Warp wrote:
>   I don't think that's true. Maybe it was true 50 years ago, but nowadays
> IQ tests are specifically designed to be detached of all cultural backgrounds.

One example I remember was something like "You've lost your ball in a 
circular field. How can you more efficiently look for it."  If you grew up 
in a rain forest, with neither balls nor fields, this is a difficult 
question to consider.

The IQ tests I had in grade school (maybe 35-40 years ago) definitely had 
culture components. Pictures from a cartoon that had to be put in the right 
order, involving leaving the house, seeing it's raining, going back for the 
umbrella, missing the train because of that, etc. Granted, this wasn't 
*supposed* to be applicable to cultures outside where I went to grade 
school; I'm pretty sure that even disadvantaged black children knew what 
umbrellas were, for example.

> all people have had the exact same education for quite many decades.

Not here. People from poor neighborhoods with crappy schools and overworked 
teachers get worse education than those from rich neighborhoods with 
expensive lab equipment and books and plenty of teachers per pupil.

Of course, the question is how many generations do you go before you decide 
that any residual results of discrimination are no longer significant?

Obviously, the children of newly freed slaves are going to be at a 
disadvantage compared to the children of previous rich slaveholders - their 
parents don't know as much, don't speak gramatically, can't answer questions 
about science, etc.  The children of uneducated parents are going to be less 
educated than the children of educated parents.

Honestly, it hasn't been that long since blacks here got legally equal rights.

>   I have hard time thinking of a question in a fireman test which a white
> citizen of the US is able to answer due to his culture but a black citizen
> of the US isn't, especially if both have gone to the same schools.

Yeah. Actually, I think this was a test for promotion to some 
leadership/management position. It wasn't a test about fighting fires, but 
about running a fire fighting company.  So I imagine there could be 
something on it.  It's just hard to believe there's anything on it that 
would make *all* 26 black applicants fail the test.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Forget "focus follows mouse." When do
   I get "focus follows gaze"?

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