Dogfighting, Sports memorabilia and now genetics.

[Jamougha]

An interesting point, quite releant to the discussion; in the last decade or so, psychologists have been studying the effects of 'priming' on cognitive performance. It turns out that you can change average performance radically depending on the queues that you feed people. For example, ask one group to think about the characteristics of a university professor before taking a general knowledge test, and another to think about the characteristics of a football hooligan, and the professor group will do much better. Ask a third group to think about the characteristics of a secretary and they will score in between, but finish the test faster!

This is relevant because among the tests that have been done are tests on the effects of racial priming. Take two groups of black people and have them take a maths test. One group has to fill out their race on the front of the answer sheet, the other doesn't; no other changes. Now the group that is asked about their race will perform dramatically worse.

This means that all IQ tests that ask for your ethnicity on the front are actually invalid as a means of differentiating the IQs of different racial groups.

Kind of scary in a way.