The Bell Curve

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_Analytics
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _Analytics »

EAllusion wrote: 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.")

There is no need to exaggerate your point--Murray claims it is a SD of one-- not two.

That said, do you agree with Murray's summary of the test results? Let's talk about the facts first--then the implications.
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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_Analytics
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _Analytics »

EAllusion wrote:Scientific racist types like Gottfredson that Analytics cited in support of Sam Harris earlier in this thread.....

Politicaly-incorrectness-shaming isn't a valid argument.
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
_EAllusion
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _EAllusion »

Analytics wrote:[q
There is no need to exaggerate your point--Murray claims it is a SD of one-- not two.


That's for African Americans, not black Africans. As argued in the Bell Curve, African Americans are right around the borderline IQ range, mid-80's or one SD. Black Africans are right around the low 70's. Intellectual disability in IQ terms is commonly thought of as around or beneath an IQ of 70.

Here's a quote,

"One reason for this reluctance to discuss averages is
that blacks in Africa, including urbanized blacks with secondary educations,
have obtained extremely low scores. Richard Lynn was able to
assemble eleven studies in his 1991 review of the literature. He estimated
the median black African IQ to be 75, approximately 1.7 standard
deviations below the U.S. overall population average
, about ten
points lower than the current figure for American black
~.~Where other
data are available, the estimates of the black African IQ fall at least that
low and, in some instances, even lower. The IQ of "coloured" students
in South Africa--of mixed racial background-has been found to be
similar to that of American blacks.

In summary: African blacks are, on average, substantially below
African-Americans in intelligence test scores. Psychometrically, there
is little reason to think that these results mean anything different about
cognitive functioning than they mean in non-African populations. For
our purposes, the main point is that the hypothesis about the special circumstances
of American blacks depressing their test scores is not substantiated
by the African data. "


There you have it. The notorious scientific racist Richard Lynn has estimated median black African IQ at 75, but we shouldn't dismiss that other tests seem to show it even lower. And a test of black students in Apartheid South Africa (look up the details of that test sometime, by the way) showed them not too different from American blacks, and those populations are similar in how much white DNA is mixed in, so we can reasonably conclude that there's nothing special about the social situation of blacks in America that explains their low scores.

In the Gottfredson editorial you cited, she implicitly explains this by arguing that blacks in America are about 20% white, thus raising their IQ somewhat.

That said, do you agree with Murray's summary of the test results? Let's talk about the facts first--then the implications.


Yes and no. There are substantial problems with the testing data he cites, some of which I've directly linked on this thread. But if you were to clear away those problems, you would have IQ testing gaps to discuss.
_EAllusion
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _EAllusion »

Analytics wrote:
EAllusion wrote:Scientific racist types like Gottfredson that Analytics cited in support of Sam Harris earlier in this thread.....

Politicaly-incorrectness-shaming isn't a valid argument.


She's literally a scientific racist. That's the term for and used by the group and more recently updated to "race realist." It's like calling someone a creationist vs. an intelligent design theorist. In a video I linked, she argues the exact position I attributed to her. Do you want me to queue it up?
_Markk
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _Markk »

EAllusion wrote:I guess it's even better than that. You're aware of my majors were in biology and psych. It's that you think that eugenics, a major inspiration for the most significant historical events of the past 100 years, is so obscure that even someone with post-secondary education with a focus on biological psychology couldn't possibly know anything about it without googling your inspired analogy to dog-breeding and the genetics of human ability?

I suppose anyone who would accidentally reinvent eugenics in a message board post in 2018 is someone who would think that, but as an FYI, nothing I talked about should be news to a literate adult.

P.S. I have no idea what your last sentence - "sentence" - is attempting to say.


Watch Cheers and you would get it. Cliff acts like he is an expert on every topic known to man.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuKwpkUNNrA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mT_7fBjxTs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6GTZrc ... dTliJl42aF


You're aware of my majors were in biology and psych.


Now say that in Cliff Clavin accent.
Don't take life so seriously in that " sooner or later we are just old men in funny clothes" "Tom 'T-Bone' Wolk"
_Markk
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _Markk »

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.

ETA: I wrote this post without first having seen Analytics' last post.


No, to pretend to be like Cliff would be an impersonation...I am saying he reminds me of a real life Cliff. You got the second part exactly right.
Don't take life so seriously in that " sooner or later we are just old men in funny clothes" "Tom 'T-Bone' Wolk"
_honorentheos
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _honorentheos »

EAllusion wrote: 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.

I think he's got a hard-on for you based on this idea you're a know-it-all that he's using trolling behavior to aggravate rather than participate in threads in any meaningful way. And that shows up in every thread where you and he interact. So it seems to blur the lines between taking a deliberately obtuse position and being confused where he jumps at any chance to play the troll regarding something you've said. I'd add that there is something shameless about this choice that it leads to focus so heavily on his characterization of you as a know-it-all to the point he chose to reinforce Markk who is playing with legitimately horrible ideas.

I mean, the way Markk is so oblivious that he thinks eugenics is something the average person wouldn't immediately recognize without referencing Google* in his racially driven stumble into WTF-land is almost as fascinating as watching the way his base racism seen in other threads made that the take away idea from this thread. It was like getting hold of Asimov's chronoscope and looking back into the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century.


*I'm also curious how Markk imagines Googling would work for someone who doesn't know what eugenics is, reads his insane post, and goes from ignorance to commenting that his dog-breeding analogy was more historically related to horse breeding analogies with horrific consequence that became universally understood as morally depraved without being able to use the word eugenics in their google search because ignorance?
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth?
~ Eiji Yoshikawa
_honorentheos
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _honorentheos »

Hey Analytics,

I have a few questions for you since I've not read the book, do not have access to it, and as of now see my reading time as in short enough supply I wouldn't seek it out.

Could you explain what the data is that is being debated? Both source and results? Somewhere up thread the ASVAB was mentioned as a data source if I recall correctly, but it would seem likely this would be only one of multiple datasets.

Also, what's the discussion in the book (or elsewhere) regarding IQ scores being culturally selective rather than culturally blind as metrics?

Lastly, what's the point? Generally speaking, we know that so many factors affect a person's learning and abilities including test-taking abilities, access to networking and other factors at birth strongly influence social-economic status over a lifetime, that upward social and economic mobility is greatly affected by a spectrum of factors, and that bias is inherently difficult to eliminate from social evaluations such that one almost has to apply extreme skepticism towards both the process and results of any study around topics where historic bias has been intense and intransigent just to engage them in a way that isn't completely in the service of a preferred position.

So, if someone says there is a metric that is defined in such a way as to show the cultural parents of this metric perform better at it than those who are not culturally of this group, and this metric has some kind of predictive power to show how successful a person might be within the parent culture that defined the metric, then...? My gut instinct is to shrug and wonder why a person finds that discussion-worthy except as a discussion of how outcomes become predicated on the structure of the inquiry.
Last edited by Guest on Sun Apr 01, 2018 4:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth?
~ Eiji Yoshikawa
_EAllusion
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _EAllusion »

honorentheos wrote:Hey Analytics,

I have a few questions for you since I've not read the book, do not have access to it,


Here you go:

https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.word ... -curve.pdf
_honorentheos
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _honorentheos »

honorentheos wrote:...and as of now see my reading time as in short enough supply I wouldn't seek it out.

Also includes not being willing at this point to expend valuable reading time on it without reasonable cause. If there is a strong consensus view that the book is so flawed as to be only worth reading in order to recognize its flaws and debate them with a resurgent interested and hostile authoritarian Nationalism then I'll wait until it seems more worthy of my reading time. Right now, Sam Harris' honor isn't just enough cause (either to belittle or defend), and I've not seen anything in this thread that suggests one way or the other that the book should be considered meaningfully contributing to the civic dialog. I could see someone like Harris getting behind it strictly because Murray was protested and prohibited from speaking at colleges and then getting on his high horse about people taking issue with data from an emotional perspective that isn't justified by the content of the data itself. But not actually illuminating anything one way or the other. He's prone to doing that, and the rising tide of intolerance on college campuses is a hobby of his.

So, thanks for the link. I'll keep reading other stuff for now while observing the discussion here.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth?
~ Eiji Yoshikawa
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