Jason Richwine Dissertation On Low Hispanic IQ Puts Heritage On Defensive

[moonbladem]

WASHINGTON - A conservative researcher's 2009 dissertation, which argued that Hispanic immigrants to the U.S. have substantially lower IQs than whites, put one of the biggest opponents to an immigration reform bill in Congress on the defensive on Wednesday.

The dissertation by Jason Richwine, then a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, argues

Comments

[the_physicist]

someone doing a phd on public policy is clearly an expert in genetics and how iq is expressed through gentics and what iq even is. definitely has me convinced he could even read through the literature on the issue and discard the clearly racist ones as bullshit and not grounded on anything but bigotry.

"When given the choice between a paycheck from a low-paying job and a welfare check, most intelligent people would realize that the welfare check offers them no potential for advancement. Low-IQ people do not internalize that fact nearly as well," he wrote.

omg, what is this shit even. how can someone write crap like that and actually believe it?

Richwine's argument was that lower-IQ Hispanics are the ones who have come to the U.S., while Hispanics with higher IQs have remained in their countries of origin because they have better employment and financial prospects.'argument'. yurh. this isn't fucking highschool. you don't get cookies for 'effort' in pulling some reason out of your arse that is founded on nothing but the stuff that

[the_physicist]

absolutely it should be taken with a grain of salt! i've been discriminated against in job applications because of my low iq. as if i couldn't do the job. but my iq of <85 means i can't get through the door of most companies i applied for as they did iq testing. that's fair apparently. never mind that i'm a physicist at one of the world's top ten universities. pffft. iq has a meaning, because i know how it has affected the way i need to work, the way i need to organise myself, and the way i need to try and keep that score hidden from any where i apply for a job ever. i do have to work harder than any of my colleagues and i've always had to push myself harder than any of my peers to accomplish the same things. they could sit on their arse all day and do nothing and understand your basics physics lectures. i'm sitting there not even understanding what the letters on the damned board mean and wasting hours pouring over the notes later because I didn't understand that i'd copied down something slightly wrong. it was very hard to get

[cher_arlequin]

Wow @ this bell curve bullshit.

[chaya]

Every time I see that book at the used book store I frequent, I'm tempted to move it over to a fiction shelf.

[ladypolitik]

LMFAO OMFG FUCKIN' DO IT FROM NOW ON

[chaya]

You should've seen my face when I started reading it. My memory was just good enough to see the cover and go, "That is a ... thing. Some kind of... noteworthy... thing." And I opened it up and scanned the table of contents and there was something about women's IQ and I just ...

[tilmon]

Who were the dissertation committee members who read that garbage and let it pass? And did no one think that maybe a student being funded by the American Enterprise Institute might write bias into his work?

And what's with Harvard's consistent vetting of racist massaging of statistics? Have they learned nothing since "The Bell Curve"?

[the_physicist]

probably eugenicist bullshit racist conservatives? when he took his dissertation topic he probably chose a supervisor who has similar views...

[carmy_w]

Not surprising of Harvard. Do you remember the storm when Obama was the first black editor of their Law Review? And that was in 1990.

Which isn't all that surprising, except that the first black to attend Harvard was Richard T. Greener, in 1870, and the first black to obtain degrees from both Harvard College and Harvard Law School was Clement G. Morgan, in 1890 and 1893, respectively. So it took nearly a century for that wall to be breached.

[maenads_dance]

Well, frankly, given that in recent memory they had a president hypothesizing publicly that there aren't many women in science because women's feeble little brains can't handle it, I am zero percent shocked that bigotry is tolerated at high levels in harvard. seems par for the fuckign course.

[tamingheadfauna]

Wow. Holy resurrection of (discredited) Lombroso, Batman.

And besides, isn't it common knowledge that IQ tests really are a measure of how well you might do in "middle class white" 'murica and is definitely skewed male?

And isn't it common knowledge that IQ tests only provide a narrow and limited measure of how people process information and doesn't really correct for things such as cultural differences.

I just can't.

[cozmic_oceanz]

Yeah. IQ tests are extremely skewed and many psychologists agree nowadays that they are not a reliable measure of intelligence, and especially not of success. Fuck alllll this.

[lickety_split]

Yeah, IQ tests test for a very specific type of intelligence and learning ability that's very much framed for a specific population of people.

[the_physicist]

Yup!

[moonshaz]

Kudos to your teacher. That kind of exercise should be a part of a lot more psych classes, imo!