In Paul Fussell’s book on class (I think), he says that people are really worried about differentiating themselves from the class immediately below them, but largely ignorant of the customs and sometimes even existence of the classes above them. When I found SSC, and then The Motte, and stuff like TLP, I was astonished to find a tier of the internet I had had no idea even existed. The quality of discourse here is . . . usually . . . of the kind that “high brow” (by internet standards) websites THINK they are having, but when you see the best stuff here you realize that those clowns are just flattering themselves. My question is, who is rightly saying the same thing about us? Of what intellectual internet class am I ignorant now? Or does onlineness impose some kind of ceiling on things, and the real galaxy brains are at the equivalent of Davos somewhere?
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Notes -
Could you cite the studies that corroborate the things you're saying about IQ tests and HBD? I'd have a difficult time believing that you can't do better on IQ tests just because the questions on them are neither infallible nor interesting enough to even come close to doing what they mean to do. I especially don't see how the ones we have right now are good at not being gamed when one glance at any IQ test reveals a bunch of problems that become trivial once you make someone understand a specific pattern or concept. After all they're only made by people, so wouldn't they be susceptible to the issues arising from their inherent biases and ways of thinking?
How could you say that certain races of people are dumber than other races of people when there are innumerable cultural, geographical and economic differences between each race which would complicate any relevant study?
Assuming that IQ does what this forum says it does for instance, at what period did you get these races of people to take their IQ tests? Were economic differences between Jews and Natives accounted for? Wouldn't it be irrational to compare the IQ of a Native raised in poverty on a reservation to an affluent Jew from the suburbs? And even if you did somehow account for this difference and only selected Jews and Natives from identical socioeconomic backgrounds how would you take into account their cultural differences? How the average Native is raised compared to the average Jew? What Natives eat throughout their childhood compared to whatever Jewish children eat? I'm sure that there's a lot more things that I haven't thought of that would make this entire thing far fetched.
Also, wouldn't saying this also present an evolutionary inconsistency? While I see how differences in geography and climate could select for traits like increased height or lighter pigmentation in certain races compared to others, what evolutionary advantage would present itself in the relative diminishing of cognition in a race? I'd assume that intelligence is some consistently increasing factor across the evolutionary context in every race driven by technological advancements, with few exceptions and outliers.
Lastly, don't you think that it's futile to discuss things like this to such an extent because you can't really do anything with what you learn? I hardly ever see interesting people think about things like whether or not their IQ exceeds 130 or how intelligent their race is. In my experience these people almost always focus only on doing whatever they like to do, and they wouldn't let something like a standardized test determine the probability of their success in a field they truly care about. If you would let a piece of paper tell you you're not good enough to become an engineer - would you ever have done anything interesting in the first place?
It is somewhat difficult, yes! But humanity has climbed steeper cliffs than that. Dropping down to intuition why are there so many jewish Nobel Prize winners in math, physics? If it was really purely cultural, that means we're leaving hundreds of billions of dollars and staggering human achievement off the table by not spreading said culture. Which we are in plenty of other ways, we can't be perfect. but that seems too obvious and easy. (and there aren't that many jewish convert or adoptee winners). And - consider genetic drift, the founder effect, or the ubiquitous physical differences between population groups (no, they aren't fixed races) - skin color, hair, facial shape, height, eyes are obvious, but little things too - native americans have less facial hair, there's earwax, eyes, disease susceptibility, all sorts of subtle differences in body shape, different baseline blood levels, etc. Why wouldn't the pressures that produced those lead to intelligence differences too? Intelligence is so critical for human survival, it's depended on at all levels of human life, its effects on survival and reproduction are innumerable. What if - because it's selected so heavily, there isn't any room for "noise", and all human populations are so heavily pushed to be intelligent they stay at the same level, even while reproductively isolated? Well, do we see that in any other trait? In separate populations of wild species, one sees divergence and difference, even along axes with selection pressure in the same direction. This is the most stark among separate species, where pressures to be fast, get nutritious, not be eaten pushes them into entirely different niches - that isn't at all true of humans, but the same principle works.
But intelligence causes affluence too, richer people tend to have higher IQs than same-race middle class people, and you need intelligence to be a FAANG coder, and a bit less but still quite a bit to be a top lawyer or even actor. If that sounds too weasely the gap doesn't go away when we compare suburban african-americans or natives and suburban jews.
... and why is that, exactly?
I won't let that goddamn cancer diagnosis stop me from living my life. It's just a piece of paper!!!! You're right that IQ isn't an ultimate measure of intelligence, and it's much less interesting than "how intelligent and competent" someone is. But, as in the nobel example - or every single other area of human accomplishment - the same pattern persists. Why are there so many great jewish çomposers, conductors, musicians? Why are there so many of them in hollywood - even if they were evil subverters, that doesn't magically make them better at marketing or acting? Why are SA and Yud jewish?
Evolution doesn't merely proceed by advantages. It's not advantageous to have sickle-cell anemia, but it is to avoid malaria, so ... And it sure was advantageous to have light skin in europe, but tens of thousands of years passed between humans settling there and its development. And said development is contingent on random mutations, populations moving, and many other things - there's no reason lighter skin would develop at the same time or rate in separate populations. Same for intelligence!
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Apologies for the delayed response, I'm not sure why but I'm not getting notifications on your posts, and I swear I've rechecked this thread since the post date on this so not sure what's going on there. Although having read your responses to others doesn't seem to bode well for a discussion.
Anyways I'm a glutton for pain so troll or not lets roll in the mud, I enjoy it.
I'm not totally sure what you mean by this. IQ distribution gaps between the races are not scientifically controversial. Pretty much any study on it finds around one standard deviation between white and black American IQ. Here's one but feel free do a basic google search
I'm not really sure what interesting has to do with anything. Rulers are quite bland objects but are able to measure length very accurately. As for their accuracy I think the measure you're interested in is the test-retest reliability which checks how well a test resists things like training or other factors. IQ tests do quite well on this. Although this is not of the utmost importance when it comes to the HBD angle because much like BMI being a measure of population not really being meaningfully thrown off by bodybuilders to get a population obesity the vast majority of these cross race studies are not giving people multiple tests to study on and very few people are studying recreationally for IQ tests.
I'm afraid I'll need you to be more specific. Shape rotation and the like is still cognitively taxing to people irrespective of any "trick", and even if it were a well designed tests either teaches the test taker the "trick" or is designed in such a way to avoid this kind of thing.
It's a rigorously studied field that is very concerned with making sure their metrics align with outcome data. This is a very general type of criticism, I'd be happy to address something more specific but I'm just not really sure how recognizing patterns in repeating numbers is supposed to be influenced by biases.
I very specifically did not say this. We are talking about population scale averages.
The tests simply don't include culturally relevant data.
Continuously since the 50s iirc.
That's a bit of a strange question, part of how IQ test are anchored to the real world is giving them to similarly situated people and seeing how well it predicts things we care about like educational attainment. Thus the validity of the measure does do things like attempt to hold economic birth status constant, so comparing all the poor natives given the same test and seeing how the scores predict how they do versus eachother. The test is very predictive in this way with the higher scores being correlated with reduced all cause mortality, twitch reflexes, lifetime income, educational attainment, ect. So in the design of the tests these things are held constant. And the effects remain when these things are not held constant within group, a high IQ but poor native compensates for the advantage of a lower IQ but richer native. But as the tests are obviously correlated with economic differences it is kind of nonsensical to account for it when comparing groups, the raw number is what you actually want.
There is positive pressure for intelligence for sure and studies have shown IQ is rising generation by generation(referred to as the Flynn effect). Speculation into why this is happening is somewhat out of scope here but worth investigating in its own right. As for whether it's somehow inconsistent evolutionarily it isn't for the same reason we haven't also evolved giant muscles and other minor adaptions that seem useful, evolution just isn't that fast and intelligence trades off against things like calorie consumption and birth canal size so there is at least some theoretical downward pressure.
I can only speak for myself although I think I'm not alone in being generally not that interested in HBD in itself so much as in how it can be used to answer certain questions that without HBD tend to flare out into the conspiracy realm. When asked why Jews are so overrepresented in highly competitive institutions of power instead of appealing to Jewish conspiracy I can note that a small advantage in the center of a normal distribution can yield disproportionately large amounts on the wings. Likewise I don't need to reach for systemic racism to explain why costly educational interventions meant to close the black-white educational attainment gap have failed with every attempt.
I was convinced that I had aphantasia in the past, so I didn't even bother to try actually "shape rotating" on these sorts of tasks; I tried to somehow determine "logically" if shape could be rotated some way around.
Now I sorta can do it by visualizing*, but I'm not sure if performance is any better. Definitely cognitively taxing. I hate these tests.
* there's still no actual qualia, I think. But I could will myself to imagine e.g. "an apple", and then examine details. Ofc they're probably generated the moment I look for them, and certainly unstable. Also works for moving visuals - e.g. I could 'see' gameplay of a game I played for hundreds of hours (years ago).
On one LSD trip, I couldn't really think verbally at some point. Possibly that's when I learned this; I'm not sure through.
But I almost never think like this spontaneously. I wonder if it's useful and/or trainable.
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again incredibly minor nitpick: IQ is rank-ordered to be normal, and e.g. if multiplicative instead of additive effects are important at the tails IQ might be fatter. So absent evidence that it's normal at the tails, assuming that subpopulations have normally distributed IQ isn't exactly justified. iirc a study measured it somehow and found it was fatter than normal but cant find it
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For introduction into HBDIQ science, this could be useful starter.
In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths About Human Intelligence.
Author's blog here
Book summarizing the scientific evidence, showing how ironclad it is and debunking the usual anti HBDIQ talking points.
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Not who you are asking but I will provide a response to your last paragraph. And all your other concerns will probably be responded to by others anyways because the validity of IQ is an extremely popular opinion here on the Motte. Whilst blankslatism is extremely unpopular. I am surprised you posted here for so long without noticing as much.
No. Because.
If we want to make people smarter. We would need a working definition of smartness and a solid way to measure it to know if our interventions are working. This absolutely cannot be ignored. We would also need to know the mechanisms behind it let that be environmental, genetic or whatever to actually address the problem. In short, we can't just look away from it.
You can do things with what you learn. If what you learn is true, then you have a better predictive model of the world than someone who thinks otherwise. The purpose of discussing things is not only to improve something but to understand it as well. You can't understand something and its nth-order effects by.. ignoring it. Just knowing that IQ is group stratified has made my personal model of the World orders of magnitude better are being able to predict things.
So what? "Interesting people" is a very subjective term and it's best kept out of supposedly objective discussions.
That's literally what a probability is for. Some things are likely, some things are not.
If you are 5'7" tall. You might dream of playing in the NBA but it wouldn't be a lie to tell you that you are overwhelmingly not likely to achieve that dream and that your time and effort is better spent elsewhere.
Why shouldn't we apply the same level of sober pragmatism to matters of intellectual interest? It is exceedingly unlikely that someone with an 85 IQ can obtain a Ph.D. in Physics. If someone with 85 IQ tells me about his theoretical physics dreams, I would be feeding into his delusions if I told him anything other than it's unlikely.
Yes, it sucks for them. It sucks for everyone. But the truth sometimes sucks.
Thousands of people do this every day. As they get rejected from their programs of choice or get an F grade in calculus. They get told they are not good enough and that's the end of it. 50% of engineering students drop out.
The truth is worth whatever it is worth regardless of how much it hurts to accept it. The fact that it is hard to accept it isn't a very good reason to not seek it out.
Why not respond to the whole thing? Surely if you are adamant that what you say is true, shouldn't you be able to explain these things with your own independent thinking rather than through relying on the surrounding hive mind? And if it is a popular sentiment, shouldn't it be easy for you to articulate the validity of IQ or HBD such that anyone could understand it, given you've talked about these things enough times already?
When I asked you about the futility of discussing things like IQ I meant you and the forum specifically rather than society as a whole, since you seem to have put a lot of thought into something that seemingly has no direct effect on you. But I will still read what you wrote because I truly am interested in why you think IQ is so important.
I think that while your heart is in the right place, you're effectively making up a problem that doesn't exist. We already have a working definition of smartness - if your work is great, everyone sooner or later will agree that you're smart. Nobody is frantically searching for a way to quantify smartness or even define it because it is and always has been self-evident. There's probably environmental factors that predispose people for even greater smartness but I doubt they would diverge much from the very same recommendations that have persisted since the very beginning of recorded history: ample exercise, excellent nutrition, peer bonding and carefully considered, intellectually stimulating leisure. Perhaps you can try desperately to have children with someone who has also demonstrated their abnormal intelligence, but I think that this would be a very silly and likely vain effort.
Could you elaborate on this? And if you don't mind me asking, how has your personal model of the world been made better by your knowledge of IQ and specifically HBD?
I was being a little disingenuous here since I really meant to put successful people. I haven't met any successful people who think about IQ or are aware of something like HBD. While I'll concede that this was inappropriate, wouldn't you agree that subjectivity is important when discussing this? I think that you're missing the bigger picture when you refrain from discussing the sentimental aspects of this or how it effects people on an individual basis rather than through what you consider an objective perspective.
Evidently some things are unlikely. What I meant to say is that if you're willing to let the initial unlikelihood of your success deter you from obtaining success, you are probably never going to do anything worthwhile anyways because you lack the courage to put in the work and take risks.
If Muggsy Bogues took what you're saying to heart he would've never joined the NBA to become a 5'3" champion because he would've considered his stature a disability. And if someone with an IQ of 85 told me about his theoretical physics dreams I would tell him he's a liar - if he really liked it that much then he would have a higher IQ, just because he would have spent his childhood doing complicated arithmetic to work towards his vision (early specialization) and his youthful mind would've risen to meet the occasion. But what good would it do either of us if I put him down without knowing his potential? If he really likes what he does more than everyone else, why shouldn't he succeed? Keeping this in mind, I'd instead wish him good luck on his endeavors and I'd pray for his imminent success.
Even if the odds of me succeeding were near impossible I would still do what I do and die trying. I can't possibly be bogged down by the esoteric, probabilistic nonsense that burdens people day in and day out - the only direction I can possibly go in is up. So I don't mean to be rude, but I think that what you call sober pragmatism is really just your attempt to rationalize your own feelings.
I very much want what you say about IQ and HBD to be true. I want to believe that I'm special because of a test, and I want to believe that I'm smarter than other people because of my race. These fantasies sound fun to entertain, but I'm not going to go believing something unless I'm shown proof.
writing coherent responses is somewhat difficult and takes some amount of time. There are enough politics forums in existence I could spend 16 hours a day researching and writing posts on various topics. Even that understates it, I could spend 16 hours a day writing just about race and IQ across dozens of different internet forums and still not be able to respond to everyone interested. One might, ofc, want to do other things in life in addition to discussing race and Iq. If your last paragraph warrants 5 paragraphs in response, each other paragraph would ... and then you'd respond with 5 paragraphs each, and it blows up.
why do physics and math professors consistently score 140+ on iq tests?
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Sure. But I'm not really one to keep papers or sources on hand. I arrived at my conclusions over years of reading various books, articles and posts and updating my conclusion over and over again until they reached a settling point.
I suggest you read the Wikipedia page on IQ to get a rough understanding of what it is exactly.
Else this article by Scott is a good primer. Its an introduction to just how useful IQ is as a metric.
Because it's a metric that can predict a lot of things. Such as social mobility, education attainment, wealth, crime rate, etc. And it predicts those things for groups and individuals.
IQ score is a better predictor of Job performance than Education level, College grades, and Interview scores by a mile. It's not even close.
IQ is correlated with so many things consistently in the same direction that the summed correlation is extremely strong. This is the telltale sign of a signal in the noise.
Of course, it exists.
We don't know how to make people smarter. We really don't. Millions of dollars were spent on improving educational outcomes for certain groups to no avail. Refer to Arthur Jensens most infamous paper.
Everything you suggested helps one reach their natural limit, they do little to go past that limit.
Sure.
IQ has a r of 0.82 with National GDP/capita. That information is immensely useful for me. I can spot nations that are doing better or worse than their expected outcome and analyze further better than anyone who isn't aware of this, because.. I know where to look!
Seriously, I challenge you to find me something that explains this much variance that isn't an economic metric or just another proxy for IQ.
I don't care at all. The Motte is a place for adults to discuss adult things. And I will speak the truth even if it really really hurts because that's just my value system. I value the truth more than not offending people with it.
Exceptions don't disprove the rule.
That's on you, has nothing to do with the truth value of IQ as a metric. I reiterate, It's not a value judgment or a prescription, its a description.
Profound misunderstanding of the central HBD claim.
Group differences give you little information on the individual. Imagine you have two normal distributions
Na(100,15)andNb(85,15). Na refers to the White IQ probability distribution, Nb refers to the black. There will be a lot of black people who score higher on an IQ test than a lot of white people and vice versa. BUT on average, white people score higher.Also the fact that there is a race based IQ score gap is... not controvertial. The reason for that gap and what to do about it is. Just look it up.
I mean I am interested in how you think IQ measures smartness but not interested enough to do so much reading. As I'm sure you know I find reading distasteful, and I was considered illiterate until not long ago. But even after taking a glance at these links none of them really say anything about how IQ measures smartness, intelligence or whatever you'd like to call it. In fact, none of them refute what I said about IQ really only making sure that students think a particular way suited to the needs of an institution.
I looked at the first article you provided and I really never knew about this before. I definitely see how IQ would be important when you want to measure the things Kaufman discusses - but I still fail to see how IQ would be important to an actual person going about his day. I also fail to see how this refutes what I said about IQ tests determine a manner of thought rather than the supposed smartness of an individual. Kaufman himself states that IQ should be considered a summary score that emerges from a host of related cognitive mechanisms. It seems more appropriate as an analytical tool for psychologists like Kaufman for gauging the effectiveness of public policy or the downstream effects of economic changes. On the other hand, the latter two links you provided were inaccessible and shoddy at best. The first of the two was locked behind a paywall, and the second led to a Reddit comment which then led to several unavailable research papers and an obscure blog post.
You only took the first part of what I said and went on a tangent. I said that we already know what smartness is, not that the problem of not knowing how to increase this abstract smartness doesn't exist. Even if you're making an actual point this is still off the mark - assuming you're talking about the west, the efficacy of the educational system isn't really dictated by whether or not we know how to make people smarter.
What do you mean by natural limit? Theoretically, there's no upper limit to an IQ score.
This is pretty interesting, but it's still not very worthwhile or remarkable. I don't really see this being used anywhere else, and it just seems like you're trying to rationalize spending years reading into IQ.
I commend your maturity and honesty. But I think that your evident lack of real world experience is preventing you from seeing that even if IQ is monumentally important, whatever it insinuates in the eyes of most students under any practical application would do far greater harm than good.
Clearly, but I never said that they didn't. Note that what I originally said was that phenomenal people wouldn't let something like a standardized test determine the probability of their success in a field they truly care about. I'm only criticizing your own personal value system through which you argued for the practical use of IQ tests in a way that would have share the sober pragmatism of determining the likelihood of NBA eligibility based on height.
What did I misunderstand so profoundly, assuming IQ tests do what you say they do? If this is not what you're saying, then what do you mean to say? It's fine to bring these normal distributions up but you're disregarding the nuanced cultural, economic and historical differences between each race that would complicate these findings (see previous responses), and by failing to take these things into account you're painting an entirely different picture.
The idea behind it is simple. When you track various different abilities such as mathematical test scores, language abilities, musical abilities, memory recall under stress, and many more. All those results tend to correlate. Meaning people who are good at one test are also likely to be good at another test. Keeping in mind care is taken to make sure people can't learn or study for these tests, they are trying to test of inherent ability.
This suggests the existence of there being some kind of latent variable/factor that is a feature of all the above functions. This latent factor is called the 'g factor'. Or the general intelligence factor. Which is the working definition of "intelligence" or more colloquially "smartness" according to most psychologists and especially psychometricians.
You will need to understand factor analysis for the "light bulb moment". IQ tests are the best metric we have as trying to proxy the g factor. Because of their strong 'statistical reliability' (Explanation on Wikipedia/IQ).
Those links assume that you know that IQ is tracking the g factor. So look at them in retrospect now.
Here are the mechanisms.
IQ tracks g.
g cannot be increased and is hereditary (probably genetic).
g correlates with many success metrics.
I can't do the thinking for you. But if you spend some time reflecting on those 3 facts. It will be evident why IQ is so useful as a metric.
Not at all. Psychometricians are well aware of those weak points and take great care to account for those. The strongest studies showing IQ's heredity (studies that track identical twins across their lifetimes) show that IQ is strongly hereditary.
These discrepancies also hold in different regions, different times, and different places. There really isn't any other explanation but to accept the signal that some groups of people score differently.
This doesn't make very much sense. Students who spend all their time making songs and poetry aren't going to do well on math tests. Conversely, students who spend all their time doing arithmetic aren't going to make very good songs. And a correlation between these things isn't necessarily enough to demonstrate the presence of inherent ability - more contextualization is needed, otherwise you're just disseminating bad science. When you make sweeping conjectures you need to cite reputable studies and you need to explain yourself.
Psychometry is a pseudoscience. For a forum that supposedly intends to move past shady thinking this is a surprisingly shady thing to bring up. No respectable academic even remotely corroborates the things you've mentioned, and you've veered off from showing that IQ measures intelligence into discussing the existence of an elusive G factor. You've also refrained from correcting my profound misunderstanding of HBD or even further discussing HBD in its entirety, while also refraining from responding to any of the straightforward questions I had about IQ from prior responses.
You need to prove the things you're saying with studies and explanations. When you make these far fetched claims you can't simply tell the people you're trying to convince to do the thinking themselves, otherwise you ironically come off as someone incapable of thinking for themselves. People who really understand what they do are usually really good at explaining what it is they do to an uninformed audience. So far you've provided studies and explanations likely propagated by this forum and other similar echo chambers comprised of people who think similarly - nothing you've said yet tells me that you've arrived at these conclusions on your own volition or free thought.
Again, psychometry isn't taken seriously by academia and is regarded as a pseudoscience - I implore you to cite and explain the studies that led you to the conclusions you're making about heritability and the G factor. Also, you should provide additional context for the twin studies you bring up. Did the researchers assume that the twins continuously lived in the same environment? Did they ensure that the twins were genetically identical? These factors are among the things that make twin studies difficult to get right, and they're also why twin studies are no longer taken seriously as a means of analyzing heritability.
The ideas you discuss are not real things discussed in either the genomics or psychiatric community, but the manner in which you articulate them feigns professional authority and understanding to a sufficient enough extent that any uninformed person perusing through this discussion would believe what you're saying and become indoctrinated with the perspectives propagated by the echo chamber. What you said about this forum being a branch off of HBD conjecture on another adjacent forum makes sense in hindsight - the people here have already decided that they believe in what you're talking about, and they're just finding things to reaffirm what they think. The relative mediocrity of this discourse is ironic given it's taking place under a post that remarks on how intellectually stimulating this forum is compared to the rest of the internet and its communities of unenlightened denizens.
You are not going to waste my time by ignoring everything I said, then claim you were illiterate months ago and refuse to read anything I provide, then ask for "reputable studies" in the next breath. Why should I provide them to you if you self-professed won't read them? Then claim I don't have free thought?
And then you go on to bash the supposed good faith and intelligence of the very forum that isn't banning an obvious troll like you and is attempting to answer your questions in good faith even though you are not making that job easy for anyone?
I'm done here.
You never did before I claimed this - you only started citing psychometry as a legitimate source in your prior response. Anything real you did provide didn't say IQ measured smartness, and you neither proved nor explained what you mean when you say HBD.
I don't know why you're being so angry with me, I really am interested in what you think. I don't know what I can do to show you I'm not trolling. Does asking questions warrant such a combative response?
On a similar note though I found that people with a high IQ tend to be better at regulating their emotions.
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You kind of give the impression that you're playing at ignorance, but to address the "but IQ test must be easily learnable", I'll point you towards various standardized tests (SATs, GREs, MCAT, LSAT). They are incredibly important for getting into various schools, and people fight very hard to get to those schools. While training courses exist, they generally don't do much, and if it were as easy as you seem to think, everyone would have 100% anyway.
Seriously, have you ever taken a standardized test? Did you ace it? If not, do you think it's only because you couldn't be bothered?
These are not IQ tests. Note that I said like standardized tests. Although irrelevant to the discussion, the tests you specifically mention are things you need to study for. The top performers on these tests are people from supportive family structures who apply themselves rigorously and consistently.
They're correlated, this doesn't necessarily mean they're the same thing. These tests do not and have never claimed to measure IQ. Many of the questions on these tests require specific knowledge, analytical skills and ways of thinking that can be obtained from a textbook.
What you're saying is not corroborated by anything and is merely anecdotal. It's actually quite the opposite, as differences in standardized test scores across different rungs on the socioeconomic ladder have always been attributed to the accessibility of quality test material and the tremendous opportunity cost of studying, particularly in the US. Assessments like the SAT are made to require studying some amount of trivia, and students from poor neighborhoods just aren't going to have the time, resources or support structure to put into this. Most of these students aren't even going to be thinking about school in the first place because of cultural issues. I'm glad that you're the exception, but there are lot of people that grew up like you did who were not as fortunate.
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