Did the US Supreme Court really find that African Americans are less intelligent than people of other races?
It's already common knowledge that African Americans, as a group, score poorly on IQ tests as opposed to other groups.
I personally find it strange that people feel it is all that important. After all, what if it was provable that a racial group was less intelligent than other groups? How could one reasonably and humanely find that information actionable?
Certainly people here on Hacker News don't need to be convinced of the value of finding elite engineers, or the very real wealth they can generate from book learning.
The problem is the doublethink that allows the IQ elite -- graduates of highly selective institutions like Harvard and Stanford -- to pretend that there is no such thing as an IQ elite, while simultaneously selecting their peers (coworkers, marriage partners, fellow students, etc.) from that very same ostensibly nonexistent IQ elite.
The contrast is whiplash inducing. One minute IQ doesn't matter, the next minute everyone is talking about how all these "idiots" can't solve FizzBuzz... Very big blind spot here, which many Asian countries don't share in the same way.
Aha, fifth-grade-me thought, a trick question! “The Indians,” I said confidently.
The woman administering the test rephrased the question: “Who is generally credited with discovering America?”
Even though I scored well enough to qualify for the “IQ elite”, that experience gave me a livelong skepticism about how seriously to take IQ tests. I don’t need to ask for someone’s IQ scores before deciding whether or not to work, hang out, or have sex with them.
The comparison with FizzBuzz is not apposite, because nobody is claiming that FizzBuzz is a measure of general intelligence or even a measure of general programming aptitude. If candidate A solved the FizzBuzz problem twice as fast as candidate B, no sane hiring manager would conclude that candidate A is going to be twice as good at programming.
The good news is that there's also emerging research showing how test scores for blacks & women can be raised by exposing them to certain facts/examples that reduce the effect of "stereotype threat".
It completely debunks the theory of disparate impact, assuming you believe IQ drives general problem solving ability. This information would be useful in rejecting a huge number of baseless lawsuits.
It also suggests that racial gaps in education are here to stay, and nothing can be done about them. Therefore, we should accept them and move on.
I don't accept for a moment the notion that "blacks" are "less intelligent" than "whites", or even that we can with any useful precision define what these terms are, but the way you've summarized the points seems to illustrate well the reason people have such a hard time discussing this issue.
''Did the US Supreme Court really find that African Americans are less intelligent than people of other races?''
Simple answer is no, they didn't.
The court basically found that because African-Americans had suffered a lower standard of education (their wording: ''Because they are Negroes, petitioners have long received inferior education in segregated schools, and this Court expressly recognized these differences in Gaston County v. United States, 395 U.S. 285 (1969)'') and that DP knew this the whole point of the new scheme was to continue segregation.
More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co. (it's an interesting case)
Whether that would be the same now, I don't know. On the other hand I could completely believe that companies are still worried by it, and so avoid IQ tests etc.
This is provable. Suppose that all racial groups were equally intelligent by some metric. Then the average value of that metric for each racial group would be the same. Assuming a sufficient resolution for the value range and millions of people taking the test, the odds of any racial groups average value being equal to any others is astronomically small.
"Disparate impact" reasoning in equal protection cases has a long history, by the way. One of the earliest cases, Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886),
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2131565438211553...
held that a local law that regulated laundries in San Francisco violated the federal Constitution because most of the laundry businesses banned by the law were owned by Chinese immigrants, while most laundries that fit the law's requirements were owned by people of "white" backgrounds. (Knowing the time and place of this case, it's rather plain that the law was designed to discriminate in that manner.)
Context matters. But some of the comments above are true, that today many companies use school credentials as proxies for intelligence, and give higher education institutions a lot of incentive to operate as diploma mills. But there ARE companies in the United States that use various tests (the Wonderlic test is one example) that are essentially IQ tests as part of the hiring process.
The current claim in the mainstream literature on hiring procedures is that the two most effective screening procedures for job applicants are
1) work-sample tests
or
2) IQ-like tests (these two are tied for first place),
with all other procedures such as personal interviews, resume reviews, diploma requirements, personal references, etc., etc. ranking lower in practical usefulness. IQ-like tests are also quite inexpensive (in the form such as the Wonderlic test) and thus fare well for organizations that use them. That is the current claim in the literature, across a broad array of occupations in a broad array of industries.
After edit: Here's a link to a reasonably good, current bibliography on IQ-testing issues, including some of the issues about legal requirements and trade-offs in efficacy of different ways to rate applicants for jobs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...
