The Bell Curve

[_Gadianton]

Oh, you mean this sentence:

"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"

I'll have to defer to Markk's interpretation on that one.

[_EAllusion]

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.

One of my links already discusses this section in some detail. I might as well quote it:

Lynn’s work is cited twenty-four times in The Bell Curve’s bibliography.23 It is used to support three important claims: that East Asians have a higher average IQ than whites; that most immigrants come from groups with subpar IQs; and that the IQ score of blacks in Africa is “substantially below” the American black average. Each of these seemingly discrete claims has a key role in the formulation of The Bell Curve’s broader suggestions about the relationship among race, heredity, IQ, and social structure.

The assertion about inferior black African intelligence has particularly far-reaching implications. If it can be shown that low IQ predicts social ills such as crime, poverty, and unstable families, current views of Africa and of the sources of its tragic problems would have to be significantly revised. The finding would also support the claim that the IQ superiority of whites is genetic, because the African-American edge over blacks in Africa could be attributed to their admixture of white genes. (Murray and Herrnstein note pointedly that South African “coloureds” have about the same IQ as American blacks.) And lagging African IQ could also be taken to refute the claim that black Americans’ lower IQ is a legacy of racism—assuming, as Murray and Herrnstein put it, that “the African black population has not been subjected to the historical legacy of American black slavery and discrimination and might therefore have higher scores” (p. 288).

Setting up their discussion of Lynn’s data, Murray and Herrnstein contend that the comparison between black Americans and black Africans is a valid exercise because IQ scores have been found to predict job and school performance of black Africans as well as those of black Americans (p. 288). They also attribute the paucity of published estimates of an overall average IQ score for blacks in Africa to the fact that these scores have been extremely low—the implication being that researchers are reluctant to publish such politically incorrect findings (p. 289).

These assertions are based on a highly selective reading of the article Murray and Herrnstein cite to support them: a comprehensive 1988 review titled “Test Performance of Blacks in Southern Africa,” by the South African psychologists I.M. Kendall, M.A. Verster, and J.W.V. Mollendorf (p. 289). The main point of these three researchers’ argument is to question sweeping comparisons such as the one Lynn attempts, and Murray and Herrnstein repeat. The three South African psychologists write:

It would be rash to suppose that psychometric tests constitute valid measures of intelligence among non-westerners. The inability of most psychologists to look beyond the confines of their own culture has led to the kind of arrogance whereby judgments are made concerning the “simplicity” of African mental structure and “retarded” cognitive growth.24

Given the host of environmental and cultural factors that hamper black Africans’ test performance, they also say, “one wonders whether there is any point in even considering genetic factors as an additional source of variance between the average performance levels of westerners and Africans.”25

Nevertheless, Murray and Herrnstein venture an estimate of African IQ, drawn mainly from an article by Lynn that appeared in Mankind Quarterly in 1991. It should be noted, for a start, that the authors of The Bell Curve misreport Lynn’s data. They say he found a median IQ of 75 in Africa (p. 289). But in his article, “Race Differences in Intelligence: The Global Perspective,” Lynn said that the mean African IQ—not the median—was 70.26

In any event, how did Lynn arrive at his number? First, he assembled eleven studies of the intelligence of “pure African Negroids,” drawn from different tests of several different peoples and widely varying sample sizes in the years from 1929 to 1991. Then, he decided which was the “best”: a 1989 study from South Africa. In this test, he says, 1,093 sixteen-year-old black students (who had been in school for eight years and were therefore familiar with pencil-and-paper tests) scored a mean of 69 on the South African Junior Aptitude Test. Finally, Lynn rounded this result up to 70, and declared it a valid approximation of black IQ in the continent of Africa as a whole.27

This methodology alone invites skepticism. But Lynn also seems to have misconstrued the study. Its author, Dr. Ken Owen, told me his test was “not at all” an indication that intelligence is inherited. He blamed the low performance of blacks on environmental factors such as poorer schooling for blacks under apartheid and their difficulty with English. Owen said his results “certainly cannot” be taken as an indication of intelligence among blacks in Africa as a whole.28

Lynn further defends his choice of 70 as a “reasonable” mean for Africa on the grounds that 70 was the median of the average IQ scores reported in the eleven studies he had found. This statistical artifact aside, his list of studies is dubious. It includes what he calls “the first good study of the intelligence of pure African Negroids”: an experiment in 1929 in which 293 blacks in South Africa were given the US Army Beta Test, and got a mean score of 65.29

The test was administered by M.L. Fick, whom Kendall, Verster, and Mollendorf call an “extreme protagonist” of the view that blacks are inherently inferior to whites.30 The Beta test, which was developed for illiterate recruits in the US military, shows blatant cultural bias. One question presents a picture of people playing tennis without a net; respondents are supposed to sketch in the net to get full credit. In 1930, just a year after the Beta test was given in South Africa, C.C. Brigham, who had been its leading proponent in the US, finally admitted that the test was invalid for non-Americans. Lynn does not mention this fact.31

Far from refuting the thesis that the legacy of racism is to blame for black Americans’ lower IQ scores vis-à-vis whites, as Murray and Herrnstein contend, Lynn’s data actually support it (to the extent they have any meaning at all). Of Lynn’s eleven studies, five were conducted in South Africa under apartheid (and one in the Belgian Congo in 1952).32 If any country oppressed black people more than the United States, it was South Africa. Indeed, as the modern South African psychologists now acknowledge, one of the main uses of IQ tests under apartheid was to provide “scientific” justification for that system.

The assertion of an East Asian IQ advantage over whites, though essentially a success story, also plays a subtle, but crucial, supporting role in The Bell Curve’s overall argument about the connections among IQ, social achievement, and race. Coming before the discussion of black-white differences, it helps prepare the reader to accept racial categories as units of social analysis. It also conforms to readers’ preconceptions, shaped both by the media and by everyday experience, about the amazing brilliance of Asian immigrants and their offspring.

The authors would seem to be on firmer ground invoking Lynn here, since his specialty is the inherited mental superiority of East Asians, or “Mongoloids,” as he refers to them. In Mankind Quarterly, he has contended that the Japanese “have the highest intelligence in the world.”33 In an article in Nature in 1982, Lynn claimed the Japanese enjoy a ten-point IQ advantage over European whites, and that this difference is growing. He suggested that this helps to explain the postwar economic miracle in Japan.34

But two American psychologists, Harold W. Stevenson and Hiroshi Azuma, pointed out in a rebuttal in Nature that the Japanese sample Lynn used was made up of children of relatively well-off urban parents—a fact Lynn failed to disclose in his article. Lynn’s result was thus fatally flawed: he had tried to compare this socially skewed sample with a much broader and more representative American one.35 Murray and Herrnstein’s sole mention of this is a footnote: “For a critique of Lynn’s early work, see Stevenson and Azuma 1983” (p. 716).

[_honorentheos]

Thanks, EA. That's helpful information.

[_Analytics]

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?

I really don't care about her one way or the other. My point is that you are predictibly and gratuitously shaming me for the sin of trying to understand a position that isn't politically correct.

I get it that most people choose sides first and then select and interpret evidence to validate their side's a priori beliefs. If I were like that, it would be a great debate tactic to list the assholes who find anything pursuasive about The Bell Curve--I'd quickly conclude that Murray must be on the wrong side and and would burn the book without another thought.

I just have this personal quirk where I want look at the actual evidence and understand it.

[_Analytics]

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.

Starting with you last question first, the reason this thread started is because on another thread (over a year ago now, maybe?), somebody made a comment in passing about how there can't be a basis for morality other than religion, or something like that. In response, I linked to Sam Harris's Ted Talk about "The Moral Landscape," which I happened to like. EA hates Sam Harris and jumped in and said something to the effect that Sam Harris is a stupid evil hack, and that he is so evil, he actually gave a sympathetic interview on his podcast to the nefarious Charles Murray. I asked who Charles Murray was, then listened to the podcast EA linked to find out. That led to reading the book, with my impressions listed in this thread so that I could be disabused of what the book actually says that is wrong.

Going to your other questions, the book is about IQ. The point of the book is that "general intelligence", i.e. "g", as measured by IQ, is a real thing, and that it has a lot of predictive power for social and economic outcomes. Further, IQ tends to be heritable--your parents' IQs are a predictor of what yours will be. Further, IQ isn't all that malleable--while a good education, a good family, and a good environment can all raise one's IQ score, there are limits on how much it can help.

The basis for this are dozens and dozens of studies that the book summarizes. The book positions itself as something that is summarizing for a general audience the sum-total of all of the relevant academic studies.

The last chapters talk about the social implications of all of this. Where are all of these dynamics going to take us? What are the things we can do to make society better? What things are we doing that probably aren’t worth the cost?

Finally, there is the infamous chapter 13, which compares IQ scores across racial groups. If this chapter were to be removed entirely, the rest of the book would still hold up nicely (except a few pages at the end that talks about affirmative action and how it allegedly goes too far). Throughout, the book implores readers that everybody should be treated with the same dignity and respect regardless of race and regardless of IQ, but still tries to argue that we need to get real and that it is impossible to get to Lake Wobegon where everybody is above average.

My edition of the book has an Afterward that discusses and responds the initial public reaction to the book. There Murray said the following, which gives an indication of what I’m trying to do and what Harris and Murray talked about:

Let me make a more limited prediction: When the Sturm und Drang has subsided, nothing important in The Bell Curve will have been overturned. I say this not because Herrnstein and I were so brilliant or farsighted but because our conclusions were so conservatively phrased and anchored so firmly in the middle of the scientific road. Therein also lies the best way for you to decide what to make of the various commentaries on the book. Take whatever critical review you find to be most persuasive, delete the rhetoric, and identify the bare bones of an assertion: “Here is what Herrnstein and Murray said, and here is why they are wrong.” Then go to the relevant section of the book and put the assertion side by side with what we actually said. You will find the exercise instructive.

[_EAllusion]

The idea that their commentary on race is confined to one chapter is simply incorrect. Their entire social policy discussion is colored by their earlier commentary on race and they constantly walk you right up to conclusions without explicitly saying them. Multiple chapters focus on race and its central points involve it.

If I'm not mistaken, there's a section in which they argue that white "cognitive elites" have been treating black people relatively well out of a sense of paternalism and white guilt, but as low IQ whites concentrate, they won't be so kind to them. Because if there's anything that typifies white America's relationship to blacks circa 1994, it's paternalistic kindness.

Then they sneak in the argument that the best and brightest blacks are joining whites in the white flight out of "inner cities" leaving them ravaged as a low-IQ hellscape run by people who literally qualify as borderline intellectually disabled leading to a breakdown in social order.

This is not in Chapter 13. I think it's in a later chapter on discontent with Affirmative Action, which not surprisingly, has a lot to do with race.

Further, the idea that the book is rock solid except some throwaway aside controversy on race - nothing in the entire field of psychology is more established in the words of Sam Harris - is just ridiculous. It's status is more accurately summarized as a hodgepodge of material on intelligence of varying respectability containing a lot of sloppy research and summarizing, with the most provocative commentary that happens to define what the book is about also being also the most dubiously supported and socially noxious.

[_EAllusion]

Hey, I found what I was referring to. It's in Chapter 21. This is later than Chapter 19, the one on Affirmative Action:

The white cognitive elite is unlikely to greet this development sympathetically.
On the contrary, much of white resentment and fear of the
black underclass has been softened by the complicated mixture of white
guilt and paternalism that has often led white elites so excuse behavior
in blacks that they would not excuse in whites. This does not mean that
white elites will abandon the white underclass, but it does suggest that
the means of dealing with their needs are likely to be brusque.

As the patience of whites for other whites wears thin, the black inner
city will simultaneously be getting worse rather than better. Various
scholars, led by William Julius Wilson, have described the outmigration
of the ablest blacks that has left the inner city without its former leaders
and role models.14 Given a mean black IQ of about 85 and the link
between socioeconomic status and IQ within ethnic populations, the
implication is that the black inner city has a population with a mean
IQ somewhere in the low 80s at best, with a correspondingly small tail
in the above-average range.

What is the minimum level of cognitive resources necessary to sustain
a community at any given level of social and economic complexity?
For sustaining a village of a few hundred people in a premodern
society, the minimum average level is probably quite modest. What is
it for sustaining a modem community? The question is of enormous
practical significance yet remains innocent of any empirical investigation
whatsoever. Perhaps the crucial feature is the average cognitive
ability. Perhaps it is the size of the cadre of high-ability people. Perhaps
it is the weight of the population at low end of the distribution. No one
knows. Whatever the details, a prima facie case exists that the cognitive
resources in the contemporary inner city have fallen below the minimum
level. What looked like a rising tide of social problems a generation
ago has come to look more like a fundamental breakdown in social
organization.

ETA: I want to add here that this is yet another example of them predicting things that seem like no-brainers to the eye of someone in the early 90's. This book was published in 1994 and presumably written in the years leading into it. The "inner city" as a coded term for the poor parts of cities where minorities mostly live - as opposed to the expensive parts of Manhattan - dominated the zeigeist of this period. Our current president is more or less stuck in that time-frame and continues to use that language. The idea that the inner city was just getting worse and worse is very popular theme in the pop culture of the period, though the real story was a lot more complicated than that, as hopefully we all now know. This was a safe prediction to make from the point of view of the period. It turned out to be 100% wrong, but there would've been nothing meaningful about it turning out to be right should that have happened. Again and again in the book you see them predict things that anyone tapped into the period would regard as a safe bet, then attribute their prediction to their peculiar IQ theories. I'm not sure what we should call this gambit, but it is neat.

It'd be like writing in 2017 that the cognitive elite are going to disconnect from broader society more and more, and therefore I predict this will include abandoning fiat currencies in favor cryptocurrencies.

[_EAllusion]

I really don't care about her one way or the other. My point is that you are predictibly and gratuitously shaming me for the sin of trying to understand a position that isn't politically correct.

I get it that most people choose sides first and then select and interpret evidence to validate their side's a priori beliefs. If I were like that, it would be a great debate tactic to list the assholes who find anything pursuasive about The Bell Curve--I'd quickly conclude that Murray must be on the wrong side and and would burn the book without another thought.

I just have this personal quirk where I want look at the actual evidence and understand it.

I said that you cited a scientific racist in support of Sam Harris given to arguing a particular line of thought Markk seemed to be fiddling around with, because you literally did that. It's descriptive, not normative.

Markk - Possibly something a scientific racist would say.

Me - That sounds like an idea scientific racists, for example the one Analytics cited in this thread in support of Sam Harris, would say. Conveniently, I already linked her saying it.

Would you be happier if I used the term "race realist?" What euphemism must I use so you don't feel shamed in bravely following the evidence? The notion that evolutionary theory explains the existence of real, underlying gaps in intelligence in racial cohorts is literally what modern scientific racism, race realism if you must, is.

[_EAllusion]

Here's an article published earlier this year from the Guardian on scientific racists starting to penetrate academia again thanks to a few key figures getting on journal boards:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... am-science

It uses the terms "scientific racism" and "race realism" to describe them and refers to people who used to call themselves scientific racists, but now refer to themselves as race realists. What term should this article have used to describe them to avoid people who agree with them feeling shamed? Because that's what's important here.

[_honorentheos]

Thanks Analytics.

Your responses raises two thoughts with me.

The first is that I've more recently seen arguments made that social silos in the US are becoming culturally significant which seems to run parallel to an argument being made in your book but believed to be multi-variable and self-enforcing with little to do with innate genetics as much as social point of origin. This increasing siloing is aided by technology as people increasing date among their social-economic peers which decreases a historic means of upward social mobility where geography may have made more cross-boundary relationships possible. It's exacerbated by the unaffordability of housing within enclaves of the high-earning members of society such that there is increasing less direct cross-culture exchange in the US along with upward mobility barriers increasingly being tied to the circumstances of birth dependent on whether one is fortunate enough to be born into a family in such an enclave with access to all this brings, or is unfortunate and born outside of such an enclave with all the disadvantages this brings.

It sounds like Murray and co., would say that smart people date other smart people, have smarter children which causes the population to drift into two genetic poles which can also be mapped onto one's ethnic background. Given the more recent arguments focus on how the socio-economic background one is born into exerts strong influence on the socio-economic status one obtains in life, this argument from genetics seems out of touch with the times while making an argument that would demand a rather difficult rigorous attempt to isolate genetics out of the socio-economic background to be able to make such a claim. And I didn't see your summary demonstrate this was done. I've read and listened to Harris' Waking Up podcast for over a decade and am familiar with his thinking. He's got strengths and weaknesses as a thinker which I tend to take into account when engaging his content. In this case, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see Harris leaning into an argument that is crossing his pet-peeve with college campus intolerance and a certain libertarian belief in socio-economic status demonstrating truths about market conditions that justify branding the losers in the market as somehow deserving.

The second thought is related to IQ as a metric generally which I've understood requires one acknowledge that what it measures isn't so much innate intelligence in some sort of objective form, but rather the ability to perform mental tasks defined by mathematic, linguistics (in the US this by default means one's proficiency with English of a certain formal type and usage) and spatial-visualization proficiencies that are looked on favorably in post-industrial western cultures. The analogy used maybe over-simplified but essentially like this cartoon below, one ought to consider this when looking at results -