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Apropos of Race-IQ Twitter complaining I didn't spell out its argument for why black people are intrinsically less likely than whites or Asians to be mathematicians, allow me to again not give them a platform. Instead...
..here's the full quote from Fields Medalist @wtgowers I partial-quoted in this story, nytimes.com/2019/02/20/rea…, which followed my first one, on the black mathematician Edray Goins and the under-appreciated toll of anti-black racism among PhD faculty at elite universities.
"People tend to think of mathematics as some very mysterious thing that is done by people with special brains. But a large part of what makes mathematicians' brains special is the capacity to become obsessed with a maths problem." And here's one from Fields Medalist Terence Tao:
"[A] reasonable amount of intelligence is certainly a necessary (though not sufficient) condition to be a reasonable mathematician. But an exceptional amount of intelligence has almost no bearing on whether one is an exceptional mathematician." (terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/…)
Maxime Bocher, author of Bocher's theorem, Harvard prof, prez of @amermathsoc (in 1909): "Just as one cannot become a painter without a certain amount of skill, so one cannot become a mathematician without the power to reason accurately up to a certain point... MORE
"...Yet these qualities, fundamental though they are, do not make a painter or mathematician worthy of the name, nor indeed are they the most important factors in the case. MORE
"Other qualities of a far more subtle sort, chief among which in both cases is imagination, go to the making of a good artist or of a good mathematician." (www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Quotations/Boc…).
Do you have to be smart to be a research mathematician? Sure. Does the fact that black Americans score lower on IQ tests, on average, let other Americans off the hook for the extreme racial imbalance in research math? Uh, no. Because, like I DID spell out in my story, there is...
1) no genetic evidence to suggest the average IQ gap between racial groups in America reflects genetic differences caused by natural selection acting differently on human populations in different parts of the world over millennia (their argument)
....as opposed to environmental/cultural/political forces like centuries of legally-enforced racism that have resulted in vast racial disparities in education, income and wealth.
2) No reason to think that even if the IQ gap is in fact partly genetic, it would not also be affected by culture/environment. (The average genetic contribution to various human behavioral traits IS likely different across geographic ancestry groups, population geneticists say...
...there's just no evidence how different or in which directions for IQ in particular, not to mention cognition more broadly. And, the geneticists say, untangling it is going to be exceedingly hard).
3) Most pertinent to this specific flavor of Race-IQ Twitter's interest in the right-tails of IQ curves, to which they attribute the explanation for much of social inequality: No evidence super-high I.Q. is the key to math ability, per quotes above and others (h/t @MathPrinceps)
4) A ton of evidence for structures/behaviors that perpetuate race inequality specifically in math, like a) lack of early-childhood math literacy support b) disparity in quality of k-12 public schools c) bias in 'gifted' program selection d) access to extra-curricular math
e) faculty hiring criteria that happen to exclude most black candidates f) what one black mathematician described to me as "the racism of educated people.'' And ICYMI here's my story on that topic. nytimes.com/2019/02/18/us/…
Relevant addendum: nytimes.com/2019/02/21/us/… by @AsteadWesley
