to others. Knowing that, I think we can all agree that, particularly in that latter circumstance, our actions are better guided by moral judgment than by mental heuristics, however “natural.”
Oh, speaking of agreement, I think you’ll also concur that it’s one thing to make fun of Helen Keller because she’s deafblind, and quite another to deny her admission into Radcliffe College solely on the basis of that disability.
An excellent retort V, however, it is impossible to assess, say, your neighborhood, by that principle.
“John is white. He is married with two children. He wears a blue collar when he leaves his shabby, inner-city house to go to work. Life has been a struggle for John, but now he faces his most difficult challenge. John’s neighborhood is turning black.
In John’s city, neighborhoods do not integrate, they go black. He has seen it happen elsewhere. He knows what to expect. John and his family will soon face intolerable hardships. They will have to move. Inevitably the last whites able to leave, will. High among their reasons will be fear — fear of becoming victims of violent crime. As his neighborhood turns black, John and his family will notice many changes, but none will be more dreaded than the prospect of being violently victimized.
As a neighborhood turns black, violent victimization of its white residents begins immediately. At first the risk is small, not much different from its previous all-white level. However, by the time the neighborhood reaches the half-black point, every white family of four has better than a one in three chance of being victimized within a year. Two factors account for black-on-white violence. 1) Blacks are 3 times more likely to commit violent crime than whites, and 2) black thugs prefer white victims, selecting them 64 times more than white thugs choose black victims. Most of the risk faced by whites, results from the predilection of black thugs to prey upon whites. As a neighborhood becomes overwhelmingly black, the risk curve for whites rises to ominous heights. In the last stages of transformation, the likelihood of a white being victimized within a year becomes a virtual certainty.”
http://lagriffedulion.f2s.com/hood.htm
It is impossible to assess your neighborhood, just by knowing your neighbor. The conundrum becomes, the guy who lives next to me is black and a pleasant fellow. He probably will not cause my family trouble. However, it is a virtual statistical certainty that if a white family lives in a black neighborhood they will be the victim of a violent crime.