{"id":76412,"date":"2015-10-07T11:43:28","date_gmt":"2015-10-07T19:43:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=76412"},"modified":"2015-10-07T11:59:25","modified_gmt":"2015-10-07T19:59:25","slug":"wp-why-you-shouldnt-be-surprised-that-prisoners-crushed-harvards-debate-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=76412","title":{"rendered":"WP: Why you shouldn\u2019t be surprised that prisoners crushed Harvard\u2019s debate team"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Washington Post<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\nLast month, a debate team of three inmates with violent criminal records defeated a team of three Harvard University undergraduates.<\/p>\n

It sounds like an underdog story plucked from the pages of a yet unwritten Walt Disney screenplay \u2014 and in some ways, it is.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s also worth pointing out the fallacy of our underlying assumptions about such a match-up \u2014 the first (and most pernicious) being that if a definitive link between criminality and below-average intelligence exists, nobody has found it.<\/p>\n

Despite living behind bars, prisoners have recorded albums, produced fine literature, run lucrative criminal enterprises and mastered the ancient meditation technique known as Vipassana.<\/p>\n

As the highly sophisticated prison break from Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y., made clear earlier this year, inmates are not only intelligent, but often more capable and deliberate than those of us on the outside. Richard Matt may have been smart enough to tunnel his way out of prison using rudimentary engineering skills picked up on the fly, but like many career criminals, his greatest gifts were probably rhetorical in nature, prison staffers said.<\/p>\n

The debate took place last month at the Eastern Correctional Facility in New York, a maximum-security prison about an hour southwest of Bard College. The hosts beat a Harvard team that had won three of four American Parliamentary Debate Association National Championships.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are few teams we are prouder of having lost a debate to than the phenomenally intelligent and articulate team we faced this weekend,\u201d the Harvard College Debating Union wrote on Facebook after the defeat. \u201cAnd we are incredibly thankful to Bard and the eastern New York correctional facility for the work they do and for organizing this event.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To get the real story, you have to go to the comments on the story:<\/p>\n

\n* In general prisoners have lower intelligence than the average population. 70% of them do not have a high school diploma. That doesn’t mean very intelligent people aren’t convicted; they are usually poor and couldn’t afford a good lawyer, or they were actually guilty.<\/p>\n

* With one Google search I found 3 scholarly articles that did, in fact, link lower intelligence with criminal behavior. Why could the writer of this article not find it?<\/p>\n

* Criminals are dullards. Everyone know this. We need no study to know this, it is self-evident. The author wrongly suggests that if a tiny handful of criminals in jail are cherry-picked to debate, have tutored instruction by a debate expert, and have the jail-time afforded leisure to prepare ALL DAY-EVERY DAY, they somehow represent the average criminal in prison. Middle school mathematics says otherwise. The three evil criminals being coached to do something as simple as debate have nothing to do with the 1.3 million evil criminals in prison.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A Google search reveals that prisoners on average have low IQs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Where’s the video of this debate? Judges can decide on a winner for reasons that have nothing to do with excellence. <\/p>\n

Why do blacks keep winning these debates? Steve Sailer writes July 20, 2015<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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