The Bell Curve

[_Always Changing]

Here is an older study which explains some of the social class differences in IQ http://www.doceo.co.uk/background/language_codes.htm

I'll start researching newer information. This is the first one I found https://www.theatlantic.com/health/arch ... ty/253156/

[_Analytics]

Just to check in, I wanted to let you all know that I appreciate all of the comments here. I've dished it out about as much as I've taken it, and I'm not mad at anyone.

I'm in the middle of a busy business trip, and for the time being I have very little time to reply to this thread. I will eventually plug forward. I just wanted to let you know that I haven't gotten offended and have taken my ball and gone home.

Cheers.

[_Analytics]

I've read EA's criticism and Analytic's responses and Lemmie's recasts/sharpening of EA a few times and I'm a more than a little out of my depth here, but trying to understand what the dispute is.

Suppose I'm a hedge fund manager who trades on "volume" and "value", factors generally considered by that crowd to "modestly" predict stock price movement. Over thousands of trades and a little time, I make money. Now I quit the fund and become CEO of a big company. I read this bell curve book and bring my nerds over to devise a "trading formula" that hires and fires employees based on their 2nd grade IQ scores and salary data. Suppose the data is good data. I should be able to increase profits for the company (though not easily) over thousands of employees analyzed and given the shaft. In this sense the predictive power "matters for the group".

The dispute seems to me to be over the claim that the top 10% in wealth are the top 10% in intelligence. That would be like saying stock price movements are determined by volume and value -- with their "modest" correlations. when Analytics says, "The accusation is made in a general way and I don't know how to address it" I THINK the specific accusation is that modest correlations don't explain extreme stratification by intelligence?

In other words, if society were really that stratified, then epsilon wouldn't overshadow IQ for the individual. The epsilon for individual bench-pressers unlikely overshadows their tricep mass. Isn't the whole point of big data to figure out these subtle correlations and exploit them vs. finding totally obvious stuff?

The thing is, I can't totally pin Analytics down to saying what EA says he is saying, since there is this other way that little correlations add up in big data analysis to matter for a "group" consideration.

I'm reading Lemmie as cutting right to the heart and saying modest correlations don't predict individual or group success, the unidentified factors captured in epsilon do. It doesn't matter if a .004 correlation is much better than the next best factor of .0007.

okay...so all three of you feel free to take me to the woodshed in representing your views...

By way of clarification, the argument isn't that the top 10% in wealth are the top 10% in income. Rather, it's that as the world has gotten more complex, forces are emerging that give strong economic incentives for smart people to get jobs that require high intelligence. Related sociological forces are causing the highly intelligent people of both sexes to congregate in the same schools, worksites, and communities. As an example, in 1960 it was relatively easy to get into Harvard--slightly-above average grades and intelligence helped, but what you really needed to go there was to be from New York or New England and come from a connected family with money. Now it has become extremely meritocratic--if you aren't super-intelligent and an intellectual overachiever, you have little chance of being accepted. The super-intelligent overachievers are then getting prestigious jobs that pay an obscene amount of money. More often than not, these people don't marry people of average intelligence--they marry each other.

The book predicts that over time as the world continues to get more complex, the economic pressures that cause the highly intelligent to gather into schools, worksites, and communities where they have less and less exposure to people who aren't highly intelligent will increase. Right now, if you are in the top 10% of intelligence chances are pretty good you are also in the top 10% of income. Going forward, those chances will improve. Going forward, the highly intelligent regardless of background will have great economic opportunities. However, the chances are getting higher and higher that those highly intelligent people will come from highly intelligent parents.

[_Analytics]

Wrong. "Does this help?" is way more patronizing. In any case, the main reason is because you are one of the few people addressing the actual issues on a detailed level, and I sincerely wanted feedback about whether what I was saying made any sense or not. I like you and value your opinion and was hoping this would make you feel engaged in the conversation

Ah, well, what delicate flower of a girl can help but be flattered that a big strong gentleman would be so kind as to explain to her not only how her feelings of being patronized are wrong, but then also take very special care to make sure she feels engaged and not intimidated by all the big strong men who of course never need encouragement to feel engaged !!!!


I like you too, Analytics, but you have GOT to be kidding. What. The. “F”. You honestly think I damned need some special damned comments so that I'll feel damned engaged in the damned conversation? I mean, do you know me at ALL? I'm laughing my fuckin' ass off over here!!

But anyway, honestly, thanks for thinking of me, but I am the LAST woman who needs help to feel engaged in a conversation. Carry on, I'm going to go laugh for another hour or so!

Oh, don't worry about my stats questions, I've asked them enough times that if you feel like ever addressing any of them you can just answer an old post. Please, carry on with your reviews. I'm enjoying the thread more than I thought I ever would.

I'm glad you are enjoying the thread. I am too. Do you remember a couple of months ago when I said something to the effect that one of the things that attracts people to Mormonism or keeps them going through the program was the hope of scoring a hot Mormon chick as a wife? I forgot the specific details, but that was the gist. You called me out as being sexist and excluding you. That's when I learned that you are a woman and somehow got it into my head that it was important to go out of my way to make you feel included in the conversation.

[_Analytics]

Part II: Cognitive Classes and Social Behaviors

The introduction to the second part of the book is about as long as a chapter. The introduction is largely an explanation of statistical concepts, with some further notes about the data they are using and their approach do dealing with the multicollinearity between the social economic status (SES) of their parents, low IQ, and little education.

To give a feel of the tone of the book, here is a quote from the beginning of the introduction to Section II:

High cognitive ability is generally associated with socially desirable behaviors, low cognitive ability with socially undesirable ones. “Generally associated with” does not mean “coincident with.” For virtually all of the topics we will be discussing, cognitive ability accounts for only small to middling proportions of the variation among people.

It almost always explains less than 20 percent of the variance, to use the statistician’s term, usually less than 10 percent and often less than 5 percent. What this means in English is that you cannot predict what a given person will do from his IQ score— a point that we have made in Part I and will make again, for it needs repeating. On the other hand, despite the low association at the individual level, large differences in social behavior separate groups of people when the groups differ intellectually on the average.

Herrnstein, Richard J.; Murray, Charles. Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) (p. 117). Free Press. Kindle Edition.

A couple points:

Part II is explicitly restricted to non-Latino whites.

The book puts everybody into one of five groups: very dull, dull, normal, bright, and very bright. It apologizes for the labels and says it is the best they could do.

[_Analytics]

Chapter 5: Poverty

The first paragraph summarizes the chapter quite well:

Who becomes poor? One familiar answer is that people who are unlucky enough to be born to poor parents become poor. There is some truth to this. Whites, the focus of our analyses in the chapters of Part II, who grew up in the worst 5 percent of socioeconomic circumstances are eight times more likely to fall below the poverty line than those growing up in the top 5 percent of socioeconomic circumstances. But low intelligence is a stronger precursor of poverty than low socioeconomic background. Whites with IQs in the bottom 5 percent of the distribution of cognitive ability are fifteen times more likely to be poor than those with IQs in the top 5 percent.

Herrnstein, Richard J.; Murray, Charles. Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) (p. 127). Free Press. Kindle Edition.

The chapter begins by showing a graph of poverty going down from 50% to about 11% from 1940 to 1970, and then leveling off. It says,

As affluence spread, people who escaped from poverty were not a random sample of the population. When a group shrinks from over 50 percent of the population to the less than 15 percent that has prevailed since the late 1960s, the people who are left behind are likely to be disproportionately those who suffer not only bad luck but also a lack of energy, thrift, farsightedness, determination— and brains.

Herrnstein, Richard J.; Murray, Charles. Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) (p. 129). Free Press. Kindle Edition.

The way they expressed that last point is cruel, but I can't help wonder if it really is true and if so, how the point could be expressed more nicely.

The basis of this analysis is the NLSY79. They asked two basic questions of these data, first, for the white kids that had finished school by 1989, what is the chance they were in poverty by then if they were exactly "average" in all respects except for IQ? Second, for the same group of white kids, what is the chance they'd be out of poverty if they were exactly average in all respects, except for the Social Economic Status (SES) of their parents? The results are seen in this graph:



In words, if you are a white member of this group and average in every way but you are "very dull", your probability of being in poverty is about 26%. If you are white and have average IQ and are also average in every other way but come from a very socially and economically disadvantaged family, your chances of being in poverty is only about 11%.

In sum: Low intelligence means a comparatively high risk of poverty. If a white child of the next generation could be given a choice between being disadvantaged in socioeconomic status or disadvantaged in intelligence, there is no question about the right choice.

Herrnstein, Richard J.; Murray, Charles. Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) (p. 135). Free Press. Kindle Edition.

The book then raises the question, maybe this difference is being driven by educational level rather than just IQ. To deal with this, they filter out exactly two groups: those whose educational level ends exactly with a high-school diploma, and those whose end exactly with a bachelor degree.

For the cohort with only high school diplomas, the results look basically identical to above. For the ones with college degrees, they only show the curves for people with an IQ or parental SES above the mean. They say they cut it off because it doesn't make much sense to talk about people in the "dull" category who has graduated from college (that disappointed me because we all know one of them). Their conclusion was that if you finish college, you have a very low chance of being below the poverty line regardless of any other factor.

Finally, they raise the question of poverty among children. The biggest culprit of poverty among children is the parents not being married. After that, they show that the mother having a low IQ increases poverty more than the mother coming from a disadvantaged SES background.

In general, I feel a little more suspicious about all of these points than I did about the first chapter. Maybe partly because luckily I don't have as much first-hand knowledge of this world. The statistical methodologies are also a bit more involved. If someone were trying to debunk this book there is a lot to look at in this chapter.

[_Lemmie]

I'm glad you are enjoying the thread. I am too. Do you remember a couple of months ago when I said something to the effect that one of the things that attracts people to Mormonism or keeps them going through the program was the hope of scoring a hot Mormon chick as a wife? I forgot the specific details, but that was the gist. You called me out as being sexist and excluding you. That's when I learned that you are a woman and somehow got it into my head that it was important to go out of my way to make you feel included in the conversation.

Well thank you, Analytics, I really do appreciate your thinking of me and wanting to include me!

Maybe I can clarify, what I was trying to express to you several months ago was that when you said "one of the things that attracts people to Mormonism or keeps them going through the program was the hope of scoring a hot Mormon chick as a wife", a woman reading that sentence cannot help but feel that you were defining people as men. How can a woman feel anything but excluded upon reading that in the middle of a conversation in which she had been fully participating???? (And no offense to the lesbians and bi-s who WOULD want to score a hot chick as a spouse, but you did say Mormon wife.)

In order not to exclude a woman, all you have to do is talk to your audience, both men and women, as people. For example, if you had said "all people want to do is score a hot Mormon chick as a wife, or a well-hung Mormon dude as a husband," or even "all people want to do is score a hot Mormon spouse," it would have been fine.

Bending over the other way and treating a woman differently in a conversation, specifically and only because she is a woman, is just the same thing in the opposite direction, which is what I meant when I said I didn't know why you were singling me out by saying "does that help?"

Don't worry, I feel very welcomed here in most conversations, and having you treat me the same as you would any man participating is all it takes to indicate you are including me. but like I said, I really do appreciate you thinking of me. Thanks!!

[_Analytics]

I'm glad you are enjoying the thread. I am too. Do you remember a couple of months ago when I said something to the effect that one of the things that attracts people to Mormonism or keeps them going through the program was the hope of scoring a hot Mormon chick as a wife? I forgot the specific details, but that was the gist. You called me out as being sexist and excluding you. That's when I learned that you are a woman and somehow got it into my head that it was important to go out of my way to make you feel included in the conversation.

Well thank you, Analytics, I really do appreciate your thinking of me and wanting to include me!

Maybe I can clarify, what I was trying to express to you several months ago was that when you said "one of the things that attracts people to Mormonism or keeps them going through the program was the hope of scoring a hot Mormon chick as a wife", a woman reading that sentence cannot help but feel that you were defining people as men. How can a woman feel anything but excluded upon reading that in the middle of a conversation in which she had been fully participating???? (And no offense to the lesbians and bi-s who WOULD want to score a hot chick as a spouse, but you did say Mormon wife.)

In order not to exclude a woman, all you have to do is talk to your audience, both men and women, as people. For example, if you had said "all people want to do is score a hot Mormon chick as a wife, or a well-hung Mormon dude as a husband," or even "all people want to do is score a hot Mormon spouse," it would have been fine.

Bending over the other way and treating a woman differently in a conversation, specifically and only because she is a woman, is just the same thing in the opposite direction, which is what I meant when I said I didn't know why you were singling me out by saying "does that help?"

Don't worry, I feel very welcomed here in most conversations, and having you treat me the same as you would any man participating is all it takes to indicate you are including me. but like I said, I really do appreciate you thinking of me. Thanks!!

Excellent points; touché.

ETA: Just analyzing my thinking, back in the day the Church treated boys and girls differently and kept us segregated. I knew the guys pretty well from being my friends, quorum members, fellow scouts, and mission companions. I had a chance to figure out who they were as people, hear all of the crap the church told them, go through the same manipulation, and see them in their most religious moments, most rebellious moments, and most human moments.

In contrast, the girls were these mysterious creatures we'd see around and be taught about in priesthood quorum meetings and politely interact with, but actually being friends with girls was implicitly off-limits until we were ready to start looking for an eternal companion. So when I was extrapolating about why "people" get stuck in the Mormon trap, it was based on an extremely biased sample--the ones who I knew best were all guys. Go figure.

[_Always Changing]

In contrast, the girls were these mysterious creatures we'd see around and be taught about in priesthood quorum meetings and politely interact with, but actually being friends with girls was implicitly off-limits until we were ready to start looking for an eternal companion. So when I was extrapolating about why "people" get stuck in the Mormon trap, it was based on an extremely biased sample--the ones who I knew best were all guys. Go figure.

My contact with Mormonism growing up was within Hancock County Illinois, with high-caste Utah Mormons moving in and out. Then my experience in a town in western Kansas. Biased samples in themselves. I don't ignore you because I dislike you-- your participation is in subjects in which I have no interest, and likely because I am on the lower end of the very bright--(yes they avoided the superior label) group. And my anger on this thread was not at you, it was against the LDS culture which was predisposing you to accept the book hook, line, and sinker.

[_Analytics]

In contrast, the girls were these mysterious creatures we'd see around and be taught about in priesthood quorum meetings and politely interact with, but actually being friends with girls was implicitly off-limits until we were ready to start looking for an eternal companion. So when I was extrapolating about why "people" get stuck in the Mormon trap, it was based on an extremely biased sample--the ones who I knew best were all guys. Go figure.

My contact with Mormonism growing up was within Hancock County Illinois, with high-caste Utah Mormons moving in and out. Then my experience in a town in western Kansas. Biased samples in themselves. I don't ignore you because I dislike you-- your participation is in subjects in which I have no interest, and likely because I am on the lower end of the very bright--(yes they avoided the superior label) group. And my anger on this thread was not at you, it was against the LDS culture which was predisposing you to accept the book hook, line, and sinker.

Nice to meet you, AC--I love the name. It reminds me of what Emerson said, "with consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do." I hope you didn't feel like I was ignoring you. It's just that I've now known Shades, Gadianton, Beastie, EA, and a few others for nearly 20 years. When the conversation mushrooms, it's easier to focus on and reply to the comments made by old friends rather than new ones. But I appreciate your fresh perspective.

Regarding the "cognitive elite" talk, what I've said has been half tongue-in-cheek. General intelligence as-in the ability to solve complex problems (i.e. "g") must be a complicated combination of several other factors. We know this because otherwise intelligence scores wouldn't follow a normal distribution.

I do quite well on some of the underlying skills that contribute to g and less-so on others. For example, my short-term memory for names and such is way below average. Not below-average among the self-described cognitive elite--below average among everybody. You wouldn't believe how difficult it was for me to learn Spanish at the MTC--comparing my performance at the MTC to that of everybody I saw around me, I was definitely a solid 2 standard deviations below average. I was so bad they pulled me out of my district and gave me special tests about my learning style and about whether I should be transferred to an English speaking mission because I was incapable of learning Spanish.

I just mention all of this to emphasize that I'm really not as arrogant as I sound. In some ways I'm smart, in other ways I'm not, and in any case none of this has anything to do with somebody's intrinsic worth as a person. Further, smart people use their intelligence to do mental gymnastics and justify false beliefs as often as they use it to figure out the truth. Just because somebody is smart doesn't mean they are right.

This topic sucks. Talking about your IQ in detail is a lot like talking about your income. It's a personal thing that everybody is generally aware of but that you just shouldn't talk about in public.