Fun hate facts about the bell curve, with James A. Donald

Me

Fun hate facts about the bell curve

Notice that the function falls of hyperexponentially, in other words, very abruptly.

This makes it possible to deduce facts about people's characteristics from their race in particular individual cases, and their race from their characteristics in particular individual cases.

It follows from hyperexponential decay that if you select a subgroup from the population that meets some high standard, for example the entry requirements of a university course, or fails some low standard, for example performs an act that is both stupid and criminal, then the vast majority of those selected will only just meet the standard.

Thus, if you apply affirmative action, and have one standard for whites, and another standard for blacks, chances are that all the whites will be better than any of the blacks.

Even though there is a lot of overlap in the population as a whole, in the selected category, very little overlap, so chances are that in any small group of the category, such as students at a class, every person who got in on his merits will be better than any single person who got in on affirmative action.

Thus for example, a class of fifty students, six of them black. None of the white essays are plagiarized, all of the black essays are plagiarized.

Conversely, if you look at the work of a group where they were selected for being good enough, that work is is not good enough, you can be pretty sure he belongs to the category benefited by affirmative action. You can tell the skin color of Michelle Obama from the fact that her Princeton University senior thesis is incoherent and full of spelling and grammar errors. Obviously, you cannot conclude that someone is black from the fact that their essay is full of spelling and grammar errors, but from the fact that it is senior thesis at an ivy league university, and nonetheless is full of errors, you can tell that they are black.

If a crime is violent, you cannot necessarily know the perpetrator is black. If a crime is stupid, you cannot necessarily know the perpetrator is black. But if a crime is violent and stupid, you know the perpetrator was black.

How about that one.
Her I can't even... I mean, it's word salad with mathdressing. Like that's gonna save it?

Me Ironically, it actually isn't. The guy is uniquely bad at expressing himself however.
Her Well if so you've a better underreader than I. I can't see it.

Me I mean, it's uncanny, he gets extremely close to what people who understand what he's saying would think is a passible explanation digestible by they who don't, so he won't be corrected, but in fact he is 100% outside of what may be understood by the people who don't get it. It's almost as if he had spent a lifetime carefully passive-aggresively correcting his work so as to not improve it, but to make it pass the test of the knowledgeable.
Her Lol!

Me Anyway, let's model what he says on neutral ground, it'll be obvious.
Her K.

Me Suppose you hear an improbable noise for the place you're in. Can you now decide if an actual noise was there, or you just misheard ?
Her I could, but it'd take more information to do so reasonably.

Me Right. Suppose you hear a noise in a place where no noise would reasonably be expected at all. Can you now decide if an actual noise was there, or you just misheard ?
Her Idem.

Me Now suppose BOTH the noise is improbable for the place AND the place isn't likely going to have sounds at all. Like say, you're in a submarine by yourself, and what you hear is... a bull bray.
Her Can now decide i've misheard. (Reasonably.)

Me Yeah. This is basically what he's saying. While it's true that men and women have reasonably similar performances in say swimming, and while it's true that there's a lot of overlap between individuals' performance, nevertheless since the Gauss curve describes the distribution thereof, and since the Gauss curve falls very abruptly, the composition of extreme samples is going to be VERY unrepresentative for the averages of the populations. This is just banal statistics. Id est, if you select the 10 shittiest swimmers out of 1k people, you are stuck with women, even if women are only 0.93x as bad as men on average. No matter what happens, the extreme is going to massively overrepresent the one population that's even slightly weaker on average.
Her Sure. So why's the guy represent these as "hate facts"?

Me Well because people dun want to hear about it.
Her I mean, I honestly can't tell if he's tongue-in-cheek playing around or if he actually believes this is a good basis on which to despise 0.93xers.

Me I doubt he despises them. He does despise the people who try to hide the effects he discusses tho.
Her Eh, careful supposing all people who understand an idea also have your personality.

Me Yea, mebbe he does, I never could make him out tbh. But doubt is doubt - when in doubt, it's safe to doubt.
Her I see ;p

Me Anyway! In point of fact the policy which he seems to oppose is simple fake-it-till-you-make-it-ism, which having run its course through the economic life moved on to metastasis in the social. The idea being that it is socially valuable to promote black women like Michelle Obama or Condolezza Rice, who are in fact intellectually nil, as if they weren't, because whatever little black girl that isn't intellectually nil has much better chances to get somewhere in a world where accomplished black women exist, whether deservedly or not, than in a world where they do not exist, at all. On its own black cultureⁱ is plainly incapable of achieving anything, as it's proven over what, 10-15`000 years, so perhaps forcing it to is the only chance it has. This may work or it may not work, but whether it does or it doesn't work, it's no skin off anyone's back : the six seats in a hundred given away thus are taken from the bottom, not from the top of the pile, and who the hell cares that some white kid who came in 95th doesn't get to go to Princeton because he's white. Obviously, the more cogent counterargument is that a world where achievement is a lie is in fact even more toxic for the little black girl than the actually fair if politically inconvenient alternative it replaces. These are matters of social policy though, and the only truth about social policy is that it shouldn't ever be tried because it never actually works. Much like the "if you're going to hire an astrologist, hire the cheapest"ⁱⁱ.
Her Wow well this is kind of a jumble, it'd seem. On the one hand, a social policy can be meritocratic or not, but if it is or it isn't it should be or shouldn't, and the entire shuffling things around nonsense is certainly bullshit, I don't see any reasonable counteraguements there.

Me Hm ?
Her On the other hand, I'm not sure I could agree that "black culture has achieved nothing", nor that it's impossible or unlikely for black people to be other than intellectually nil. And what is your hm about?

Me It's definitely possible for individual black people to be as accomplished as you'd like to set it, but possibility is not a proper reference in a discussion on probability. And the hm cuz I dun see how what you said connects with what I said. Take it in parts ?
Her A world where achievement is a lie is actually even more toxic for the little black girl than the fair alternative it replaces. <<< I'm agreeing with that. And saying that I don't see any worthy counterargument.

Me I doubt there is one. But what I'm saying is, the whole discussion is moot anyway, because in a discussion about how to pull yourself into orbit by your underpants, a cogent point about getting undies that don't wedge is still not particularly valuable. In practice, such a cogent argument is very vulnerable ("but Jay spent 500 bucks on special unwedging underwear and he's still not in orbit!!!" etc)
Her Sure it's moot. I guess it could still produce a lot of data points however, fertile ground for muck sifters to root around in making piles of this and that.

Me Yup. Eexactly. Which is why braindamaged-in-principle points should never even be considered, at all. This is predictably enough a tough sell for they aspiring to make a living shifting muck, and so, he calls them "hate facts", ie, "facts which threaten to make us starve" for a large section of the public likely to read them, and an even larger section of the public likely to comment.
Her Aha. Well sorry I didn't have much to input. Thanks for explaining it though.

Me Plenty enough for an article.

1. Not US black culture. Worldwide black culture. You know, from the "country of Africa", as the current mulatto-in-chief likes to say.

   And no, giving random Nobel prizes to randomly selected black people does not resolve this problem. [↩]

2. Because no actual value can be produced by any astrologist, the exact same value is obtained in exchange for the lowest retainer as for the highest. Rationally then, one must choose the lowest priced provider. [↩]