More nonsense research on IQ. Are high IQ people more racist?

Maybe I am missing something but I think that the research below has simply shown that people who are good at recognizing patterns are good at recognizing patterns.

It is true that the Raven's IQ test is a test of pattern recognition.  Pattern recognition is a major part of IQ. So the geniuses below did a study in which people were presented with some graphics that were patterned in a certain way.  They then tested the people who had been shown the patterned graphics  to find out if they had seen and learned the pattern in the graphics.  Some had seen it. Some had not.

They found that high scorers on the Ravens pattern recognition test were more likely to have learned the pattern that had been presented to them in the graphics of the experiment. People who were good at detecting one lot of patterns were good at detecting other patterns. In other words, they confirmed that good pattern recognition was part of IQ -- which  we already knew.

So what the heck is going on?  Why did this tomfoolery get published?  It is because pattern recognition is RACIST!  If you see a pattern in people who cry "Allahu Akhbar" when they kill other people and conclude that Muslims might be more dangerous than others, that is PREJUDICE.  I would argue that it is POSTJUDICE -- judging from experience -- but that makes me a racist apparently. Recognizing patterns is BIAS!  You are not allowed to learn from experience


A new study complicates the narrative that only unintelligent people are prejudiced. The paper, published recently in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, suggests smart people are actually more at risk of stereotyping others.

The study consisted of a series of experiments, all of which suggested that people who performed better on a test of pattern detection—a measure of cognitive ability—were also quicker to form and apply stereotypes.

First, researchers from New York University showed 271 participants a series of pictures of red, blue, and yellow cartoon aliens with different facial features, paired with a statement of either a nice behavior (“gave another alien a bouquet of flowers”) or a rude one (“spat in another alien’s face”):

Most of the pairings were random, but two were skewed so that keen observers might pick up on a pattern: 80 percent of the blue aliens were paired with unfriendly behaviors, and 80 percent of the yellow aliens were paired with nice ones. The subjects didn’t know if the statements about the aliens were true or false. In this way, the study tried to mimic how people actually form prejudices about certain groups, like through anecdotes in the media or through portrayals in TV shows.

Later, the subjects were asked to pick which alien had committed a given behavior from a lineup:

The participants then took a test called the Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices, a pattern-based exam that’s a common measure of human intelligence.

The participants who were better pattern detectors were more likely to make stereotypical errors: They tended to ascribe the friendly behaviors to the wrong yellow alien, and the unfriendly behaviors to the wrong blue alien. Meanwhile, they were less likely to ascribe the behavior to a different-colored alien.

A second study showed similar results, but for measures of implicit bias. That is, smarter participants were quicker to stereotype the aliens in the course of a word-sorting task, even if they didn’t realize they were doing it.

Next, the researchers tried it with human faces, showing a new set of participants a series of computer-generated pictures of men with either wide or narrow nose bridges:

Here too, 80 percent of the narrow nose-bridge men were paired with friendly behaviors, while 80 percent of the wide nose-bridge men were supposedly unfriendly. The participants were then partnered with a new set of pictures of men for a trust game using fake money. Again, superior pattern detectors gave more money to the characters with narrow nose bridges, suggesting they had learned the stereotype about friendliness and employed it in judging the new men.

These depressing results suggest there’s a downside to being smart—it makes you risk reading too much into a situation and drawing inappropriate conclusions.

SOURCE  

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The Democrats' “Rising Star”. A look at the radical record of Kamala Harris

The pictures of Harris generally make her look quite light-skinned.  Yet she is of Southern Indian and Jamaican descent.  Do picture editors deliberately lighten her skin?  If so, is that not racism?

As House and Senate Democrats press forward with their quest to destroy Donald Trump's presidency by any means necessary, they are simultaneously focused on finding someone in their ranks who could be an effective presidential candidate for their own party in 2020. Fifty-three-year-old Kamala Harris, who served as the Attorney General of California from 2011-16 and then filled the vacant U.S. Senate seat that had been occupied for a quarter-century by Barbara Boxer, is someone whom they will undoubtedly look at very closely. To be sure, Harris possesses all the qualifications necessary to be a Democratic leader, insofar as she is a far leftist in the mold of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — but without the baggage of Obama's extensive ties to domestic terrorists, anti-Semites, and America-hating Marxists, or of Hillary's status as a money-grubbing thief who feloniously violated the Espionage Act more times than anyone can count.

Consider, for instance, Harris's stance on immigration. In December 2012, during her tenure as California's Attorney General, she issued a memo informing all the executives of law-enforcement agencies statewide that they could “make their own decisions about whether to fulfill” Immigration & Customs Enforcement detainers, which are temporary holds that federal immigration authorities place on municipal prisoners who are suspected of being eligible for deportation.

After an illegal alien named Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez — a convicted felon who had been deported from the United States on five separate occasions — was released from prison in April 2015 and subsequently murdered a 32-year-old San Francisco woman named Kathryn Steinle, Harris backed up the city sheriff's decision to release Lopez-Sanchez without first calling immigration authorities.

During Harris's Senate run in 2016, her campaign website stated that “everyone should have access to public education, public health, and public safety regardless of their immigration status”; that Harris, if elected, would “fight for comprehensive immigration reform that creates a fair pathway to citizenship” for America's “11 million undocumented immigrants”; that she would “protect President Obama’s immigration executive actions,” which shielded several million illegals from deportation; and that the U.S. had a duty to “responsibly resettle refugees” from Syria and other war-torn, terrorism-infested nations around the world.

But then again, America's national security has never been high on Kamala Harris's list of priorities. In September 2015, for instance, she spoke out in support of the nuclear deal that the Obama administration had negotiated with the government of Iran — an agreement that allowed the Islamist regime in Tehran to enrich uranium, build advanced centrifuges, purchase ballistic missiles, fund terrorism, and be guaranteed of having a near-zero breakout time to the development of a nuclear bomb approximately a decade down the road. But by Harris's reckoning, the accord represented “the best available option for blocking Iran from developing nuclear weapons capability and to avoid potentially disastrous military conflict in the Middle East.”

In 2015 as well, Harris launched an investigation of journalist/anti-abortion activist David Daleiden, who had recently made headlines by releasing undercover videos demonstrating that Planned Parenthood routinely violated federal law by collecting and selling fetal tissue and body parts. As National Review reports: “The basis for investigating Daleiden was his appearing to have used a fake California driver’s license to hide his identity from Planned Parenthood, and the suspicion that he violated Planned Parenthood’s privacy. Those trivial allegations were enough for Harris to have eleven police officers raid Daleiden’s house, confiscate his computers and hard drives, some private documents, and all the yet-unreleased Planned Parenthood footage Daleiden had shot over two years. When Daleiden called his lawyer, Harris’s raiders tried to confiscate his phone too.”

It should be noted that Harris is no disinterested observer in matters involving Planned Parenthood and the abortion movement at large. When she ran for the Senate in 2016, for instance, her campaign website featured a petition to “protect” the “important work” of Planned Parenthood, which, along with its affiliates and employees, contributed at least $30,000 to the Harris campaign. Other pro-abortion groups and their affiliates, meanwhile, donated at least $50,000 more.

In environmental matters as well, Harris does not deviate one iota from left-wing orthodoxy. In 2016, she was one of 17 Attorneys General who joined “AGs United for Clean Power” (AGUCP), a group launched by former Vice President Al Gore. AGUCP's objective is to file criminal fraud charges against fossil-fuel companies (and their supporters) that fail to explicitly endorse the notion that greenhouse gas emissions associated with human industrial activity are chiefly responsible for potentially catastrophic “climate change.” Most notably, Harris and New York AG Eric Schneiderman together launched an investigation into ExxonMobil for allegedly funding research that questioned the validity of climate-change alarmism.

When Harris subsequently ran for the Senate, her campaign website assured voters that she would “stand up to the climate change deniers and fight to pass national climate change legislation that promotes innovation like establishing a carbon tax or creating a cap-and-trade market for carbon pollution.”

That same campaign website also vowed that Harris would seek to:

    “make the minimum wage a living wage and tie it to inflation” – notwithstanding the reams of evidence that minimum-wage hikes invariably lead to increased unemployment among young people and unskilled, low-income workers;
   
“support President Obama's “plan for making community colleges free” – with no explanation as to how a new entitlement like this could be justified in light of the fact that we are a nation already bearing the crushing burden of a $20 trillion fiscal operating debt, and at least $220 trillion in unfunded future liabilities;

    support “expanding access to Head Start [and] Early Head Start, and creating national universal pre-kindergarten” — even though large bodies of empirical evidence have exposed Head Start as an ineffective, virtually useless boondoggle;

    “make it a priority to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act,” legislation rooted in the thoroughly discredited notion that “women earn about 21 percent less” than equally qualified, equally credentialed men in the workforce;

    end “mass incarceration” by “roll[ing] back draconian sentencing laws for nonviolent drug offenses” — a proposal founded on the baseless premise that America's criminal-justice system discriminates against nonwhites;

    “end federal bans on student loans, food stamps, housing, and voting rights for ex-offenders”; and

    “stop voter suppression” measures like Voter ID laws.

When President Trump nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court four months ago, Harris said: “Judge Gorsuch has consistently valued legalisms over real lives. I won't support his nomination.” As the American Thinker aptly pointed out at that time: “'[L]egalisms' (aka what the law actually says) are the very basis of the rule of law. When [Harris] touts 'real lives,' [and] not the law, as the proper basis for SCOTUS rulings, she openly endorses a political system based on favoritism, not the rule of law.”

Kamala Harris has frequently been called one of the Democratic Party's “rising stars.” Given her steadfast commitment to open borders, her utter contempt for the rule of law, her low regard for American national security, her radical stance in favor of unrestricted taxpayer-funded abortion rights, her endorsement of environmental policies that would cripple the American economy while doing nothing to promote clean air or water, her support for massive government deficit spending as the all-purpose solution for every social and political challenge facing mankind, one can only conclude that Harris is, indeed, a rising Democrat star. With credentials like these, what else could she possibly be?

SOURCE

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