I'd like to post a substantive comment on this story, but my comments seem to disappear when I logout of my account - as if HackerNews has decided to prevent anyone from reading me except, well, me. Any advice?
These results can obscure as much as they reveal. The demographics of the US differ from European countries - the US has proportionally more students from lower scoring ethnic groups, as compared to most European countries.
If you look only at non-immigrants in European countries, and whites in the US, the US looks quite a bit more competitive.[1] Not to mention, Massachusetts and Minnesota have more of the higher scoring groups (principally whites) and fewer of the lower scoring groups (Hispanics and blacks) than the US as a whole.
It's important to understand where the differences in scores lie, and not just mash it all together and shout cliches like "More money!" Though it does seem like Finland's got something special.
This is one of my biggest pet peeves - you see something and ask "why the hell is it this way?" You even speculate about some possible solutions, but someone will chide you, condescendingly, that 'that's the way it is.' It's usually delivered in a tone insinuating 'you're a foolish naive little one aren't you' And that theirs is a profound, valuable observation.
It seems like entrepreneurs in particular are willing to ask, and not be content with an endorsement of the status quo.
>Daniel Willingham reviews in the submitted post, and the paper is a joint review article on the last decade and a half of research on human intelligence by an all-star group of researchers.
The original linked posts lightly implies that the points made are a consensus of the field. That's a bit like going to the Democratic Convention and concluding that politics aficionados have reached a consensus on who should be president next year.
For instance, that APA statement in response to The Bell Curve? There were several intelligence experts who signed a different document[1]. If you want an independent, randomized survey of experts in the field, there is also the excellent Snyderman & Rothman survey [2].As the Rothman study indicates, the picture the media painted of what many intelligence researcher believed, and what they actually believe, is rather different.
Turkheimer himself has said that he disagrees that "the possibility of genetic differences between the races for IQ, agree that the question is a legitimate matter for scientific inquiry, to be settled by cool-headed evaluation of the empirical evidence." [3] While that doesn't mean he is wrong, one should not limit your reading of the field to the likes of Turkheimer; one would do well to read some of the prominent 'opposition' such as Linda Gottfredson and Arthur Jensen. Jensen, by the way, is considered the most eminent living man in the field, and he favors the hereditarian viewpoint. Not that science should be done by consensus or a raising of hands, but it's handy to know what is and isn't considered tenable by modern researchers. There's more disagreement in the field than the linked post lets on.
In the third link below, the Cato Institute held a discussion between the 'environmentalists' Ceci, Flynn and Turkheimer, and the hereditarian Linda Gottfredson. It's worth a look.
This post half implies that the points made have reached a consensus within the field, that unnamed scientists have come around to these views. That remains unproven. Notably absent from the paper's authors are any of the people who had defended The Bell Curve, such as Arthur Jensen, Philippe Rushton, Linda Gottfredson, or any of the other signatories to the document 'Mainstream Science on Intelligence.'[1]
I suspect one could find papers contradicting each of these points from very well respected scientists within the field. I haven’t the time to review each one right now, but as for the narrowing of the black-white difference, Rushton and Jensen question it:
>“Dickens and Flynn (2006, this issue) challenge our hypothesis. They claim that ‘‘no one can really trace the Black-White IQ gap in the United States back to its origins’’ (p. 913) and that in the United States, Blacks have gained ‘‘4 to 7 IQ points on non-Hispanic Whites between 1972 and 2002’’ (p. 913). But to maintain that ‘‘no one can really trace the . . . gap back to its origins,’’ Dickens and Flynn had to sidestep our citation of Shuey’s (1966) review of the literature, which shows that Black White IQ differences in the United States have remained at 15 to18 points, or 1.1 standard deviations, for nearly a century. For example, she found 23,596 Black draftees in World War I (1917)had an IQ of 83 (vs. 100 for Whites), with a Black overlap of the White mean of 13%. For recent data, we cited the meta-analysis by Roth, Bevier, Bobko, Switzer, and Tyler (2001), which also shows a mean difference of 1.1 standard deviations (range of 0.38 to 1.46 standard deviations, depending on the test’s g loading), based on 6,246,729 individuals from military, corporate, and higher-education samples. Roth et al. found any narrowing of the gap was ‘‘either small, potentially a function of sampling error . . . or nonexistent for highly g loaded instruments’’ (p. 323, italics added).
>To claim a 4- to 7-point gain for Blacks, Dickens and Flynn chose three independent tests showing medium gains (the Wechsler, Stanford-Binet, and Armed Forces Qualification tests) and relegated to their Appendix B four or more tests showing lesser gains. They excluded the Wonderlic Personnel Test, which they acknowledge showed a gain of only 2.4 points for Blacks between 1970 and 2001. (Dickens and Flynn suggest that more ‘‘high quality’’ Whites than Blacks had taken the test.) They excluded the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC), which Murray (2005) described as showing a loss of 1 IQ point for Blacks between 1983 and 2004. (Dickens and Flynn say the data contained an inflated standard deviation.) They excluded the very g-loaded Woodcock-Johnson test, which Murray (2005; whom they cite) described as showing the conventional gap of 1.05 standard deviations for the third (2001) standardization sample. (Dickens and Flynn say the Blacks were an unrepresentative ‘‘subsubsample.’’) They also excluded the Differential Ability Scale, which in Lynn’s (1996) analysis (which they cite) showed a maximum gain of 1.83 IQ points for Blacks between 1972 and 1986. (Dickens and Flynn say the sample lacked ‘‘quality.’’) To be compelling, however, researchers must take the totality of available evidence into account (Gottfredson, 2005). Even the tests Dickens and Flynn did analyze do not support their conclusion. The alleged gain of 4 to 7 points is from a ‘‘projected’’ trend line based on a small IQ rise per year multiplied by more years than are in the data using unclear procedures (see the additional appendix in the Web site they refer to). Simple arithmetic applied to the data in their Table A1 shows a mean gain for Blacks of only 3.44 IQ points, from 86.44 to 89.88
If you’d like to see an accurate survey of what experts in the field believe, you’ll have to settle for a 25 year old survey, albeit one very well done.[3]
Tl;dr the points made represent one side of the field, and are not a consensus of intelligence researchers.
Are you saying the solution is for Company B to regularly raise employee pay to market levels? Eg, at the conclusion of John Doe's first year, raise his salary 30%. If so, why do you think this doesn't happen? Because employers think the employee will stay without a raise?
I don't work in software, but this happens to varying degrees in many industries. I asked why employers don't simply regularly raise salaries to market levels, instead of giving years of meager 3% wages until the employee finally bails. That way, they reduce their turnover costs. Of course, this won't work, if the poaching company can extract more value out of the employee than the incumbent employer can.
That aside, one answer I got is that many employees will simply not try to get a market wage, so you'd be throwing away money on raises on employees who wouldn't care. I'm not sure that employees are this ignorant or unconcerned about pay.
What do you count as a success? The only solid markers of success are sex, blowjobs and a girl meeting you on a different day, i.e. for a date. In that order. Everything else is 'harmless flirting,' basically meaningless as an indicator of 'success.'
Airtime, or something like it, has great potential to shake up online dating. I've tried several online dating sites, and it's clear their basic functionality is extremely flawed. I've always felt that you can learn more about your chemistry with someone by talking to them in person in five minutes than through hours of mutual profile gazing or stilted correspondence. Turns out researchers feel the exact same way[1].
Even IM mimics natural conversation far more than long-form messages back and forth. Yet people will spend more time poring over profiles than actually talking to people, and all that filtering is of questionable effectiveness.
It ends up making women more superficial, leaving them to decide more on factors like height, looks, race and income, than they would in person. I say women, because they are the one doing the choosing, at least among younger users. Women get swarmed with attention, and the odds are stacked against individual men. But the men who do get chosen get chosen often, and they are free to conduct several concurrent relationships.
Imagine if employers decided to hire the top 10% of a pool of candidates, and there was lots of overlap in what each employer's chosen 10%. Most importantly, these candidates could hack it so that they could work for multiple employers concurrently, instead of having to choose one, the one with the best fit, salary, benefits, etc. Then the employers, especially the less than spectacular ones, find that their talented employees are always behind on their work, and will quit at a moment’s notice. Still, the employers have tasted the brilliance of this talented tenth, and are unwilling to drop their standards, despite the obvious drawbacks. They keep telling themselves that all the problems with previous hires won’t crop up again, because they’ll uh, be extwuh extwuh careful this time.
That's what online dating promotes. Girls may find themselves getting 'played,' with a man totally unwilling to have a monogamous relationship, because they've priced themselves out of the monogamy market. This whole scenario has some real life parallels. [2]
Of course, this phenomenon is nearly as ubiquitous in the real world – plenty of girls are comfortable sleeping with men who are sleeping with other men. They may not like it, they may try to badger the man into monogamy, but ultimately they chose him, and his ways, because they implicitly prefer him to the men who would agree to monogamy from the outset. They aren’t honest with themselves, so they tell themselves that Mr. Sexy will become Mr. Reliable [2], when reality says not really. If they want to spiral through chaotic relationships and periods of elation and disenchantment, the status quo is great. If they want something a little less rocky and a little more consistent, there’s room for change. Hell, a video solution would increase the ‘truth in advertising,’ so both would stand to benefit. The ‘truthier’ online dating is, the less you have to rifle through people that don’t quite live up to the billing. Lower transaction costs more transactions.
For something that purports to start new serious relationships, the status quo approach blows. A solution like video gives you more exposure to fewer people, reducing this phenomenon of ‘runaway selection.’ It will always be present though, due to the nature of female sexuality, just as men’s penchant for variety abounds.
It's possible looks could become even more important with video, but personality will likely become a bigger factor than it is now. Video is a great step towards getting strangers past the 'activation energy' needed to meet up in person. And there are girls who honestly desire a real relationship, and don’t get caught up in trying to meet the best man possible – these women find a suitable man quickly and easily, provided they are reasonably attractive. But they are something of an outlier on online dating sites.
The online dating industry is stagnant. There are a couple big players who achieve growth only by buying up other entrants, or plagiarizing a startup like How About We once they see a concept well executed. You have sites like JDate that have 1996-era interfaces, and the speed to match.
To explain the issue further, tersely, at the risk of being downvoted, in America, the average score among blacks is a standard deviation lower than that of whites, on IQ tests, that is, 15 points. Given that IQ is normally distributed for the most part, using IQ as a factor in hiring will reduce the proportion of blacks who pass the 'bar.'
This gap may diminish if you're looking at a pool of people who passed some previous threshold, eg they have a degree in math. But even then, some of the gap remains, due to the shape of normal distributions. Think of the heights of men and women, and how even if you looked only at people six feet and taller, the proportion of women in that pool who just barely meet the threshold of 6' would be much higher than the similar group of men; despite the cutoff, the average height of the women would still be less than the average height of the men, within that group. Draw overlapping bell curves to see this visually, and analyze the areas under the graph of each distribution, to the right of a given cutoff point.
We do have a law against invidious racial discrimination. The current implementation of the law states that in practice, if some selection mechanism has a passing rate for one minority that is less than 80% of that whites, that is evidence of discrimination in the absence of validation of that mechanism. This is known as the four fifths rule. A test in which 10% of whites and 7% of blacks passed would fall afoul of this law. Say you set a 115 IQ threshold. That is +1 S.D. from the white mean roughly, and +2 S.D. from the black mean, meaning 16% of whites and 2.3% of blacks would pass, if drawing from the general population. That wouldn't even pass a 'One fifth rule,' let alone a four fifths one.
And validation is no sure thing either - police and fire departments have had these tests validated and still have the results thrown out regularly, due to disparate racial impact, i.e. relatively few blacks and Hispanics (average IQ: ~90) passing the test.
On a related note, explicit racial and gender quotas are more efficient than the race- sex- and IQ-blind, approach in use today. A quota would mandate in effect different thresholds for different groups, but it would allow one at least to use this selection mechanism. Within given groups, one would obtain more efficient outcomes. The problem with quotas is that they make racial preferences explicit, while abandoning such selection methods entirely is only an implicit, de facto racial preference, a rather subtle and hidden one at that.
Awesome. Aping the accreditation, credit and degree system of brick and mortar academe doesn't make sense for the latest generation of educators - udacity, Coursera, Khan Academy, et al. Proctored exams to verify that the student knows the material are the way to go.
For final exams that cover an entire course, a test independently designed by a third party, using input from employers, entreprenuers and academics, might be a great supplement. Where you took the course would be irrelevant, so long as you could pass the test. It would allow for easy comparison of students in different programs.
Testing is a vital step in providing a credential at least as valuable as a college degree.
Yes, this seems like a much more appropriate progression than imposing the credit-degree system on online education. A standardized test would assess the depth of one's knowledge, with proper validation and scoring to allow one to compare any one test-taker to another. It's also more meritocratic, because as it is, one might be forced to compare the grades of say, a Stanford grad with that of a Cal State grad, and there's no easy way to compare the two given the potential differences in course content, difficulty, grade inflation, peer competitiveness, etc. With a way to objectively compare students, the value of a prestige degree, decoupled from the implied intellectual capacity of its holder, might decline.
We already do this with Advanced Placement tests, although it would make sense to have more granular grading, to distinguish say the top .1% from the 1% from the 10%.
The most important part of this, for it to gain mainstream credibility, is for employers to actually hire people on the strength of these qualifications, as well as their interviewing skills, demonstrated work ethic, etc. Most people are going to school to get a good job, and if online education can provide that cheaper and faster, then brick and mortar schools will lose a lot of their advantage.
The optimistic scenario: employers, entrepreneurs and teachers get together to decide what they want potential employees to know, and go about writing a test that covers that material. Then the educators write courses that cover that material. In turn, these schools might even publish their student passing rates, pointing the way to the best teaching resources and methods.
While there'd be a certain amount of teaching to the test, if the tests are written well, that's not such a bad thing - the student would ace the test by knowing the material.