I watched 8 Mile the other day. Pretty good. Eminem ("Jimmy Smith Jr.") has some great raps and disses. He is brilliant, though I have to say I wasn't an early fan and thought he might be a white flash in the rap pan. You know that Eminem though failed 9th grade three times? And how about many of the other black rappers out there? Aside from Will Smith (who turned down a scholarship from MIT and loves math), how many of them would score very high on IQ tests? And yet try as I might, I can't imagine throwing down raps like these guys though I suspect that they'd probably test duller than I. This brings up an interesting point: g isn't everything, and the distribution of IQ in certain groups (blacks) can mislead you into believing they're less competent and eloquent than they are in everyday situations. The problem is comparing tangerines to oranges, because sometimes it's more important to compare someone to their group mean rather than the general population. A black kid with an IQ of 70 is borderline mentally retarded according to the numbers, but he's only in the bottom 15% or so of his racial group, and according to Jensen such children are socially adept. On the other hand, a Jewish child with an IQ of 70 is in the bottom 1-3% of their population, and it would almost certainly indicate a whole suite of social and developmental problems. The point is, just because someone can't figure out a differential equation and compare analogies with ease on the SAT doesn't mean they lack basic human capacities for creativity. Eminem and his ilk show that. Their brain makes connections and their learned skills hone their native abilities to throw down harsh disses. On the other hand, don't hope that cheating off someone like this to write a college paper will help you out.... Update: The short of it is this-for years we've been reading about the high number of African-American children in special education. Many of these kids are in the 60-70 IQ range, sub-normal. But it is often quite clear that they don't belong socially in the same room with many who are suffering from chronic pathologies. If you take a sample of white or Asian kids in the 60-70 IQ range and put them in the room, I strongly suspect there will be many anti-social dribblers and droolers. On the other hand, you won't find this with black kids, because 60-70 is frankly closer to the normal IQ of this group so it is less an indicator for greater psychopathologies. I don't believe that the government should take race into account when it doesn't need to (for instance I think a case for racial profiling can be made), and in this case, the easiest course is for school officials to make sure that kids who are socially normal but academically impaired get put in a separate pool than those that are both socially and academically impaired. Our educational system and its elite is geared toward producing "college educated" people, especially those grounded in the logical-abstraction skills measured by g loaded IQ tests (or on-the-fly bullshitting skills nurtured by English profs). This is an illustration of the axiom of equality, for they expect all groups to be able to perform at the same level. The presence of many socially normal children of sub-normal intelligence in certain groups is a clue that g is not equally distributed, and this to me is a clue as to the reason that normally progressive educators throw so many black children into special education-they don't want to admit that there are any differences between blacks and whites in their aptitude on g loaded tests and their concomitant prospects as college graduates. Tutoring and coaching children with sub-normal IQs to perform at a higher level on these tests is probably futile (depending on its g loading), and the cost would be prohibitive in comparison to piling on the poorly paid special ed teacher. Maybe I should be more straightforward as to what I'm getting at....