(March 6, 2016 at 12:45 pm)LastPoet Wrote: It's all fear mongering, they have nothing else. I voted for a politician here that had the right words. Turns out that she allied her party to the socialists and communists she vexxed as corrupt during the campaign. I will not be fooled so easily again...

(March 6, 2016 at 12:55 pm)paulpablo Wrote:

(March 6, 2016 at 12:20 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: They're also the result of other factors, is my point.  Until you actually demonstrate that the results are coming from intelligence or its lack, you're simply engaged in the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, because tool use can also be a function of exposure to tools, training, ability to afford tools, sufficient need for tools -- there are many reasons why a person may or may not know how to use tools.

Until you have demonstrated your opinion, the only thing you are illuminating is your own bias. You clearly aren't addressing any of the points I'm making about the different causes; you are simply repeating your point, and as I said earlier, repeating your point is not supporting it. You have an opinion?  Great.  I find it terribly unconvincing, limited and incomplete as it is.


No, I didn't say anything about bias in the educational system in America affecting Africans, who obviously don't attend American schools, nor did I say Asian countries "had something in the land that helped inhabitants", nor any of that other claptrap.

You seem incapable of recognizing a strawman when it is your own.


Again, I never said this, but I wanted to isolate this to give you one more example of multivariate thinking. It is possible, I suppose, that your misreading of my point is actually true, that "Asian privilege" is why they have low crime rates. It is entirely possible, too, that it is simply the fact that households with higher incomes tend to produce less criminal behavior.  It is also a fact that Asian cultures tend to place higher emphasis on group unity and respect for sociocultural norms, both attitudes which would tend to militate against criminal activity.

You see, when you're talking about the cultural behaviors of animals as complicated as humans, reaching for one reason to explain differences is absurdly simplistic. Of course, it takes more work to see past your own biases. The problem in this conversation is that you're giving entirely too much weight to innate intelligence as an explanation, without justification.  And when I ask you about it, you point to results that can be explained a number of ways, but cite them only as evidence for your own view, without demonstrating the causality you claim links them.

When I was talking about Asians and Africans performance in American jobs and schools I was talking about Asian Americans and African Americans, I know that the education system in America won't affect the education of children in Africa or China.  What I'm saying is if they're in American schools Asian Americans in general perform better academically than African Americans, if they're in their own schools in their own countries they still perform better.

Yeh I realize it's just my opinion and economy, education, lifespan, academic success, job success, technological innovation, high IQ results, low crime rates, team work, delayed gratification, forward planning and such can all be explained by other factors definitely.  I'm not qualified enough to disagree with you about it, I am addressing what you're saying and I'm saying you could be right, but in my humble opinion there's so many factors pointing a higher intelligence on average in certain Asian countries than in several African countries.
I'm don't consider myself bias, I'm not African, I'm not South Korean or Japanese, I have no vendetta against Africans or a need to glorify the achievements of China, I have no invested interest in stating my observations.

It's definitely not the case in all Asian countries, the Philipines exhibits signs of having less intelligent inhabitants than South Korea for example, with the South Korean high IQ results, relatively high suicide rate, a high value put on the education system, forward planning and so on.

(March 6, 2016 at 3:13 pm)Vincenzo "Vinny" G. Wrote: I don't think secularism best represents atheism. It tries too hard to borrow from religious worldviews values like tolerance and equality.

Trump is just pure unfiltered atheism.