> ...victims succumbed to an insatiable exhaustion and an impenetrable haziness of the mind that some called stupidity. Adults neglected their fields and children grew pale and listless. Victims developed grossly distended bellies and “angel wings”—emaciated shoulder blades accentuated by hunching. All gazed out dully from sunken sockets with a telltale “fish-eye” stare.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-so...
> In 1899, American zoologist Charles Wardell Stiles identified progressive pernicious anemia seen in the southern United States as being caused by the hookworm A. duodenale. Testing in the 1900s revealed very heavy infestations in school-age children.
> On October 26, 1909 the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease was organized as a result of a gift of US$1 million from John D. Rockefeller, Sr. The five-year program was a remarkable success and a great contribution to the United States' public health, instilling public education, medication, field work and modern government health departments in eleven southern states.[45] The hookworm exhibit was a prominent part of the 1910 Mississippi state fair.
> The commission found that an average of 40% of school-aged children were infected with hookworm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hookworm_infection#Eradication...
It's worth noting that this is one of the great public health interventions of American history, and that the intervention consisted entirely of getting people to wear shoes.
> Pellagra was first reported in 1902 in the United States, and has "caused more deaths than any other nutrition-related disease in American history", reaching epidemic proportions in the American South during the early 1900s.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-low...
https://edsource.org/2021/university-of-california-sticks-wi...
Perhaps lead levels contribute only a small amount. But then also, micro-aggressions have a tiny affect. Testing bias might also be very small. Maybe less income also leads to being less likely to get glasses when you need them. Perhaps food deserts in minority communities leads to poor nutrition and poorer outcomes, but only a negligible amount. Then there are poorer, urban neighborhoods that might be loud at night causing children to not get quite enough sleep.
And sure, you could blame a lot of this just on poverty in general, but then of course, you have to acknowledge our racist history that lead to so much less wealth in minority families.
It goes on and on and pretty soon you have death by a thousand cuts and a phenomenon that is far too complex to explain in anything less than an entire encyclopedia so you sum it up with "systemic racism".
Note that tiny fractional differences in the median outcome gap will turn into big differences at the left- and right-wards tails of the distribution. In practice, those are the differences that everyone will ask about. Why are so many X's (relative to Y's) living in socially marginalized settings, resorting to crime, ending up in the justice system? Why are there so very few X's in very high-skill, high-effort occupations like computer programming and other hard-STEM fields? The X's and Y's will vary by time and place, of course. And societal oppression of various sorts is always playing a role in these dynamics, if only as an amplifying feedback. But either way, these are questions about uncommon, tail outcomes not average or median ones!
That's true, but the gap is already huge at the median. As a rough approximation, the distribution of outcomes has same variance, but mean is shifted left by 1 sigma.
Even as a financially secure white tenant, I have found my landlords to be extremely hesitant to initiate any testing that might legally obligate them to renovate (or at least cover/shield) sources of lead. And in most municipalities, your landlord is only obligated to follow up on lead concerns if they have personal knowledge of lead paint usage on the property; they're not obligated to go through the property's history and refute the possibility of lead.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_abatement_in_the_United_S...
I guess what I'm trying to say is that lead poisoning is a symptom of a bigger issue. It's perfectly fine (and encouraged) to treat the symptoms, but I feel like the comment was replying to was acting like we shouldn't attribute things like this to systemic oppression.
Before the advent of iodized salt, the prevalence of goiter in certain cities in Michigan was as high as 60%. This also led to various mental deficiencies in people in those regions. It turns out this was a direct consequence of the soil in the Midwest being naturally deficient in iodine, leading to drinking water not naturally supplementing the diet of those who lived there. Iodized salt, introduced in the 1920s, almost completely eradicated goiter in the developing world.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3509517/#:~:tex....
Aren't those same factors going to show up in racial differences?
stress in particular has a measurable impact on cognition, behavior, and motor development. even prenatal maternal stress.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w18422
parental leave, cash and food support, and other assistance during pregnancy and childhood, are probably one of the easiest policy wins towards improving outcomes for a huge segment of the population. better schools with smaller class sizes and individualized support for each student would be the next step.
You could be on to something here. I've seen many other factors like education and wealth being adjusted for but not this. I wonder if anyone has attempted to quantify the damage this causes.
Also even if a study found parameters like that, it would never be published as the scientists career would absolutely be ruined.
Looking at it now, it seems he WAS actually arguing FOR censoring stories of the bad behavior of the gods AND FOR censoring Homer's Odyssey.
Sigh.
Our state is built on the narratives of democracy and equality thus while those factors have ability to undermine the narrative (as we've seen in not so distant history) we have to censor them and do the research behind closed doors, otherwise we risk more damage than any possible benefit.
Pretty verboten topic though and kind of unpalatable to think about, even if you don't particularly care about these sorts of demographic shifts.
Personally I like that the whole idea of "race" might become increasingly indeterminate and vague in liberal societies.
The phenomenon is real but for fully understandable reasons not much is published about it.
mRNA can change gene expression locally for limited time, enough to train your immune sysem but not for permanent changes. CRISPR can make permanent changes but but for now only to few cells in vitro, not to whole organism. Even the Chineese CRISPR modified twins are mosaics of modified and unmodofied.
Also see this HN comment from a day ago on how much a black person had to fear even in 1980:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30061511
An excelelnt book regarding these is 'Simple Justice by Richard Kluger
https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Justice-Education-Americas-Str...
Another book focusing on computing is 'Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing by Jane Margolis
https://www.amazon.com/Stuck-Shallow-End-Education-Computing...
There is a wealth of info regarding these things, see redlining for example:
Actually there has been, we're just not allowed to apply the components of the explanation to this context, so we continue on a fruitless search in every other direction, spending money, contorting society, and increasingly tearing down achievers in a misguided attempt to bring up the underperformers.
We know of hundreds of genes which are strongly correlated with IQ and directly influence behavior, and we know how those genes are distributed among various demographics. The science itself is not controversial or uncertain. But the logical conclusions are social and career suicide.
What about geographically isolated interbreeding with other homonids? Those genes are also unevenly distributed; why would these genes not influence cognition?
One striking example is the so called warrior gene, which completely alters the metabolism of monoamines, like dopamine and serotonin, which have direct influences over reward seeking, mood, and behavior. This mutation is nearly absent in many populations. There are plenty of other such unevenly distributed variations.
Note that this does not imply that all people from group X are Y. But it does neatly explain, at least in part, multimodal statistical distributions like those we see consistently reflected IQ and crime frequency.
It’s a hilariously wrong assertion that could generously be regarded as an opinion, albeit a racist one.
I suspect the deviation would most largely result from the parameters of a given test itself. Redefining the test content, subject matter, test environments, conditions, and/or other factors may grow or shrink that gap. If that is so there is cause for research to determine why certain test factors are preferential and if removing such preferential factors does/does not result in higher quality student performance.
I first learned about this from Radiolab: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/g-pro...
edit: Why am I being downvoted?
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/lead-poisonin...
But seriously: we vaporized 200,000 tons a year in gasoline. Where do you think it all went? Places with lots of cars: cities. Definitely do not eat food grown in a city garden- always use raised planters filled with country dirt.
https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/epa-requires-phase-out-...
See figure 2 here:
https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/the-hour-of-lead.pdf
Mitigation/ removal of lead paint is more of a danger than the original risk.
Outdoors, the problem is the lead dust in the soil. Chickens are getting lead poisoning in urban areas:
https://now.tufts.edu/articles/backyard-chickens-and-risk-le...
Regular re-painting can keep the old paint largely encapsulated, but it's still there waiting for an unsuspecting home owner to sand or scrape it loose while doing repairs or renovation.
Outdoors, that dust contributes to the lead load in the soil around the house. Indoors, it's house dust, which babies and kids are naturally bathed in because they live closer to the floor than adults do, and because they put everything in their mouths. In both cases the vectors of exposure are both oral and by inhalation.
Another big contributor to lead dust in households is older (early 2000's and earlier) vinyl window blinds [1]. Many vinyl products contained lead, and vinyl chalks the same way latex paint does as it degrades.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate
[1] https://healthyindoors.com/2018/11/lead-paint-sweet-aint/
But even if that's true, lead acetate would have been used only in tiny quantities (like any other metallic drier). And lead acetate degrades rapidly, so there wouldn't be any lead acetate left in the paint after a short time anyway.
> One teacher decided to look deeper to see if there could be some other factor that could explain the difference.
A "several point difference" sounds like an unusually narrow gap - depressed white scores, maybe? On an unbiased test with no environmental problems, you'd expect to see a gap of around 15 IQ points.
Apologies for an OT nitpick: the past tense of "lead" is "led."
They did not rule this out? Could still have been a contributing factor.
The correct form here is led, even though it ruins the potential pun. :)
Because this did not actually happen.
There was a school district in a small town that for the first time gave IQ tests to all of the children in some younger age group, I think around 7 or 8. The results showed a several point difference between the white kids and the Black kids. The district wrote this off as due to cultural bias in the tests.
One teacher decided to look deeper to see if there could be some other factor that could explain the difference. What that teacher found was that in this district all of the white kids lived in suburban single family homes that had been recently built, and all of the Black kids lives in decades old apartment buildings.
In particular, the white kids' homes at all been built after we stopped using lead point, and the Black kids' homes were all built before that.
The kids were tested for lead exposure, and it turned out all the Black kids and none of the white kids had high lead levels. That lead to (no pun intended) cleaning up the environments in the old apartments and treating the Black kids for their high lead levels.
This was caught early enough for these kids to prevent permanent damage, and when tested a few years later the IQ gap had largely disappeared, and the Black kids were doing as well as the white kids in school which they had not been before being treated for their lead exposure.