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Fight fire with fire, as they say.
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<p>Sorry, but it doesn't work this way. Fallacious reasoning is fallacious reasoning no matter what. </p>
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And even with this, it's still predictive.
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<p>No, it's not. We don't know that, and that's the point. There is a TON of endogeneity in the whole "IQ versus success" debate that obscures a great deal of the actual variation. That's the thing that Jensen and the rest of the "IQ is predictive" crew haven't really grasped. Sowell's example, more than anything demonstrates that IQ is, in and of itself, subject to collection bias-- this will then bias its predictive ability in any classical statistical model.</p>
<p>Let me make this clearer: even if you do, by some statistical trick, have a p < .05, you still have a model that is essentially meaningless if you are pinning a lot of the variation on this one variable. </p>
<p>It is therefore NOT predictive.</p>
<p>I don't know how much clearer I can get about the statistics.</p>
<p>As for your response about Gould, you really didn't say much. You seem to believe that Jensen is somehow the "greater scholar" when that's of course absurd. Gould and Jensen came from different fields and are therefore biased by their own paradigms. That doesn't mean, however, that what Gould says, even though it differs from what Jensen says, is necessarily wrong within its own context. It's possible, interestingly enough, that IQ is predictive, but that it is not largely a racially determined trait. Unfortunately, people get too caught up in the idea that ALL of one person's ideas have to be right-- they don't, of course.</p>
<p>Regarding Japanese academic achievement (something I personally have experience with, having been a teacher of sorts in Japan), I daresay that most Americans have a terribly biased and inaccurate view of Japanese academic abilities. While it is true that Japanese primary and secondary schools were exceptional up until about the 90s or so (they have since then languished a fair bit by even Japanese accounts), they were incredibly good at teaching skills that involve rote learning (math, foundations of science, kanji, etc.) Japanese students, by my account-- and by many contemporary Japanese educators-- fall far behind their Western counterparts when it comes to "creative thinking." This, of course, is one reason why American universities are still exceptional: they are fonts of creative thought. There are, even today, few people in Japan who could match a Feynman, a Greene, a Stiglitz, etc. Even in literature, most of the great contemporary and even past Japanese authors were those who, shall we say, were not very "Nihonjin." </p>
<p>As far as the notion of letting the smart vs. stupid in the US, I think that the primary goal should be to let in people who will be productive and an asset to the country. I mean, let's be fair here: a century ago people thought the Irish were intellectual halfwits. Do you suppose that distinction would still hold today in the public discourse?</p>
<p>Finally:</p>
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I would assume that the army knows a little bit about soldiering. They probably know a bit more about it than you or I.
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<p>Perhaps, but then again the military, like any other organized body, is just as prone to silliness. I mean, the federal government still believes that the polygraph test is meaningful in some way. So much that they end the careers of thousands of eager and qualified individuals at the hands of 6-weeks trained voodoo artists. Who's to say that the ASVAB hasn't simply ingrained itself enough to be subject to "bureaucratic momentum," so to speak?</p>