OK Mitch, is this a trick question?

I loved Bob. Isn't he doing stand-up in Atlantic City these days?

I'm going to interrupt this post for breaking news . . . Don't worry, I survived the Big Island quake. TERRY IS ALIVE AND UNHARMED.I now know that it is true that you can tell it's a 6+ quake because you have trouble standing up.
The quake was actually a good thing. Despite the lack of electricity, the landslides, and the collapsing houses, as a vacation destination the Big Island will has been and will remain a wildly successful vacation destination.

Genuinely glad to hear you're okay, Terry. Must've been a hell of a quake to keep you from continuing to participate in the debate you started over on 008006.html .

(Oh, and Mitch? Your software's "questionable content" filter doesn't like dot in fo. Kinda funny that I'm not allowed to use a URL from your own site.)

Terry,

Glad you are OK!

Beeeej,

Yep, my spam blocking s/w is a mess. I have an ongoing project to switch blog tools (and, eventually, domains) but I haven't had time to finish it. Blah.

beeeej-
Sorry I stalled on 008006. I wrote a response to your comment to my comment etc. & deleted it before posting because it was peeb-like. Too long and too tangential to Mitch's original post.
I'll do my best to abbreviate it here.
No one seriously disputes the fact that Asians and whites (and European jews), on average, have higher IQ's than hispanics and blacks. After all the numbers are adjusted for economics and cultural backgrounds the difference still doesn't converge to anything close to 0. The remaining question is the meaning of the numbers to social policy, and that is a matter of politics, not science.
The wikipedia article on race & intelligence is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence_(Average_intelligence_gaps_among_races)
A lot of people don't like the wikipedia; trust me, in this case the wikipedia follows the accepted knowledge of people who study intelligence as a hard science. Social scientists have another take on the statistics, perhaps best summarized in Stephen J Gould's book 'The mismeasure of man'. The wikipedia article on Gould's book is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
Given sufficent space I am perfectly willing to debate the topic with you. I have no stake in the outcome. Whatever mental attributes I or anyone else has they have because they are who they are as individuals, not as members of any particular race. Because of where I live and where I work I deal with both stupid asians and black astrophysicists. The reason I brought the IQ issue up is because the comments on the 8006 thread had degenerated into a discussion of the left as a "reality based" community when it is clear to me that the left collectively buries its head in the sand and ignores reality when doing so suits its ideology.

Addendum to the IQ post-
I didn't mean to imply that Gould was a social scientist. He was an evolutionary biologist. Whether that makes his critique of IQ tests more legitimate depends, I suppose, on whether or not you agree with his conclusions.

Thanks for the recap, Terry!

"After all the numbers are adjusted for economics and cultural backgrounds the difference still doesn't converge to anything close to 0."

I admit I didn't the Wikipedia article all that thoroughly, but I certainly didn't see anything in it about adjusting numbers for social and economic backgrounds or how doing so still doesn't close the gap. Where are you getting that data/assertion?

We can debate this specific issue if you want. I just think perhaps you chose a bad "reality" to shove in the left's face if you're going to accuse it/us of burying our heads in the sand when we see one we don't like.

Beeeej wrote-
"Where are you getting that data/assertion?"
I get it from lots of places. It's interesting that the data is out there, but not often mentioned in debates in our race-obsessed culture. Start with the footnotes to the wikipedia article, and especially check out the section in the Wikipedia article labeled "Expert Opinion".
When you say that you would like to know if the numbers are adjusted for "social and economic backgrounds" you are asking about adjustment for what is called "environment" in the article.
The fundamental questions are: "is intelligence a real feature of the human mind?" and "is intelligence heretible?".
Expert opinion says, I believe, yes to the first question and "to a significant degree when the question is asked of large populations" to the second question. The answer is complicated by the fact that IQ seems fixed for adults but that the final number has a definite (but not total) correlation to childhood environment that varies to a greater degree among indivduals within a given population group than in comparison to other groups as a unit.
That's where the sience ends; the idea of grouping people by race and assigning social therapy to lower scoring groups is pure politics.