Thursday, October 25, 2007

Status Que?

When Greg leaves comments on my last post cryptically hinting that I should perhaps update my blog, I figure it's time. The bad part about going two months without updating is that I have two months worth of updating. So you're getting a cumulative update rather than an event-by-event update.

So, the months. I finally finished my cryptic crossword and sent it in to he who wears short Shortz last week. It's not without its flaws, but I think there are some fun and creative clues in there. I'm battling serious odds—he may not even take unassigned cryptics—but until I hear back, I can live safely in that quantum superposition of "accepted" and "not accepted." And if the function collapses to "not accepted," you, my dear reader, can look forward to trying the puzzle...on this very blog! Unless I decide to submit it elsewhere. Gee, I hope I get some personal comments from the man himself. That would be an honor, indeed.

Our apartment has settled, and it is good. Chayes has beautified her room—it's great to be spending some quality time with her—Betsey has moved into Megan's old room and is fitting in beautifully, and Greg's the same sunny delight as ever. Greg and I saw a super-exclusive run-through of Cry Baby last weekend (yay, thanks, Mark!) This particular performance was not "up for review," so I will only review it with the most inscrutable puzzle I can think of: _T W_S _W_S_M_. G_ S__ _T WH_N _T'S _N T_WN.

Work's been crazy as ever. There's been lots of talk about the, er, inappropriate comments made by a certain, unnamed James Watson. If you haven't already read the massive press coverage, you can get the latest at the links I put in the first half of the sentence. The whole to-do prompted me not only to fashion a harness for my jaw to wear whenever reading Watson's comments on black people, women, fat people, gay people or, oh yeah, Rosalind Franklin, but also to do some reading on race and IQ.

It's apparently well-established [most of the following assertions come from that linked report] that the average IQ of black people in America is 15 points lower than the average IQ of white people in America. There are two major questions that come out of this: What are the reasons for this difference? and What the heck does IQ mean anyway? Neither one of these has yet been answered especially thoroughly. While IQ is highly heritable, this doesn't mean that the IQ variations between races is largely genetic. There are plenty of other factors, many unknown, that go into intelligence, and it seems likely that these largely account for differences that we see. Yes, racists, it's conceivable they don't. Someone, sometime will do solid research and we'll have a better idea. The other question, about what IQ actually measures, is just as hazy. It's definitely a solid predictor of academic achievement. In this sense, the test isn't biased toward white people...it's an equal predictor for black people and white people. As the APA report points out, the test is biased against black people in the plain sense that they, on average, do worse. You might say, well, that's not really bias if it still predicts the same stuff, but hey, IQ tests are designed so both sexes necessarily have the same average. It's explicitly not biased toward men or women; I don't know if it's an equal predictor for both sexes, though. This paragraph's getting long, so let me sum up my point: IQ tests are a good but imperfect predictor of academic achievement. There's no great reason to think they measure some ineffable quality of "intelligence." That concept isn't well-defined, anyway. There would probably be some correlation between IQ score and anything measuring some kind of intelligence—probably a fairly strong correlation—but who knows how strong or how consistent between tests? I don't. What I'm saying is we don't know all that much about this topic. And I think people without an agenda should research it, mostly because I'm a curious person and it's an interesting topic. So there.

Oh, and the UU apps are coming along swimmingly. Hopefully those will be out the door in the next couple of weeks. I'm actually feeling very good about this decision. I'm reading One U, a book about UU school, and it's scaring me, but it's also getting me very psyched for the kind of thinking I'd be doing.

All right, friends. I have an episode of Dirty Sexy Money to watch. Emily points out the show's egregiously absent commas. Normally, I would be unforgiving, but somehow Donald Sutherland and Peter Krause have won me over.