The Bell Curve

[_EAllusion]

Andrew Sullivan, the moderate conservative journalist / pundit, is a big fan of scientific racism/race realism/race science/term to be named later. When he was editor at TNR, he had a whole issue dedicated to the Bell Curve. When he weighed in recently on the recent issues going on, one of his former interns, now a notable dirtbag leftist, tweeted:

If Andrew Sullivan wants to keep writing his race science crap, it's worth noting (as an intern of his in 2013): At a private meeting, his entire staff challenged him on it until he asked, exasperated, "well, why didn't Africa conquer Europe, then?"

https://Twitter.com/deep_beige/status/9 ... 0480697344

The comments exploded with people wondering if Andrew Sullivan has even heard of Jared Diamond. For this comment, yeah, that's the right reply. For testing gaps, you have to be more cautious about why those gaps exist. It is, after all, possible that IQ measures something about intelligence that the scaffolding of more advanced civilizations improves and that explains all of the variance. Intelligence doesn't have to be a fixed capacity. The milieu Murray is in and the sources he relies on do think that there are evolutionary differences between black Africans and whites that helps explain "why Africa didn't conquer Europe" and this necessarily comes into conflict with Diamond's point of view. But it doesn't have to be that way to think there are significant IQ differences. The significant IQ differences Murray cites are based on pathetic methodology, but that doesn't preclude there being real gaps that could be found with better methods.

[_EAllusion]

Second, you interpret everything Murray says through your hostile sources...

I've read Murray myself, and have quoted him (and Hernstein) several times.

and don't believe he says anything or means anything that doesn't conform to that boogeyman.

Murray is habitually dishonest, that is true, but we need to distinguish here between what Murray says directly and what Murray says are the implications of those comments, because those are distinct things. They even vary depending on which audience he is addressing.

I believe marginal IQ scores aren't the only thing that matter in life.

Great. But that's where it becomes helpful to think about what is the IQ dataset they are relying on is measuring. It is measuring people's ability to do high school math, people's ability to read and comprehend vocabulary, etc. What they argue, and this is explicit mind you, is that differences in educational quality between schools involving objective factors like per pupil spending, quality of the school facilities, etc. does not meaningfully impact the variance. I do think the research they are relying on is quite suspect and contradicted in the literature, but that can be placed aside just to think about the implications of this. School might be great for other reasons. But the reason that we do things like pay more money for teachers who have more years of schooling or have gone to better schools to teach math, buy the most expensive, best math books, etc. is because we believe those things have an impact on how well students will be able to do things like answer math test questions. Therefore, doesn't this imply that we shouldn't be wasting our money on that?

Murray is a libertarian and is mostly liked by people on the far right, so they get this implication right away and like it. You, on the other hand, do not seem to. There might be value to other things about schooling that are worth spending money on, but you have to actually connect resources being spent on that to those. Can you explain why buying new math textbooks every 2 years instead of every 3 helps students with socialization more? You're still not explaining why if the variance between quality of schools matters so little to outcome, then why not make cuts? I get that your answer is, "because school does other things" but you're not explaining why those "other things" require so much spending. Being generous, it is not nearly as obvious why raising taxes for new text books or smaller classrooms helps those "other things" once you take out the justification of "students will perform better." School spending is a risk/benefit decision, and when you accept that the benefit is much lower than traditionally thought, this should naturally make some of those decisions tilt towards "not worth it."

A second broad difficulty with relying on improvements in education
is that although they make some difference in IQ, the size of the
effect is small. This conclusion is supported by evidence from both natural
variation in education and planned educational experiments.
Looking at Natural Variation
Parents buying new houses often pick the neighborhood according to
the reputation of the local schools. Affluent parents may spend tens of
thousands of dollars to put their children through private schools. Tell
parents that the quality of the schools doesn't matter, and they will
unanimously, and rightly, ignore you, for differences in schools do matter
in many important ways. But in affecting IQ, they do not matter
nearly as much as most people think.
This conclusion was first and most famously reached by a study that
was expected to demonstrate just the opposite. The study arose out of a
mandate of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to examine how minority
groups are affected by educational inequalities. The result was a huge
national survey, with a sample that eventually numbered 645,000 students,
led by the eminent sociologist James S. Coleman. His researchers
measured school quality by such objective variables as credentials of the
teachers, educational expenditures per pupil, and the age and quality of
school facilities.
Because the schools that most minority children attended were measurably
subpar in facilities and staff, it was assumed that the minority
children fortunate enough to attend better schools would also show improved
cognitive functioning. But the report, issued in July 1966, announced
that it had failed to find any benefit to the cognitive abilities
of children in public primary or secondary schools that could be credited
to better school The usual ways in which schools tried to
improve their effectiveness were not likely to reduce the cognitive differences
among individual children or those between ethnic groups.
The Coleman report's gloomy conclusions were moderated in subsequent
analyses that found some evidence for marginal benefits of school
quality on intellectual de~eloprnent.'~'~ Coleman himself later concluded
that parochial schools generally do a better job ofdeveloping the
cognitive abilities of their students than public schools, which pointed
to at least some factor in schooling that might be exploited to improve
intelligen~e.~' Yet the basic conclusion of the report has stood the test
of time and criticism: Variations in teacher credentials, per pupil expenditures,
and the other objective factors in public schools do not account
for much of the variation in the cognitive abilities of American
school children.12"

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Murray is a libertarian and is mostly liked by people on the far right, so they get this implication right away and like it.

Just in case any posters here are still confused by EA's motivations on the forum...

- Doc

[_EAllusion]

Murray gives somewhat mixed-messages on this. On the one hand, he argues that since people with higher IQs do perform better at work, it would in fact be economically efficient to allow employers to screen and hire based on IQ. Ironically, since IQ-testing job applicants is illegal, employers might be tempted to slyly hire on race because that is a visible trait that is statistically correlated with IQ. In other words, if we tested on IQ, employers would be free to be color blind, knowing they would be getting the best person, regardless of race.

Many years ago while I was in college, I applied at a temp agency for a job to increase my income. Part of their screening of me was a Wonderlic test. This is an IQ test, though one of questionable value. It's probably most famous as the exam giving to prospective NFL players before the draft. After that, they found a job for me where I was to be groomed for management in a factory where the frontline employees were clearly almost entirely undocumented workers. The managers were awful people in my opinion. I quit after a couple of weeks.

I think this was legal because the job itself didn't IQ test me. Rather, they merely took referrals from temp agency. It's the temp agency that used IQ testing to screen for them, presumably on the logic that temp agencies have many possible jobs so a broad screen is justified. In retrospect, this was sketchy as hell.

[_EAllusion]

Murray is a libertarian and is mostly liked by people on the far right, so they get this implication right away and like it.

Just in case any posters here are still confused by EAllusion's motivations on the forum...

- Doc

What is that? Do you think Murray isn't a libertarian? Do you think he isn't mostly liked by people on the far right? These are indisputable objective facts, so I hope not.

Did you see where I wrote several months ago, "I don't think there's any question about that when you look at Murray's political advocacy both before and after the book based on the same general arguments, the anti-policy that makes up the book's recommendations, the other policies they hint towards, but do not state, and the some of the key resources behind the book.

I don't want to focus on that because I don't want that to be viewed as poisoning the well, but if someone wants to challenge whether the book is an attempt to underwrite a sort of social Darwinism with racial overtones via eliminating redistribution programs meant to provide opportunity to the disadvantaged, then I think that's the place you have to go. The broad sweep of the book is quite libertarian in its policy aims, which I share in plenty of cases for completely different reasons, but that's where it goes. Murray would tell you that the policy implications are secondary to this abstract stratification story they are telling, but then again, Murray has made a career out of providing a case for such policy based on the stories he's telling.

Murray's schtick is to say something like that job training programs for people receiving public assistance are probably going to be highly ineffective because people on public assistence are, on average, pretty dumb and it's really hard to fix dumb with training. Take that information what you will. He doesn't want to see anyone get hurt or anything. He's not saying throw the poor to the wolves. Also, it's shame if the poor live lives so comfortable because of assistance that we accidentally encourage them have children who will inherit their dumb genes. Do we want that social burden? He's not a eugenicist here. He's just sayin''.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

I guess the real question with regards to this subject, since we have some physics guys on the board, is this:

Can human intelligence be subject to first principles thinking? Can we boil things down to the most fundamental truths about our biological and cultural make up, what are we sure is true, and then reason up from there?

This is why I suspect, as has been pointed out, the Germans have approached this problem pragmatically rather than idealistically.

Unfortunately, I think our lack of cultural homogenity works against us in crafting an educational and trade system that works for or on behalf of most people's interest.

- Doc

[_EAllusion]

If you are taking what the book actually says at face value, then the paragraphs about Africa have nothing to do with the main point of the book. Nothing.

That's not true at all. It's not a throwaway aside. It's an important cog in an argument that racial IQ differences aren't explained by the social situation of different racial categories. Knowing this is crucial to informing the implications of everything else they say about race, which they walk you right up to. They are arguing that black people, as a group, really are quite dumb. That is to say IQ testing reflects real underlying racial gaps in intelligence that matter. This fact is a really important factor in understanding why black people are disproportionately represented as an underclass and relative social disarray exists in black communities, and that the lack of intelligence among blacks is more a reasonably thought of as a cause of this situation than an outcome of it. That is to say, racial discrimination, SEC, etc. does not explain it well. It does to an extent, but there is something beyond that going on. To be more specific, blacks can't be discriminated against in job opportunities all that much, because blacks rather have a harder time finding a job because they, on average, are too stupid to access or qualify for them. This well explains most of the disparity. Further, efforts to ameliorate the social situation of blacks caused by the legacy of slavery aren't and shouldn't be predicted to be all that effective, because that's not the entire issue or even necessarily the issue at all. It's that black people are, on average, quite dumb for mysterious reasons that are at least in part, maybe in large part, genetic.

The reasoning in the African IQ section is atrocious because it turns out that the continent of Africa also involves black people not always being in the best of circumstances and the numbers were derived using methodology that doesn't pass the laugh test.

Sowell's arguments discussed before were both that testing variances can be explained in part by the cultural biases coloring the testing and that real intelligence gaps probably exist, but are caused by improvable environmental factors attributable to being a socially disfavored group. This is not what Murray thinks or says. He argues against both.

[_Analytics]

Second, you interpret everything Murray says through your hostile sources...

I've read Murray myself, and have quoted him (and Hernstein) several times.

and don't believe he says anything or means anything that doesn't conform to that boogeyman.

Murray is habitually dishonest, that is true, but we need to distinguish here between what Murray says directly and what Murray says are the implications of those comments, because those are distinct things. They even vary depending on which audience he is addressing.

I believe marginal IQ scores aren't the only thing that matter in life.

Great. But that's where it becomes helpful to think about what is the IQ dataset they are relying on is measuring. It is measuring people's ability to do high school math, people's ability to read and comprehend vocabulary, etc. What they argue, and this is explicit mind you, is that differences in educational quality between schools involving objective factors like per pupil spending, quality of the school facilities, etc. does not meaningfully impact the variance ....

...Parents buying new houses often pick the neighborhood according to
the reputation of the local schools. Affluent parents may spend tens of
thousands of dollars to put their children through private schools. Tell
parents that the quality of the schools doesn't matter, and they will
unanimously, and rightly, ignore you, for differences in schools do matter in many important ways.

...

What makes a good math teacher "good" is her ability to teach math well. That is the primary purpose of school, in fact. To learn.

When I finished the 11th grade, my IQ may have been 120. I then took Calculus the next year. At the end of the 12th grade my IQ was still 120. Does that mean I wasted a year of my life? No. I didn't take Calculus to improve my IQ. I took it to learn Calculus. I succeeded at my goal, and having a good teacher helped tremendously.

IQ tests are intended to measure "g"--general intelligence--a general ability to think and solve abstract mental problems. They are not intended to test how well you learned any given school curriculum. You don't seem to grasp this basic point.

I had an acquaintance who scored a "1600+" on the SAT at the age of 15 and started studying at Yale that year. His IQ was literally off the charts. Since then I've spent perhaps 15,000 hours studying. Doing so has led to achieving my educational goals. But it hasn't budged my IQ one iota closer to where my friend found himself as a teenager.

[_Analytics]

Sowell's arguments discussed before were both that testing variances can be explained in part by the cultural biases coloring the testing and that real intelligence gaps probably exist, but are caused by improvable environmental factors attributable to being a socially disfavored group. This is not what Murray thinks or says. He argues against both.

Did Murray say the following? If so, was he lying?

Our view was that the current differences will narrow over time, probably dramatically, as nutrition and the quality of schools for black Africans improve. Changes in black African culture may provide an environment more conducive to cognitive development among young children.

[_Analytics]

"Murray is a libertarian and is mostly liked by people on the far right, so they get this implication right away and like it."

Just in case any posters here are still confused by EAllusion's motivations on the forum...

- Doc

What is that? Do you think Murray isn't a libertarian?

No, he doesn't think you are a libertarian.

That is so obvious you must have got his point. Is there another level of this that I'm missing? Are you pretending to miss the point to mess with him?