The Bell Curve

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_EAllusion
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _EAllusion »

honorentheos wrote:...


In the first post, Doc seems to be trying to say that I'm guilty of using the logic I criticized to infer that poor nutrition can reduce height. "You can't make this up" seems to be exasperation over my trivial self-contradiction. I'm not doing that, and it would be incredibly dumb to think that I am. You can make the generous assumption that he is trolling and is being deliberately thick, though I doubt that in this case, or you can go with the odds that he's just confused. If I were to guess, he thinks I'm saying that you can't make nature / nurture attributions of variance at all, when what I'm criticizing is the unfortunately common, but fallicious intuition that because a trait is seen as both hereditary and environmental, any difference between groups along that trait logically probably includes both factors.

This somehow morphs into an argument bout the inductive nature of scientific knowledge, which is crazy-pants, because that has absolutely nothing to do with the point being made.
_EAllusion
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _EAllusion »

Markk, there are currently 50 states in the United States, not 49.

There you go again, running off to google to pretend to know things. So typical.
_Analytics
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _Analytics »

The topic of this thread is the book, The Bell Curve. That book is about IQ, how it differs among groups of people, and the effect that has on their lives. Some of the conclusions the book reaches are politically incorrect. It is politically incorrect to discuss research that indicates one's IQ has an effect on socioeconomic outcomes, that different racial groups have different distributions of IQ, and that there is little that can be done to change one's IQ.

Many of the scientific inferences the book discusses are politically incorrect. That puts me in a bind. If I make an attempt to discuss the evidence, I fully expect to be "politically-incorrect-shamed." Rather than being disabused of how the book misinterprets evidence, I'll be told in the vaguest of terms about how the book has long been discredited, and will then be lectured on how the most unsavory people on the planet really like the book.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.

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_Gadianton
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _Gadianton »

EA, what you meant was obvious. I was going to provide the recap but H got to it first, so carry on. I think Analytics and my wife (wtf shades) might see you as deflecting from evidence; I mean, I see what you're saying, but at the end of the day, if there is evidence there to make the case for the significance of genetics then there is, despite how politically sensitive it is to flaunt it around. So once we get past any circularity of restating facts about "biology" in terms of its constituents "nature and nurture," then there really might be evidence carefully accounted for that suggests "nature" makes the difference. It doesn't seem to me that TBC is considered to have made this case. Analytics mentioned other studies, and so it's a question as to whether there really are peer-reviewed, established studies on this matter that are widely accepted as credible. I have no opinion on this one way or another as it's not a subject that I've had interest in or have pursued myself. To me, it's one of those dark corners of human knowledge that isn't going to be easy to pin down, and the costs of pursuing such knowledge probably isn't worth the benefit. Certainly, there are times when we can sit back and shoot the bull and conjecture and speculate and it's all good, but for the topic of correlating innate human capacity to race, with all the evil that has been done in the name of racial superiority, we'd best only share opinions heavily backed by evidence.

I think Markk's last sentence was pretty obvious, even though it wasn't written like sentences are normally written. He's saying you pretend to be like Cliff from cheers, who had reams of trivia stored in his head, but you are are really like DCP, who pretends to hold a vast store of knowledge in his head, but he's really making it up as he goes along.

ETA: I wrote this post without first having seen Analytics' last post.
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_Analytics
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _Analytics »

Chapter 13

[This is the one we've all been waiting for. Prior chapters have talked about how IQ is a real thing, and about how you have a better shot at better social-economic outcomes with a higher IQ, and about how you are more likely to have all sorts of problems with a lower IQ. This chapter compares IQ across races.]

Here is the introduction to the chapter:
Murray wrote:Despite the forbidding air that envelops the topic, ethnic differences in cognitive ability are neither surprising nor in doubt. Large human populations differ in many ways, both cultural and biological. It is not surprising that they might differ at least slightly in their cognitive characteristics. That they do is confirmed by the data on ethnic differences in cognitive ability from around the world. One message of this chapter is that such differences are real and have consequences. Another is that the facts are not as alarming as many people seem to fear.

East Asians (e.g., Chinese, Japanese), whether in America or in Asia, typically earn higher scores on intelligence and achievement tests than white Americans. The precise size of their advantage is unclear; estimates range from just a few to ten points. A more certain difference between the races is that East Asians have higher nonverbal intelligence than whites while being equal, or perhaps slightly lower, in verbal intelligence.

The difference in test scores between African-Americans and European-Americans as measured in dozens of reputable studies has converged on approximately a one standard deviation difference for several decades. Translated into centiles, this means that the average white person tests higher than about 84 percent of the population of blacks and that the average black person tests higher than about 16 percent of the population of whites.

The average black and white differ in IQ at every level of socioeconomic status (SES), but they differ more at high levels of SES than at low levels. Attempts to explain the difference in terms of test bias have failed. The tests have approximately equal predictive force for whites and blacks.

In the past few decades, the gap between blacks and whites narrowed by perhaps three IQ points. The narrowing appears to have been mainly caused by a shrinking number of very low scores in the black population rather than an increasing number of high scores. Improvements in the economic circumstances of blacks, in the quality of the schools they attend, in better public health, and perhaps also diminishing racism may be narrowing the gap.

The debate about whether and how much genes and environment have to do with ethnic differences remains unresolved. The universality of the contrast in nonverbal and verbal skills between East Asians and European whites suggests, without quite proving,genetic roots. Another line of evidence pointing toward a genetic factor in cognitive ethnic differences is that blacks and whites differ most on the tests that are the best measures of g, or general intelligence. On the other hand, the scores on even highly g-loaded tests can be influenced to some extent by changing environmental factors over the course of a decade or less. Beyond that, some social scientists have challenged the premise that intelligence tests have the same meaning for people who live in different cultural settings or whose forebears had very different histories.

Nothing seems more fearsome to many commentators than the possibility that ethnic and race differences have any genetic component at all. This belief is a fundamental error. Even if the differences between races were entirely genetic (which they surely are not), it should make no practical difference in how individuals deal with each other. The real danger is that the elite wisdom on ethnic differences—that such differences cannot exist—will shift to opposite and equally unjustified extremes. Open and informed discussion is the one certain way to protect society from the dangers of one extreme view or the other.


The text of the chapter attempts to explain and justify this summary. This chapter alone has 131 footnotes.

If anybody thinks Murray is wrong about any of the specific things he actually said in the quote above, or if anybody wants me to explain his arguments on a specific point in more detail, let me know and we can dive into it in more detail.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.

-Yuval Noah Harari
_DrW
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _DrW »

Gadianton wrote:-- I think Analytics and my wife (wtf shades) might see you as deflecting from evidence; I mean, I see what you're saying, but at the end of the day, if there is evidence there to make the case for the significance of genetics then there is, despite how politically sensitive it is to flaunt it around. So once we get past any circularity of restating facts about "biology" in terms of its constituents "nature and nurture," then there really might be evidence carefully accounted for that suggests "nature" makes the difference. --]

As a footnote to my comment upthread about the advantages of taking (let's call them cultural) differences into account when trying to transfer knowledge or technology, please consider the following.

Working together on the ground or in consultation with one another, two members of my immediate family and I have been responsible for intercultural technology transfer programs over the last 40 years in Japan and Israel (scientific instrumentation), Mainland China and Taiwan (energy and environment), UAE, Oman, KSA and Kuwait (scientific instrumentation, education, energy, defense, medical and environment), Central and South America (scientific instrumentation, medical and natural products), Africa and Southeast Asia (scientific instrumentation, medical and pharmaceutical), Turkey (education, energy and environment), Finland (energy and environment) and Ireland (energy and environment).

With the exception of Turkey, where one of the two projects was derailed by political events, all projects were either completed on time and on budget or are ongoing pretty much according to plan. What success we have had, in no small measure, is due to our best efforts to spend time in, and learn about, the target cultures in order to be able to account for cultural differences up front, and then by executing plans and policies to try to ameliorate these differences to the extent possible.

In most cases this process involved identifying, recruiting and developing local champions early on to help develop trust and eventually to step up into leadership positions once the initial transfer phase was complete.

The investor representative and my friend who saw The Bell Curve as social pornography 20 years ago has, nonetheless, made a career of doing the same. Last I heard was still working in the UAE on military offsets programs.
David Hume: "---Mistakes in philosophy are merely ridiculous, those in religion are dangerous."

DrW: "Mistakes in science are learning opportunities and are eventually corrected."
_EAllusion
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _EAllusion »

I'm confused about where you see the relevance of your observation to the Bell Curve DrW. The Bell Curve does touch on cross-comparisons of IQ between large international populations, but it does so explicitly in the context of arguing either 1) that recent immigrants are inherently less intelligent than natives and are causing a dysgenic pressure on the US population and likely will to lead to the social problems the book earlier attributes to IQ and 2) about international cross-racial comparisons of intelligence which it leads you to think are very large and substantially hereditary in nature. (It has a throw away line about being agnostic on nature/nurture mix, but then argues as though nature is significant.) I don't think in the original go-around on this thread Analytics either grasped or dealt with the implications argument that black Africans are, on average, right around intellectually disabled (what we used to call "mentally retarded.") Murray and Hernstein do, though.

Your comments now are about being sensitive to cultural barriers in transmitting information and modifying training programs accordingly. That's obviously a helpful thing, but it's not relevant to anything unique about what the Bell Curve is about.
_EAllusion
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _EAllusion »

for what it's worth, if we are focusing on how amazingly prescient the Bell Curve is, check out this data that has been getting a lot of play recently:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... -myth.html

It shows that cities that had the most immigration of the type Murray discusses since 1980 have had the largest drops in crime rates, while the cities with the fewest have had more crime. Overall, as we know, the crime rate, including the violent crime rate, is way down since the Bell Curve was published. We live in one of the safest times in American history. Murray and Hernstein argue, near the peak of a trend of worsening crime in America, that it's only going to get worse. Specifically, they argue that unintelligent immigrants coming to the US are going to make it worse.

This was 180 degrees the opposite of what happened.
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _EAllusion »

Analytics wrote:The topic of this thread is the book, The Bell Curve. That book is about IQ, how it differs among groups of people, and the effect that has on their lives. Some of the conclusions the book reaches are politically incorrect. It is politically incorrect to discuss research that indicates one's IQ has an effect on socioeconomic outcomes, that different racial groups have different distributions of IQ, and that there is little that can be done to change one's IQ.

Many of the scientific inferences the book discusses are politically incorrect. That puts me in a bind. If I make an attempt to discuss the evidence, I fully expect to be "politically-incorrect-shamed." Rather than being disabused of how the book misinterprets evidence, I'll be told in the vaguest of terms about how the book has long been discredited, and will then be lectured on how the most unsavory people on the planet really like the book.
You can make this even better: The most unsavory people on the planet are some of the key sources used in the book.

You're free to discuss the data if you think you have it Analytics. It is true that discussing it does tend to get one labeled negatively, but that's because the counter position is you are both wrong about how to read what the research actually says and are endorsing a position that for generations was used to oppress people. This does tend to make people upset. But you can make your case.

Look at it this way. If you think you have evidence that Jews really are involved in an international conspiracy to rule the global financial systems, you're free to present your evidence on this message board. Yes, you'll probably be seen as arguing something "politically incorrect," but that fact alone isn't reason enough to dismiss you. But at the same time, sharing something unpopular doesn't add credibility to it either.
_EAllusion
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _EAllusion »

Gadianton wrote:I think Markk's last sentence was pretty obvious, even though it wasn't written like sentences are normally written. He's saying you pretend to be like Cliff from cheers, who had reams of trivia stored in his head, but you are are really like DCP, who pretends to hold a vast store of knowledge in his head, but he's really making it up as he goes along.
I got that part. What I meant was his line, "Race and IQ is part of the bell curve discussion, I would just love to see your arguments applied to the rest of nature from a evolution standpoint."

What's he saying there? Gun to my head, my guess would be that he thinks that whatever I'm saying in this thread puts me in a dubious position on evolution. Scientific racist types like Gottfredson that Analytics cited in support of Sam Harris earlier in this thread tend to argue that it's obvious that evolution would lead to genetic differences in intellectual ability between populations that map onto what we think of as racial categories. Maybe that's what he's groping towards. I don't know. It's very unclear.
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