The Bell Curve

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

I don't see why the issue can't be summed up as a 'bio-cultural' construct. Biology is a fact. Culture is a fact. I get that facts make us uncomfortable, but I'd rather deal in reality and then adjust fire than send more people into life completely unprepared to contribute because they're taught things that just aren't useful to them.

- Doc

[_EAllusion]

Do you take issue with anything I quoted above? What is the opposite view? A simplistic of Winship and Korenman where if somebody with a below-average IQ and a bachelor's degree from BYU-Hawaii wants to increase his IQ by 60 points and become a genius all he needs to do is go to school for 22 more years?

You are talking about educational attainment - how much schooling you receive - not educational quality or how good the education you get is when you are receiving it. I do think we have reason to think if our BYU-grad had better education starting from infancy to the present, it's possible that his IQ might be higher as measured by the AQFT. I'm not suggesting perfect malleability, but I think the bulk of the research indicates that it is more malleable than Murray and Hernstein argue. They argue for variance in educational attainment having a relatively small effect, to which the paper I linked from a book I own argues that the effect of attainment is a somewhat larger than they estimate due to errors. I'm saying that this ignores variance in quality of education (both in the community and in schools) which quite likely also matters a fair amount for between-group differences, but they explicitly argue does not matter much. It's in the parts of your quote that you choose not to blue-up. Let me help you by re-quoting it:

Equalizing the amount or objective quality of schooling in America cannot be counted on to equalize cognitive ability much....

What I'm bringing to the party goes unstated, but is quite relevant here. The dataset we are talking about is the AQFT. That's an aptitude test. It asks you things like high-school math problems, vocabulary knowledge, spatial reasoning, etc. What does it mean when we say that variance in quality of schooling doesn't matter much for how well a person performs on that? What's the implication there Analytics?

Yes, education helps. I'm saying that if you agree with Murray that the variance in education in the United States is a very small factor in outcomes of this measurement, then why care so much about how much we spend on it? Surely we can find more socially fruitful ways to use money. Why not make Minnesota Public schools more like Mississippi's and save a few bucks? If you are saying it does not matter much, and you believe, like your own quote, "the school is not a promising place to try to raise intelligence or to reduce intellectual differences [as measured by the AQFT!]" then like your own quote, I'm asking you why spend so much on it? Why not adopt the practices of the cheapest systems since the most expensive ones aren't doing much?

[_DrW]

I don't see why the issue can't be summed up as a 'bio-cultural' construct. Biology is a fact. Culture is a fact. I get that facts make us uncomfortable, but I'd rather deal in reality and then adjust fire than send more people into life completely unprepared to contribute because they're taught things that just aren't useful to them.
- Doc

Doc,

Couldn't agree more. Fresh out of college, I ended up as an 'engineer' for a scientific instruments manufacturer in Germany. Didn't really deserve to be designated as an engineer at that point, but they needed my English language skills in the engineering department for overseas service, so they put me in a Probezeit (test period) program and gave me a shot.

For three months, I was sort of an apprentice engineer. The plant had plenty of apprentices on the blue collar side. These kids were regular employees apprenticed to highly skilled machinists and electronics and electromechanical technicians. As teenagers, these individuals had attended Realschule (career path to the trades)) rather than Gymnasium (career path to the professions). The trades bound kids had then had gone on to apprenticeship programs to become qualified and accredited in their fields.

This system worked very well indeed. Blue collar workers earned a better than a living wage. They typically owned at least one car and their homes and many eventually had little summer houses on garden plots where they could get away on the weekends. They benefited from government backed savings plans and retirement funds. They had one month's paid vacation per year. (We all received 13 monthly paychecks per year - number 13 being for vacation.)

As to my situation, after three month's assigned to a mentor (who was Hungarian and the best teacher I ever knew), said mentor vouched for my qualifications, performance and general character, and I was hired as an "Angestellte" Engineer. This essentially meant that I had a job for as long as I wanted it, with full benefits, was considered a professional as designated by my bank account, residence permit, etc., and could not be terminated except for cause.

Most countries in Western Europe have similar kinds of education-to-work systems.
Why we do not have this kind of institutionalized educational and training experience in the workplace in this country, as Doc suggests, is a mystery to me.

Perhaps the resistance arises from an unfounded fear of these kinds of 'social contracts' in a country populated with companies that value entrepreneurship and ever more rosy quarterly earnings reports more than the long term stability that results from skilled, competent and loyal employees.

It will be interesting to see how this system in Germany is affected by the declining native population growth and the influx of immigrants from the Middle East and Africa.

[_Physics Guy]

I'm curious about that, too, but my bet is that it will actually work out pretty easily. A lot of the Middle Eastern refugees are highly skilled people who had the resources to make it to German. I think Germany has just reached a little further back in its history to make a smart play. Prussia took in a huge wave of French Protestants after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and it proved to be a great plan.

I'm a Canadian professor at a German university and I have the same impression of the German education and training system. It covers everything. Do you want to be a neurosurgeon? A landscape gardener? A piano tuner? The system has a slot for you, regardless.

What's really freaky: it's free. German natural resources were all mined out ages ago, so there's a strong social consensus about developing human capital, since it's the only resource the country still has.

Germany has no tuition fees. The cost for a year at Heidelberg or Tübingen, or at any less-well-known-but-essentially-similar universities like mine, is a few hundred bucks in administration fees. And you don't even have to be German. If you have the academic qualifications to enroll, you can get a student visa and study for free in Germany, no matter where you were born. These days you may well not even have to learn the German language. There are a lot of degree programs offered in English.

As German TV says when the ads that come in a block at the end of the show, instead of interrupting it, have all finished: Das war die Werbung.

I have a black guy from Cameroon as a post-doc in my group at the moment, and I also happen to help administer a program that brings about ten students a year from Rwanda to spend seven years learning German and then studying up to a Master's in some natural science or engineering field. These people are black, and they are freakishly smart. Most of them come to Germany having never ridden a train before, and after a year I speak with them in German, which is their third language if not their fourth.

We're dealing with Rwanda's best and brightest young people, sure. And my experiences are only anecdotal. But I think I have a reasonably global perspective on how high the bar goes for "brightest young people" from having been a post-doc at MIT for four years. If you say it's hard to get things done in Africa I can believe you immediately. My brother worked for a large international company in South Africa for several years and there were definitely some difficult things. But if you say the root cause is some deficiency in African brains, then I'm going to be biased against you because that just doesn't jibe with my experience.

[_EAllusion]

Finally, there is the infamous chapter 13, which compares IQ scores across racial groups. If this chapter were to be removed entirely, the rest of the book would still hold up nicely (except a few pages at the end that talks about affirmative action and how it allegedly goes too far). Throughout, the book implores readers that everybody should be treated with the same dignity and respect regardless of race and regardless of IQ, but still tries to argue that we need to get real and that it is impossible to get to Lake Wobegon where everybody is above average.

I already responded to this quote, because it's simply false, but it was so obviously false from someone that just read the book that I was confused that it was made. For starters, there's several chapters on race and IQ, not just chapter 13. By my count, there's at least 4 chapters you can say are about race and IQ, not to mention that several others where the race and IQ discussion informs what you are led to think. They're filled with dubious arguments that you've just blatantly declared as holding up nicely. The problems with that aspect of the book alone extend well beyond chapter 13.

It turns out that this is statement of yours almost verbatim copies what Charles Murray said about the book himself. What a totally amazing random happenstance.

But hey, since the book holds up so great, a notable theme in chapter 14 (that you think isn't about race and IQ?) is that you can account for arrest rate differences between racial groups almost entirely by differences in IQ, which - remember - they rather extensively argue are mostly an immutable fact of early life that exists in significant part independent of socieoeconomic status, which is a theme they continue into their discussion on race. So racial arrest rates aren't really about discrimination in the criminal justice system, socioeconomic differences, etc. It's about blacks being less intelligent than average, and therefore, via their arguments in earlier chapters, more prone to crime. All that research out there suggesting that blacks in the US are policed differently than whites in the United States for the same behavior? Throw it out the window, as that effect has to be small in relation to IQ explaining a very large chunk of the gap rather than third variables mediating the relationship between the two.

This is part of an overarching argument in the chapter that claims of racial oppression are overblown once you realize that it is low intelligence among disadvantaged racial categories largely driving undesirable social outcomes.

Forgetting their arguments in that section, since you believe this holds up well even now, I'm interested in some research you can cite some examples of studies that further establish this line of reasoning.

Thanks.

In the national data, blacks are about 3.8 times more likely to be arrested
relative to their numbers in the general population than whites
(Latino and non-Latino whites are combined in this comparison).'"
Blacks are also disproportionately the victims of crime, especially violent
crime. The ratio of black homicide victims to white as of 1990 was
7.7 to 1 for men and 4.8 to 1 for women.j

Sociologist Robert Gordon has analyzed black-white differences in
crime and concluded that virtually all of the difference in the prevalence
of black and white juvenile delinquents is explained by the IQ difference,
independent of the effect of socioeconomic status. The only
reliable indicator from the NLSY that lets us compare criminal behavior
across ethnic groups is the percentage of young men who were ever
interviewed while incarcerated.

The figure below shows the standard
comparison, before and after controlling for cognitive ability. Among
white men, the proportion interviewed in a correctional facility after
Controlling for IQ cuts the black-white difference
in incarceration by almost three-quarters
The probability of ever having been interviewedcontrolling for age was 2.4 percent; among black men, it was 13.1 percent.
This large black-white difference was reduced by almost threequarters
when IQ was taken into account. The relationship of cognitive
ability to criminal behavior among whites and blacks appears to be similar
As in the case of other indicators, we are left with a nontrivial
black-white difference even after controlling for IQ, but the magnitude
of the difference shrinks dramatically.

[_Analytics]

You are talking about educational attainment - how much schooling you receive - not educational quality or how good the education you get is when you are receiving it. I do think we have reason to think if our BYU-grad had better education starting from infancy to the present, it's possible that his IQ might be higher as measured by the AQFT. I'm not suggesting perfect malleability, but I think the bulk of the research indicates that it is more malleable than Murray and Hernstein argue.

Murray and Herrnstein argue that the nature/nurture ratio is somewhere in the range of 80/20 on the vey high end to 50/50 on the low end. You really think it is outside that range?

The book clearly and repeatedly indicates that IQ is malleable--just not as malleable as many people seem to think. They do talk a lot about how if you study for an IQ test you can improve the score, but they wonder how much of that is actually changing the underlying g. But beyond that, they repeatedly say that getting an education does in fact increase your g. In fact, going to school for 12 years (as opposed to not going to school at all), will improve your g a lot.

They argue for variance in educational attainment having a relatively small effect, to which the paper I linked from a book I own argues that the effect of attainment is a somewhat larger than they estimate due to errors.

If you are interested in being fair, their argument is much broader than the results of that one regression. Further, they are very careful to emphasize not to put too much weight into the particular numbers of that regression because it is limited in multiple ways.

I'm saying that this ignores variance in quality of education (both in the community and in schools) which quite likely also matters a fair amount for between-group differences, but they explicitly argue does not matter much.

The statistical model your book criticized doesn't take quality of education (both in the community and in the schools) into account, but that is only because of limitations in the data. The book itself talks a lot about these other factors and suggests that some of the best levers we have for increasing IQ is adopting kids from bad enviornments into good ones and increasing nutrition.

... It's in the parts of your quote that you choose not to blue-up. Let me help you by re-quoting it:

Equalizing the amount or objective quality of schooling in America cannot be counted on to equalize cognitive ability much....

Are you suggesting that there is robust data that equalizing the amount or objective quality of schooling can be counted on to signficantly equalize cognitive ability? For example, if we fund inner-city schools as well as schools in the suburbs, we can count on that to equalize cognitive ability by a lot? Or if we make kids in the inner city study as long as kids in the suburbs that can be counted on to significantly equalize cognitive ability? Or that if we bus inner-city kids to the suburbs we can count on that to equalize cognitive ability by a lot? I hope you are right. Show me the robust data that these things work better than Murray represents and it will make my day. To show you my thanks, I'll send a $1,000 to the educational charity of your choice in your name.

The authors are wide open to the possibility that there could be ways to dramatically improve the educational system's ability to raise the g of disadvantaged Americans. They just don't think that as-of 1994 when the book was written, educators had cracked that nut.

What I'm bringing to the party goes unstated, but is quite relevant here. The dataset we are talking about is the AQFT. That's an aptitude test. It asks you things like high-school math problems, vocabulary knowledge, spatial reasoning, etc. What does it mean when we say that variance in quality of schooling doesn't matter much for how well a person performs on that? What's the implication there Analytics?

According to Murray, if we're talking about taking uneducated people in Africa and sending them to school, that will in fact have a huge effect on their IQ scores. But if we are talking about in the states where most disadvantaged kids are already going to somewhat okay schools for 12 years, making the schoools better (or bussing the kids to different schools) will only have a marginal effect. I hope that isn't true. Murray claims that is what the data say. I hope he is wrong about that and that pouring more money into schools or bussing kids to different schools is a magic bullet that will make these problems go away.

Yes, education helps. I'm saying that if you agree with Murray that the variance in education in the United States is a very small factor in outcomes of this measurement, then why care so much about how much we spend on it? Surely we can find more socially fruitful ways to use money. Why not make Minnesota Public schools more like Mississippi's and save a few bucks? If you are saying it does not matter much, and you believe, like your own quote, "the school is not a promising place to try to raise intelligence or to reduce intellectual differences [as measured by the AQFT!]" then like your own quote, I'm asking you why spend so much on it? Why not adopt the practices of the cheapest systems since the most expensive ones aren't doing much?

Murray would answer your question by saying that since education does improve IQ, we should spend money on it. He would further say that school is about more than improving IQ, and that those other factors make spending money on it even more worthwhile.

Given that that is his actual position, am I evil for pretty-much agreeing with him?

[_Analytics]

Finally, there is the infamous chapter 13, which compares IQ scores across racial groups. If this chapter were to be removed entirely, the rest of the book would still hold up nicely (except chapter 14, a few pages at the end that talks about affirmative action and how it allegedly goes too far, and perhaps a few other isolated examples). Throughout, the book implores readers that everybody should be treated with the same dignity and respect regardless of race and regardless of IQ, but still tries to argue that we need to get real and that it is impossible to get to Lake Wobegon where everybody is above average.

I already responded to this quote, because it's simply false....

I made a couple of minor corrections so that it is now completely true. Thanks for bringing this sloppiness on my part to my attention.

It turns out that this is statement of yours almost verbatim copies what Charles Murray said about the book himself. What a totally amazing random happenstance.

Normally, when a reader and the author agree on what a book is about, it is a sign of clear writing and reading comprehension. But in this case, it sounds like you are accusing me of plagerism. If so, please do two things. First, send my words and what Charles Murray said about the book himself to Lemmie and kindly ask her to analyze it and share her conclusions. Second, go to hell.

[_honorentheos]

Hi Analytics,

Thanks for the additional information in responding to my post. The only item I remain curious about regarding the book is regarding the question of ongoing evolutionary impacts as they are dealt with by Murray and his coauthor.

I ask this because it still seems like a "so what?" book to me insofar as if the book focuses on IQ, data that points to variability in IQ that can be mapped onto ethnic groups in the US (which historically could also be defined as much by cultural as by genes given segregation, etc., etc., etc...), notes that IQ is malleable but not infinitely so such that finding an intelligent mate will improve one's offspring's chances of success in life and therefore one's genes' success, and that whatever degree one assigns to it all agree quality of education matters...again, what exactly is Murray's call to action? Be real but be nice means...?

I'm reading the material you've posted and, at least from a historic perspective, could go so far as to read it mainly providing a good reason to consider oppressive behaviors towards populations as having long term consequences that take effort and time to overcome because there are perpetuated negative impacts that don't go away with the birth of a generation that is not overtly being oppressed. Is that part of this? Whose to say this isn't actually an argument for affirmative action if one steps back and accepts the proposed reading of the data with an eye of getting away from the racist aspects of potential conclusions one could draw to the other conclusions that lean more on acknowledging evolutionary pressures and advantages at the level we're talking about aren't exactly the type of change one would assign to genetic variability that starts to get into Markk territory. If anything and were it to be taken at face value as presented, it starts to read like one of the worst indictments of colonialism possible...

Anyway, I'm still not inclined to read the book but this is starting to pique my curiosity enough I may get to it eventually.

[Guest]

I'm curious about that, too, but my bet is that it will actually work out pretty easily. A lot of the Middle Eastern refugees are highly skilled people who had the resources to make it to German. I think Germany has just reached a little further back in its history to make a smart play. Prussia took in a huge wave of French Protestants after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and it proved to be a great plan.

I'm a Canadian professor at a German university and I have the same impression of the German education and training system. It covers everything. Do you want to be a neurosurgeon? A landscape gardener? A piano tuner? The system has a slot for you, regardless.

What's really freaky: it's free. German natural resources were all mined out ages ago, so there's a strong social consensus about developing human capital, since it's the only resource the country still has.

Germany has no tuition fees. The cost for a year at Heidelberg or Tübingen, or at any less-well-known-but-essentially-similar universities like mine, is a few hundred bucks in administration fees. And you don't even have to be German. If you have the academic qualifications to enroll, you can get a student visa and study for free in Germany, no matter where you were born. These days you may well not even have to learn the German language. There are a lot of degree programs offered in English.

As German TV says when the ads that come in a block at the end of the show, instead of interrupting it, have all finished: Das war die Werbung.

I have a black guy from Cameroon as a post-doc in my group at the moment, and I also happen to help administer a program that brings about ten students a year from Rwanda to spend seven years learning German and then studying up to a Master's in some natural science or engineering field. These people are black, and they are freakishly smart. Most of them come to Germany having never ridden a train before, and after a year I speak with them in German, which is their third language if not their fourth.

We're dealing with Rwanda's best and brightest young people, sure. And my experiences are only anecdotal. But I think I have a reasonably global perspective on how high the bar goes for "brightest young people" from having been a post-doc at MIT for four years. If you say it's hard to get things done in Africa I can believe you immediately. My brother worked for a large international company in South Africa for several years and there were definitely some difficult things. But if you say the root cause is some deficiency in African brains, then I'm going to be biased against you because that just doesn't jibe with my experience.

Physics Guy,

I gave indication whatsoever that I believed African brains were in any way deficient. And having served a post doc at MIT myself (if that is any indication) I would say that my view of the bar would be pretty much the same as yours.

What some may see as brain deficiencies (or enhancements, for that matter), many neuroscientists would attribute to subtle differences in brain structure, and more specifically the brain connectome. As has been discussed on this board before, this aspect of brain structure (neuronal connectivity) can be influenced by experience and learning (and diet) pretty much throughout life.

My early experience with Africans in academics was with individuals who we recruited to help staff a the KFUPMRI in D'hahran, Saudi Arabia. These individuals were mainly from Egypt and the Sudan, and were absolutely on par with those recruited from places like the UK, Finland and Lebanon.

My son, who is in town for an optics conference, is working on a project for the Gates Foundation in Namibia - and they are having problems. The issue is not the native intelligence of the local teams - it is that this sparsely populated desert country in Africa does not have sufficient digital connectivity to allow effective access to, or operation of, cloud based data libraries. In other words, lack of sufficient or proper connectivity.

[_Kishkumen]

At the risk of asking a question that has already been addressed, given the assumption that IQ tests tend to measure abilities tied to privilege and education, is it illegitimate to test people to see how well they would function in a particular system?

Granted, there may be no definitive measure for objective smarts. Maybe such a thing is, in fact, undesirable. However, the desire for efficiency places a demand on the system to identify agents with the greatest aptitude for carrying out its agenda. In a Western context, that will be a European cultural foundation, by and large. Yes? No?

Is it unjustifiable to seek efficiency in this way? If I want a group that runs with optimal efficiency to obtain the best outcome, will maximal diversity of approach result in optimal outcomes? Racism aside, is there any justification for a certain level of shared culture, or should we always seek diversity in every sense? Is that truly better?

I don’t know. A certain amount of diversity might be counterproductive . Another amount may be desirable over homogeneousness. I am not talking skin color here. I am talking culture; that comes from a tradition of a relatively (not totally) homogeneous ( in knowledge and practice) group perpetuating its tradition, its memes, its culture. It is not absolute. It always has a certain mix. But it remembers itself in a relatively historically coherent way.

I write as a classicist, who realizes his ignorance in the face of a tradition of great depth, complexity, and antiquity.