Reminds me of a passage from Philip Greenspun's article, How to Become as Rich as Bill Gates, http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/:

When I arrived at MIT as a first-year graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, I asked a professor for help with a research problem. He said "The reason that you've having trouble is that you don't know anything and you're not working very hard." A friend of mine was a surgery resident at Johns Hopkins. He complained to one of his teachers that he was having trouble concentrating because he'd been up all night for several nights in a row. The professor replied "Oh... does your pussy hurt?" According to Business Week, Jack Welch "encouraged near-brutal candor in the meetings he held [at GE]".

The bottom line: self-esteem is great but beware of creating a cozy home for unproductive people with bad ideas.

I grew up in Shaker Heights (SHHS '01) and happened to visit Shaker Heights High School for the first time on the afternoon in 1997 that The Shakerite released its article comparing SAT scores across races. It was pretty nuts.

I tend to agree with the conclusion that it's an attitude issue on the part of most (but not all) African-American parents more than any kind of funding or other issue. As I wrote about in my book, the cafeteria self-segregated and so did the classes for the most part. No one told us to--it just happened that way.

That being said, the notion that everyone in Shaker Heights is "rich," whether Black, White, Asian, or otherwise, is extremely misleading. It's a middle-class suburb. There are lower-income sections and $8 million mansions. Hardly anyone is rich though, and if they are, their kids are going to private schools like University School, Hathaway Brown or Hawken.

This is a problem for sure. There is so much in this story I could comment on but I will just say that children definitely get an idea of what they are "supposed" to be from several different sources- parents, television, teachers, peers, etc. When you are young there is a sort of penalty for being different or unusual and children often end up gravitating toward some role at least some of the time. I think certain ethnic groups "over-achieve" and others "under-achieve" because of this pressure- they are just being who they are "supposed" to be. This is my verbose way of blaming the whole thing on peer and societal pressures.

People (adults and children alike) are not really equipped to resist societal pressure. We have a lot of things we are supposed to do- graduate high school/college, get married (maybe even to someone of our own race), have children, get a good job, shower everyday, wear "cool clothes", get good/bad grades, act black, act white and we often suffer societal consequences if we don't "behave"... I think the HN community, being more counter-culturalist/entrepreneurial than average can definitely see where I am coming from on this.

The article has enriched me by a new concept: voluntary vs involuntary minorities. Thanks, upvoted.

A disturbing thought: if black racist sentiment says "Plato and hypotenuses are for whites", and white racist sentiment says "crime is for blacks", the performance disparity between the two racist asshole groups isn't all that surprising!

I'd also be very interested in similar in-depth causal studies on the gap between white and Jewish academic achievement, because this makes me, and more importantly my kids in the future, part of the underachieving group.

It seems to me that a much of the criticism could have been defused with some slightly different methodology. Some statistics that might been good ammunition (each gathered with rates of several different cohorts: white, black-non-immigrant, black-immigrant, non-black-immigrant)

  * # of hours spent on homework
  * # of hours parents spent with children on school-related activities
  * Rate of parental participation in school activities
  * Absenteeism rates
  * rates of student failure to complete homework
  * rates of student participation in school-related activities
  * all of the above plotted across grade levels (do any of these statistics vary over time as children become more susceptible to cultural forces from peers?)

Soon after he left Ohio and returned to California, a black parent from Shaker Heights went on TV and called him an "academic Clarence Thomas."

Perhaps part of these kids' problem is that they have parents who think that being compared to Clarence Thomas is an insult.

Such theorists often cite the 1994 publication of The Bell Curve, which argued that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, as evidence that negative stereotyping of African Americans still exists.

I don't think any of the critics, nor the author of this article, have actually read The Bell Curve.

Best quote:

"'I find it useless to argue with people like Ogbu,' says Urban League educational fellow Ronald Ross, himself a former school superintendent. 'We know what the major problems in this school system are: racism, lack of funding, and unqualified teachers.' Although Shaker Heights is in fact an integrated, well-funded, and well-staffed school district, Ross is nonetheless convinced that it suffers from other problems that contribute to the achievement disparities between the races."

Reading this, I was reminded of some of the things that were described in "Common Ground," the book about the Boston school bussing crisis in the 1970s, as well as "All Souls," a book about the struggles of an Irish-American family growing up in South Boston in the 1970s and 1980s. For those families -- black and white -- that had parents who were uninterested or unable to push their kids in school, the kids' peer circles tended to take over, with predictable results.

In the 30+ since the bussing crisis, Boston has spent huge amounts of money and effort to improve the schools and teaching quality, yet some of the high schools still have huge behavioral and crime problems. And guess what? Many parents still aren't invested in their kids' education, or even their extracurricular activities (there was an article in the Globe a few months ago about how few Boston parents show up for games, even when their kids are on the teams).

Somewhat of an old link, as John Ogbu died the same year (2003) the submitted article was published.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ogbu

A somewhat more recent source

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/noexcuses/

brings the story a little more up to date, by mentioning places where the achievement gap is not so broad.

A wise man once said, "...By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called 'diversity' actually perpetuate racism. Their obsession with racial group identity is inherently racist..."

I wish I could say that I didn't fall victim to this sort of thinking all through school, but I'd be lying if I say that I hadn't. There is indeed a culture of not pushing to your top potential academically, or at least there was when I was in school.

I seem to have moved on from that, and now work pretty darn hard at learning stuff, but only once I was away from my peers culturally as well as physically. It sucks but it is the truth.

I would like comment on the economic and social aspects[1] of this article.

.. * I) Underacheivement as a group Defense Mechanism ::

Some social-groups actively encourage what I call "Perennial-Underacheivement". This is in my opinion based on a group defense mechanism[2].

This defense mechanism is to ensure the weak and sick and those unable to care for themselves are not left behind. They value support for the less-able and believe that informal community support is far better than State supplied support. The reasons are a topic unto themselves but my take is that this group behiour ensures those with latent talent don't leave the community and thus those who cannot care for themselves. Some talented people may not reach their potential, but they may still lead a happy, fruitful life. Some members may take the lack of excellence to extremes and die in prison as hopeless drug-dealers.

Basically, in these groups, overacheiving and commercial gain is downplayed. Here, to be rich is to "Sell Out" and to move out of the neighbourhood it to betray your "Roots".

.. * II) Acheivement is better for the Acheiver and the Group ::

The opposing view is that each person tries for themselves and their immediate family and this works because everyone "succeeds". People who cannot care for themselves are kept at a distance, cared for by the State which is paid for by tax. Individual families may still take care of their own, but it helps to be a "successful" family.

.. * Evidence of this divide ::

My data point of a divide link here would be to consider Immigrant versus 3rd generation Locals. This is touched on in the Article, where a Black Man (but immigrant) is in conflict with American born African-Americans. I offer an explanation that some of the American born blacks are using race issues to form the defense mechanism which conciously or unconcsiously they know protects their group.

First I will state the obvious. Immigrants by definition cannot belong to the group-care mindset. Why? Because by definition they have left many, many compatriots behind to fend for themselves in a different geographical place. They may not like it, and they may send every penny back to their village. But in their mind the gain overall to themselves and the group behind is clear: immigration is better than remaining.

------------

[1] I am not a black, and I am not American. But I wish to say something on this topic because I am an immigrant (to Oz, then UK) myself and part of an oft-picked upon ethnic group (Jew). This issue is complex and there are many commingled ingredients, economic-social-racial-ethnic-familial-historical

[2] I am not making a comment on the rights , wrongs of this defense mechanism

Culture is the cause, though of course it's correlated with intelligence and income level, which is what confuses people.

Not all cultures are created equally. What your parents did in the home, and who your friends were matter much more than anything else.

Does a Jewish kid from a family of scientists and scholars have much in common with so-called "white trash"? They're both white, right?

Does the child of a black immigrant who comes from a culture of learning and achievement have much in common with some other random brown-skinned person? They're both brown, right?

The problem here isn't race. It's a loser culture.

It would be interesting to know how well the black students did in fields of study that are typically (on average) normally higher for blacks. Such as music, dancing, and sports. There is a difference in races, why do we assume the difference is bad, and that's only on average, there are always exceptions. So maybe it is the attitudes of the students and the parents, but what would change those attitudes? That's the next question to pursue, I think anyway.

I see this thread is still quite active. I was just at the behavorial genetics journal club meeting at the University of Minnesota

http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall09/mcguem/psy8935/defau...

today, and I had occasion there to hear Tom Bouchard, indisputably one of the leading experts on human behavioral genetics research, say that the number-one thing to tell members of the general public who read about this research is "correlation does not imply causation." The simple blunder of assuming that phenomena with some kind of positive correlation are in a cause-effect relationship is one of the most enduring cognitive biases in human thinking, and the bias doesn't appear to be any less frequent in high-IQ persons, nor does it appear to go away even after student receive statistical education.

"On average, black students earned a 1.9 GPA while their white counterparts held down an average of 3.45"

The ratio between black and white GPAs = .55

"Ogbu worked from the 1990 census data, which showed that 32.6 percent of the black households and 58 percent of the white households in Shaker had incomes of $50,000 a year or more"

The ratio between number of blacks/white making above $50k/yr = .56

I made it pretty well despite having a somewhat challenging childhood. So did many of my friends. Here's two quick stories:

- My most influential mentor was born in the ghettos of London and dropped out of middle school. When he was 12, his home was raided by the police and he had a gun to the back of his head as his brother was arrested for dealing drugs. He can't read or write very well and he's dyslexic. He became a construction worker. Now he's running one of the most profitable construction firms in the Middle East and owns properties in five or six countries. He makes about $20,000 per month in salary and bonuses, not including his investments.

- My best friend had the hell beaten out of him by his father, until he got big enough to fight back and eventually kicked the hell out of his Dad, which then ended in an uneasy truce. He dealt drugs in high school, got into college, and dropped out. He became a self made millionaire at age 24. He's 29 now, lives in Bel Air in a three million dollar home, and in a bad year he makes $200,000.

Me? I dropped out of two high schools and left home at age 16 or 17, just scrapping here and there to get by. I then dropped out of another university. I didn't have what you'd call an easy childhood, but I did okay too.

A lot of my friends and mentors are like this. We're all self-made - we get along sort of okay with old money people, but fit right in with entrepreneurs and self made people. Many of them come up from hard times. An acquaintance of mine is 60ish, Polish, and spent her childhood in a concentration camp. Her family became wealthy black-marketing goods past the Communist lines for sale, and eventually a branch of their family came to America. She's a psychologist, her husband is some sort of businessman.

Everyone successful I know internalizes their problems - that means they blame themselves and take responsibility. This is key - if other people are doing things to you, then you can't change that and you're stuck. But if everything is your fault and responsibility, you can change that and win. So, dyslexic? Up to me to deal with. Racism? Up to me to deal with. Grew up poor? Up to me to deal with. Spent childhood doing forced labor in a Nazi factory? Up to me to deal with. Abused? Up to me to deal with. Speak very lower-class English? Up to me to deal with. No English? Up to me to deal with.

Now, I remember some sort of study that quoted: "People who internalize failure and externalize success are less happy but more successful. People who externalize failure and internalize success are more happy and less successful."

The "it's my fault, and my problem, and I'll deal with it" attitude makes you more successful and less happy. As a bonus, everything good that happens is luck and a blessing and can't be counted on. You'll be less content, much less content, but go much further.

So me? I always blame myself. "Partner stole a lot of money? That's my fault, I should've been paying attention to the finances." Success? "Got an important order? That's good luck, can't count on that in the future."

Most people do the opposite. "Life is hard and unfair, but everything I've achieved despite that is because I'm awesome." Everyone successful I know - "I've been dealt a good set of cards, I'm extraordinary lucky, and every mistake and hardship is on me." Less contentment, less surface happiness, much more accomplishment and triumph. It's the only way to the highest levels of accomplishment in any field.

Biological explanations, while non-PC, do a rather good job of explaining the available evidence.