The Bell Curve

[_honorentheos]

Hi Analytics,

It sounds like you might not get back to this soon. That said, perhaps I wasn't making my question clear as to what I was asking.

As noted throughout this thread, no one seems to be arguing that the value of education is tied to improving IQ. Nor should anyone expect that raising IQ would be the target of education. We've also discussed that there are varied views as to how much IQ really measures general intelligence and how much it represents ability to perform to a standard defined by a particular cultural background. We can say that Murray favors viewing IQ as measuring something more universal but that's merely noting his position. Whether one is skeptical of IQ or favorable, no one would be surprised to see high IQ's correspond with high levels of success in western cultures, in particular in the US. Like the cartoon, it's like someone saying monkeys perform very well on average compared to other species when it comes to climbing trees. There's something almost tautological to this type of claim.

So, again, what's the actual argument here that matters?

Let me try framing it this way. America has lots of problems and challenges, including growing inequality, poverty, crime, educational disparity, health issues, etc. As we try to deal with these issues, we need to understand the sociological landscape, and we need ways to model the nature of the problems so that we can figure out solutions.

According to mainstream thought, the problems fall along racial lines. People of an historically unfavored race are failing much too often. Therefore, the solution must be to deal with the racism that must have caused all of this. Merely ending most of the racism has helped, but huge problems remain. Thus, the solution must involve affirmative action and such things. Since blacks were systematically disadvantaged for generations, as a society we must systematically give that race an advantage. Hopefully after several generations of affirmative action and whatever else we can think of to erase the damage done to the race because of past and lingering racism, the underperforming race will eventually perform as well as other races. Once the systematic problems of racism are dealt with, members of that race will be able to reach their full potential and do everything whites can do--even become an astrophysicist or the President.

That is the current, mainstream paradigm, more or less.

Murray is suggesting that blacks with low IQs have a lot more in common with whites of low IQs than they do with other blacks. Likewise, blacks with high IQs have more in common with whites with high IQs than with other blacks. In fact, most of the problems associated with race issues can be systematically explained as really being about IQ, irrespective of race. This raises the question about the real nature of these issues.

This all isn't to say that racism and prejudice don't exist, and it certainly isn't to say that racism is somehow justified. Rather, it suggests that we should try to understand what is really driving These problems. If the issues are really about IQ, that probably needs to be understood to find the best solutions.

So the objective is to figure out how to do a better job of raising the IQ of everybody who is dull. Better nutrition, better environments, and better education are part of it, as is research to figure out what else can be done or how it could be done better. As we strive to maximize everyone's IQ, which can be thought of as maximizing their potential, we need to work on helping them reach their potential.

As I read the book, that is his point--IQ matters. The only reason he brings up race is to point out that some problems associated with race might really be about IQ instead.

Removing IQ and race from the discussion, the broad picture sounds similar to that proposed by economists such as Tyler Cowan who, in his books Average is Over and The Complacent Class, hits on the idea that society is shifting into two distinct economic classes along the lines of maximum capability. In his view, it comes down to the post-WWII strength of the middle class being lost as we move into a future where improving automation and technological advancements will create massive opportunities for the few, most capable to become very wealthy while the majority of less capable people will fall behind. His silver lining is to suggest that this bottom rung will still be pretty nice for people who may benefit from cheaper goods and services being available and democratic access to education and entertainment this technological advance makes possible. So he tries to argue people should encourage their kids to learn to code and become flexible adaptors of technology, etc. Cowan's view isn't without controversy but it avoids the outright rage that trying to bring in race and IQ would to making the same argument.

Which brings in race and IQ since it seems that is why we're talking about The Bell Curve instead of some other book.

To take a step back, Analytics, in an up thread comment you seemed to share the view that race is primarily a construct rather than something that can be objectively defined and is widely accepted as such among social scientists. Do you sincerely believe this to be the case?

Second, we discussed the idea that IQ, meaning IQ and not g, is controversial as to what it is actually measuring. So while one can argue that Murray views it a certain way, the discussion seems to require caveats to explain his presuppositions and how others may hold valid contradictory views that need to be accounted for if one wants to extend past claims into asserting policy making should start from a place Murray defines. Would you agree with that?

[Guest]

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[Guest]

only that low IQ is at rhe root.

His fear going forward is that even if everyone's IQ significantly rises, society is only going to have a good place for those in the top x%.

To me these statements are incompatible, and may even get to the root of what I've been trying to say in many of my posts in regards to what bugs me about the book.

I don't know crap about ecology, but I'm going to try an analogy that may be off technically, but maybe good enough to illustrate the point.

As I understand it, in forests, trees compete for sunlight. Whether the average tree is forty feet tall or two hundred feet tall, the trees at some standard deviation(s) below mean will get so little light that they are at greater risk for disease and death. We could send gardeners to fertilize some of the smaller trees to give them a better chance, and perhaps they will grow taller, but as they do, they will crowd out trees that were nearly their peers in height that we didn't fertilize. If we fertilize all trees, it doesn't matter because it's the same problem but twenty feet higher in the air. Well, nature has its way of optimizing across millions of trees and thousands of forests, and perhaps generally, the loss of trees within the lower tail isn't too bad.

In this analogy we are interested in a particular forest called the Darkening Forest, and many more trees within this forest begin to die than we expect. We're worried, and so we send Murray's cousin to the scene who is a botanist. He brings all his gear and studies the trees and and then writes a book that he summarizes below.

Book Summary:

I arrived at the Darkening Forest several weeks ago with my tape measure, a pair of climbing boots, a calculator and a spade, and I have carefully studied a fair sample of the trees of this forest. Oh, how beautiful they are, every single one. I do hope we can find a solution for this growing tragedy, but I warn you, what I've discovered I'm afraid to say is quite shocking, and it's going to take real bravery to speak about these issues openly and fairly.

Critical to understanding my findings is familiarizing ourselves with the notion of HighQ. Every tree has a HighQ, and this is discovered by, first, a hearty climb up the trunk while unwinding the tape measure and reading off the number at the tick that aligns with the tip of the crown. With several trees measured in such a fashion, we at last, find the average measure and normalize that to the value 100. The average tree, then, has a HighQ of 100. Most trees find themselves within the vicinity of a HighQ of 100, which is depicted by the middle hump of a bell curve that represents a normal distribution. HighQ is important in that it represents a trees ability to access sunlight, which is needed for it to grow. A tree with a high HighQ is a tree we expect to drink gobs of sunlight and rise toward the clouds stout and true.

Now, here's where our tale gets shocking. As I measured these trees, I found that most of the trees within the Darkening Forest that are dying have low HighQs. How bad is it? Brace yourselves, because you may not wish to accept it. I measured dozens upon dozens of trees with HighQs a full standard deviation below the mean! I wouldn't have believed it myself if I didn't read the tick from the tape with my own eyes. I recall looking at one tree in particular that really struck a chord within me. I liked this tree and wished to save it. Could it be helped? Well, whatever our plans for that tree, just bear in mind that it's HighQ was only 80. Seriously folks, how can you save a tree with an 80 HighQ?

And so my book concludes that tragically, the root cause of the deaths of trees within the Darkening Forest is low HighQ. There are just too many trees below average, unfortunately; no wonder the whole things going to pot.

[_Some Schmo]

This thread is too long to read, and I doubt I have the IQ to understand it anyway. Could someone provide a summary we can all agree on?

...

What I do have to say, though... despite disagreements with him on several topics, I still like listening to Sam Harris. I like his reasoned approach to things, even if I don't agree with his reasons or conclusions. I believe he argues in good faith. And I will fully cop to my own bias, that I am inclined to trust what he has to say based on years of experience listening to him/reading his books. I don't doubt his sincerity, even if I quibble with his conclusions on certain topics. I will always prefer an honest person I disagree with than a bullshitter who shares my opinion.

So I'm somewhat confused by EA's irrational loathing for him (except for the fact that it is clearly irrational). I remember EA expressing this sentiment years ago, and thought it strange then. It's OK to disagree with someone without being suspect about their motives. EA's regard for Harris seems to go beyond simple disagreement. It's as though Harris has killed kittens and posted their decapitated heads online. When he described Harris as smug, my irony meter went through the roof. It's weird and a little surprising. I suppose everyone has their demons.

I'm not sure if anyone has implied it in this thread, but I've definitely seen it elsewhere... Harris getting sucked in as a racist over this thing has to be one of the dumbest things I've heard in a while (if you don't include everything Drumpf related). That has to be said.

[_Physics Guy]

[A] basic problem for me is that reification is a much subtler issue than the IQ literature I've read seems to realize. ... Just because wealth [or IQ] is real, in a sense, doesn't mean that it's real in the way that gold coins or hay are. In some ways it's a thing but in other ways not, and if you casually treat it as a thing in one way just because it's a thing in the other, you're going to have a bad time.

Just to clarify a few things about what Murray actually says, he does not say tbat g is a literal real thing that literally cannot be changed in the way that, say, phycists say electrons are literal real things with literal negative charges. Rather, "g" is a model with explanatory power of how we perform across the board on complex mental tasks.

He doesn't say g can't be changed as if that were a fundamental property of the universe. Rather, he says that according to the psychological research, it is difficult to change it much. ...

All IQ tests are at best approximations of "g", which in and of itself isn't a real thing but rather is just a way of modeling intelligence that turns out to have predictive power.

Spearman's "g" is defined by factor analysis, which is about rotating clouds of multi-component data points around in their many-dimensional space to try to see which combinations of components may form simple patterns and which seem to show random scatter. It's not a dumb idea but it can't spin straw into gold. The more noisy your data is, the more doubtful the conclusions of factor analysis are. Equally reasonable methodological choices, like whether to rotate to bring the most data onto one line or into one plane, can lead to radically different conclusions—like whether there's a single thing "g" or two things, "verbal and spatial reasoning".

One might think that just because factor analysis can't spin straw into gold doesn't mean it's not awfully useful. And indeed it does have good uses. The problem is, though, that if you can control your experimental variables well enough that you don't have much noise, then you don't need any stinkin' factor analysis. You can just draw a line through the points. You only try factor analysis when your data are pretty darn noisy. The killer app for factor analysis would be identifying real causal factors from complex noisy data—spinning straw into gold—but factor analysis isn't actually so great at that.

I got all that from a combination of my own background in physics and the nice pedagogical explanations by Steven J. Gould in The Mismeasure of Man, which was written largely in response to The Bell Curve. Perhaps Gould was biased but he did know his factor analysis, since he used it a lot in his own work, which got him to Harvard.

My (and Gould's) point about reification is precisely that "the research shows" this and that about IQ isn't nearly as clear a conclusion as Murray makes out. There's a whole spectrum of possible IQ reality statuses. At one extreme IQ could be something as objective as electric charge, and just as unchangeable. At the other extreme IQ could be nothing but a new term invented to conceal the tautology of statements like, "Performance on math tests is correlated with performance on math tests".

Nobody is saying that IQ is actually at either of those two extremes. My recollection of The Bell Curve, however, is that Murray and Herrnstein kind of slipped surreptitiously back and forth along the spectrum from chapter to chapter. In some places they'd loosen up and back off, pour the reader a beer, and say it's all just a model with correlations that are only strong by the low standards of social science. A couple of chapters later, though, IQ is somehow solid enough that we should be basing education policy on it because "the research has shown" us so much.

That's the fallacy into which it is easy to slip if you rely on factor analysis. The noisy data rotated to principal axes are the pattern that one would expect, if reality were a real general intelligence "g", plus random noise. The same data could also be generated by a lot of more complicated realities, however. So you can't take "g" too seriously; but the temptation to treat it as real, just because it's a simple picture, is strong. The premise "IF "g" is actually real" becomes implicit without anyone noticing, until you're taking its reality as proven by all your ample research, and counting all that unresolved noise as just a few loose ends concerning the precise nature of "g".

[_EAllusion]

nice pedagogical explanations by Steven J. Gould in The Mismeasure of Man, which was written largely in response to The Bell Curve.

Mismeasure of man was published 13 years before The Bell Curve. It's written in response to the tradition of arguments the Bell Curve represents, though.

[_EAllusion]

Nobody is saying that IQ is actually at either of those two extremes. My recollection of The Bell Curve, however, is that Murray and Herrnstein kind of slipped surreptitiously back and forth along the spectrum from chapter to chapter. In some places they'd loosen up and back off, pour the reader a beer, and say it's all just a model with correlations that are only strong by the low standards of social science. A couple of chapters later, though, IQ is somehow solid enough that we should be basing education policy on it because "the research has shown" us so much.

I think one of their main gimmicks, which I think is more attributable to Murray, is to use hedged language with caveats, but then state, strongly imply, or act as though things are true that they just hedged about. It allows them to play this "we're not saying, but we're saying" rhetorical style throughout.

I vaguely recalled that Charles Murray is fairly active on Twitter. (He's a couple degrees of separation from libertarians on Twitter I like.)

I was curious if he commented at all on the Stanford/Harvard/Census Bureau study since it seems to quite problematic for Bell Curve style argumentation and lots of the public comment on it has the observation "So much for the Bell Curve." He did, but it was one cryptic tweet that said:

An analysis destined for the unintended-consequences-of-publicizing-technically-accurate-data hall of fame.

Well, what the heck does he mean by that? His readers chime in that the study means that black men are quite prone to crime regardless of their socioeconomic status. Everyone seems to take that as the implied point of his comment. Murray does nothing to disabuse them of the idea that's what he's saying, but he doesn't concur either. Knowing who he is and even reading his current comments strongly imply that's what he means, but if you say that, someone could always argue that maybe he agrees with Ta-Nahesi Coates that this study might inadvertently reinforce the "black superwoman" trope. Who knows? Murray does. And I think we do too.

[_Analytics]

I think you are both misrepresenting the Bell Curve and Dr. Murray's later public advocacy. It is saying that national variance in traditional objective measures of school quality do not do much to budge measures of IQ, which in turn are reasonably obtained from measuring acquired aptitudes (crystallized intelligence in the "g" model). The implication here is obvious, which is that differences in schooling doesn't do much to explain the variance in performance on that measure, which is specifically something schools teach. This is long part of the public advocacy that the Bell Curve and Dr. Murray's later writings is used for, and is not an interpretation lost on both its advocates and critics. Except you, maybe.

At that point, what disadvantages do they [William Gates and Arthur Agee] have?

!

A lot? Did you fall asleep during the movie?

Touche. I may have fallen asleep in the movie. I usually do.

In any case, my point was that to his mother's credit, he didn't grow up stunted and malnourished. To his own credit, he was able to overcome all of his disadvantages and become an incredibly talented athlete, stay off of drugs, stay out of gangs, and stay out of jail.

To his credit, he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps and achieved an incredible amount of success as a teenager.

He doesn't seem like the kind of guy who accepts being the victim of his circumstances.

[_Analytics]

Which brings in race and IQ since it seems that is why we're talking about The Bell Curve instead of some other book.

We are talking about this book because Sam Harris happens to think Charles Murray is a reasonable scholar who is the victim of the PC Police, and EA thinks this proves Sam Harris is a racist hack because Charles Murray being a racist hack is beyond dispute.

If it weren't for EA and Sam Harris having such polar opposite reactions to the Bell Curve and my desire to judge the book for myself, this thread wouldn't exist. It's not the kind of think I'd normally choose to read.

To take a step back, Analytics, in an up thread comment you seemed to share the view that race is primarily a construct rather than something that can be objectively defined and is widely accepted as such among social scientists. Do you sincerely believe this to be the case?

I believe an "African American" can be objectively defined as an American with darker skin and some relatively recent African ancestory. However, I don't think there is anything intrinsically significant about that in a Linnaean sense--it isn't like different races are biologically different sub-species or something. Sure, a dna test from ancestory.com might say somebody is 38% African, but that is just based on some bits of dna that are correlated with other people who identify as having African ancestory.

Second, we discussed the idea that IQ, meaning IQ and not g, is controversial as to what it is actually measuring. So while one can argue that Murray views it a certain way, the discussion seems to require caveats to explain his presuppositions and how others may hold valid contradictory views that need to be accounted for if one wants to extend past claims into asserting policy making should start from a place Murray defines. Would you agree with that?

Yes and no. Whatever Murray's personal views are, he pretty-much keeps them to himself (that is what upsets people--they think he is implying things that he doesn't actually state). Murray says he is just trying to describe the sum-total of the evidence. He does talk about how different studies are better than others, and describes a range of views. He'll offer a vague opinion on which views are better supported by the evidence, and of course says that more study is needed on most topics (I say "most" because he does say, for example, we don't need more research on whether attending Head Start increases your IQ. He says that particular question has been studied to death and doesn't require more research to confidently answer). But it isn't like he is an evanglisit for the true interpretation of IQ. So all of the caveats and contradictory views do seem to be more-or-less included in what he says.

[_Analytics]

I'm not sure if anyone has implied it in this thread, but I've definitely seen it elsewhere... Harris getting sucked in as a racist over this thing has to be one of the dumbest things I've heard in a while (if you don't include everything Drumpf related). That has to be said.

After now reading the book, I totally agree.