Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Asked and answered

A semi-brave professor notices that without Affirmative Action, and an average SAT score 200 points below Whites, the numbers of Blacks in a college plummets. When the Black interviewer asks why --and we know what answers are not allowed-- the prof references the pathologies of the unwed mother led home.

The Black interviewer replies that he is Black and he grew up in a single parent home and does that mean he is not as smart as the Whites?

Asked and answered.

The failure to grasp the difference between a universal statement (always true without exception) and a general statement (true of most, most of the time) is one of the marks of lower intelligence.

The prof tries to avoid this dead end by praising the Black interviewer for being as smart as, or even smarter than, Whites. (Fail). See Voltaire's Razor.

What the Black interviewer has done is classic. He avoids a potentially painfully enlightening issue by turning it into a matter of ego and race pride.

Were he smarter, he would have dealt with the data and not played the race game.

But, whom am I kidding? He's no Thomas Sowell.

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