Zing!

[asterroc]

Found on a friend's friendslist...



Though technically, in the second panel it should read "hypothesis" everywhere it says "theory"... :-P

Comments

[spazzy444.livejournal.com]

uhg! I am so tired of the OMG BLACKS AND SLAVERY!!! Seriously. Blacks enslaved black in Africa long before whites did ... and nearly every country has some history of slavery.
For gods sake MY grandmother was a slave. A WHITE SLAVE LESS THAN 70 years ago!
My IQ does not have anything to do w/ the fact that she was a slave.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

Institutionalized slavery led to a systemic imbalance in our society that hasn't been corrected. It's not a competition, jeez.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Of course not, b/c you and your parents haven't subsequently been subjected to continued discrimination. If you had, things might be different.

This comic is also trying to make the distinction between actual real intelligence, and the values that show up on tests. I'm sure you're aware that no test can perfectly measure the underlying reality, and instead is filtered by the cultural biases of the people who write the tests, and of the experiences of the people who take the tests. If we asked people in low income communities to write a list of questions they'd ask to find out how smart a person is, chances are that I (middle class professional) wouldn't do as well on it as I do on traditional IQ tests.

A more tangible example is that a friend of mine a couple years back was studying the Massachusetts state standardized English exam and how students from different demographics groups performed on different questions. There was one question where she found that black students did much better on the question than white students. She went and looked up what the actual question was, and it turned out to be a reading comprehension question where they had to define the word "ebony" - which besides meaning "black" is also the name of a popular magazine targeting an African American audience. Does this mean that the black students were smarter than the white ones, at least in this respect? No, it just meant that their life experiences colored how they did on the exam.

[q10.livejournal.com]

Of course not, b/c you and your parents haven't subsequently been subjected to continued discrimination. If you had, things might be different.

naturally, but i think that's sort of the point - harping on slavery mainly distracts from the much-more-significant effects of recent and ongoing racist (or otherwise discriminatory) practices.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I think we've got the same point here, except that I didn't feel this comic was harping on slavery.

[calzephyr77.livejournal.com]

I love Tom the Dancing Bug. Thanks for posting, since I've been on holidays I haven't been checking Salon and Slate as usual!

[weirdlilfaechld.livejournal.com]

At first I kinda rolled my eyes but it did make me think about something related.

Let's take someone with "mild" autism, put them in mainstream schools since they can act "normal", and have them take an IQ test, then consider that they will probably never be independent because they scored a 63. Then lets have someone actually use their brain and give them an IQ test designed for individuals with autistic disorders and be amazed at a score of 156. It all depends on the test and the person.

[spazzy444.livejournal.com]

I wasn't saying it was a competition. Relax.
What I was saying was that my grandmother was poor, she was incredibly poor. She was forced into slavery and when WW II ended she fled. She fled and by herself she worked her way up, she learned 7 languages, her husband was a waiter all his life. She didn't live a privileged life. a few generations out our lifestyle is very different from hers, yes, and the fact that I may have grown up in a much more privileged atmosphere than her may very well play a big part in how I do on standardized tests. This is not about slavery, this is about cultural differences.

[spazzy444.livejournal.com]

How do you know my parents aren't discriminated against, first off? Hell I know my mom is to some degree. She is a lunch lady... in a public middle school. 3/4 of the employees are Hispanic immigrants and the majority refuse to speak English (most know, not all, but when management is Hispanic the 3 non-Hispanic women are outcast). I would also like to explain that I went to a school that was, 20% across the board, in my classes I could very well be one of the few white students - in some classes I was continually discriminated against, because I wasn't an Asian in AP class.

If this comic is saying - Our government is run by a bunch of really rich white guys who don't believe in public health care b/c they have enough money where that isn't a worry, etc. then sure. But the fact that this is specifically calling on black slavery as the entire reason they score worse then I call it BULLSHIT. If it is major cultural differences, then great I get it.

Recently on the radio I heard a guy say "The only reason Jewish people were known for being intelligent financers was because they were cast into that role, and if you could do it you could survive - survival of the fittest so to speak"

[spazzy444.livejournal.com]

I think standardized exams in general are crap, they rarely mean anything - I agree they are very much written to be answered by the writers progeny. Some of the smartest people I know would fail a generalized exam, but that is because they think very differently than "in the box" persons.

For instance - Savants are often people with severe forms of autism or worse diseases/handicaps... but they are absolutely brilliant, just in a very different way.

[weirdlilfaechld.livejournal.com]

Of course a while after posting I finally notice that really isn't a good comparison to use. Of course there will be a pretty big difference between how the brain of someone with an autistic disorder and someone without one works, but not a big difference between a black individual and a white individual.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Huh, it never occurred to me that there were different IQ tests for people with autism. Do you know what's different about the tests?

[weirdlilfaechld.livejournal.com]

Not a test meant just for autistic individuals, I wasn't clear, sorry. Using Raven's Progressive Matrices, which relies more on analyzing shapes and solving puzzles, rather then the more common Wechsler Intelligence Scale, which relies more on noticing and responding to verbal cues.