The Bell Curve

[_honorentheos]

I would add that the supplemental information EA has provided seems to confirm they are not careful or concerned with isolating social factors from their claims. Both the African and Japan examples provided should be concerning to anyone as bad methodology.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

I would add that the supplemental information EA has provided seems to confirm they are not careful or concerned with isolating social factors from their claims. Both the African and Japan examples provided should be concerning to anyone as bad methodology.

It's only a social issue if Whites can be blamed for keeping minorities down. If a minority group somehow magically avoided this oppression then it's not a social issue and that minority group must be repressed.

Or is it a minority social issue that keeps minorities scoring lower for standardized test? I believe it's the ASVAB where "... nearly 40 percent of black students and 30 percent of Hispanics don't pass, compared with 16 percent of whites. The average score for blacks is 38 and for Hispanics is 44, compared to whites' average score of 55."

What social corrections that don't cost billions of Libertarian dollars will be required to correct this differential?

- Doc

[_EAllusion]

Murray thinks that the effects of education on differences in ASVAB scores can be accounted for by controlling for years of education and ultimately concludes that education has little to no effect on IQ. As a paper I linked in this thread shows, the efforts in the Bell Curve go wrong even on that point, but the bigger issue to my mind is that educational attainment is a distinct variable from quality of education. If it wasn't, we wouldn't care at all about differentials in quality of schooling in the United States. The temptation is to think about differences of quality of schools and teachers, but it goes deeper than that. Even kids with the same teachers and courses can get very different experience based on who they are. Class and race in particular are famous for producing implicit bias in teachers, which other studies show can have an effect on children's performance. Children's own culturally reinforced biases towards themselves can have that impact in fact.

But even behind that, education doesn't just happen in the classroom. It occurs by parents and the surrounding community reinforcing and prepping for the educational experience outside the classroom, starting in infancy. The ASVAB is aptitude test. It tests your knowledge of things you are taught in formal education or mental tasks formal education prepares you for. That's what their IQ dataset for a good chunk of the book is relying on. If we want to know something about to what extent that differences in scores on it reflect educational background rather than an early underlying intelligence factor, we need a more holistic picture of people's educational experience than what grade a person was in when they took the test can capture.

If Analytics adopts Murray's viewpoint here, then I'd be curious to know how he justifies caring about quality of schooling, especially on the basics, since it ultimately matters so little to the basic outcomes of schooling we care about, such as reading and mathematical ability. Isn't this a place where we can save money by making some cuts?

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Quick. Everyone except EA google Emma Goldman, and then point out the exact identical political philosophies between the two.

- Doc

[_honorentheos]

What social corrections that don't cost billions of Libertarian dollars will be required to correct this differential?

- Doc

Honestly, I don't know. Putting money into education is a big topic here in Arizona right now as teachers are threatening to strike unless there is more money put back into the classrooms and into teacher pay. We've stopped investing as a state in education because the cuts deemed necessary 10 years ago have become the new ground level expectation. So, while it would cost money, it's certainly a necessity just to get back to levels reflective of recent pre-recession education spending.

But among the teachers I know the pressures they see are from all directions. Kids being raised in families where there is limited financial security affect the likelihood the kids are getting needed help at home to do homework, have the out-of-classroom discussions that matter, and have access to summer programs that mean a kid coming back to school in the fall has continued to progress or at least not slid backwards. Don't know if you ever read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers but it makes a few very good points on this subject I tend to align with regarding performance being tied to factors outside of the standard school day and school year. Addressing access to options that close those gaps seems needed.

I tend to believe we could do more to make non-college-tract options available earlier similar to the way Germany and other European nations do where kids could start an apprenticeship and be on their way to becoming a trade journeyman in a good non-college job rather than push college on all youth.

I lean far enough left that I tend to view post-High School education as something that could be paid for in the same way we currently pay for secondary education so options are available for more people from free college tuition to 21st Century vocational programs to paid internships in non-college tract jobs such as manufacturing or the like.

Really, I'm a big proponent of 1-for-1 transfer of defense spending into education spending and getting creative with how we approach it so we're building the same kind of hand up that would be the 21st Century equivalent of the High School movement in the early 1900's or the GI Bill after WWII. We've had a couple of generations in the US who did not get the major educational bump up that occurred more regularly in our past as a nation when we were racing ahead of Great Britain to become the global leader. I don't think it's unrelated to our other woes including wealth inequality and the strain on social order that folks like Ajax intuit but blame on immigrants rather than on more fundamental structural issues.

[_Analytics]

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.

My point is that in order for you to make your point about what you speculated Markk was thinking, there was no reason whatsoever--none--to drag me into it and associate me with "scientific racism." I predicted that you would, but you didn't have to. You could have just as easily said, "That sounds like something Linda Gottfredson, a professor at the University of Delaware and an editor of multiple academic journals, would say...." As you know, the only reason I cited her was because a casual look at her bio makes it appear she is a bona fide scholar with some standing in her field. I had know idea that accredited and highly regarded public universities grant tenure to "scientific racists."

[_EAllusion]

My point is that in order for you to make your point about what you speculated Markk was thinking, there was no reason whatsoever--none--to drag me into it and associate me with "scientific racism." I predicted that you would, but you didn't have to. You could have just as easily said, "That sounds like something Linda Gottfredson, a professor at the University of Delaware and an editor of multiple academic journals, would say...." As you know, the only reason I cited her was because a casual look at her bio makes it appear she is a bona fide scholar with some standing in her field. I had know idea that accredited and highly regarded public universities grant tenure to "scientific racists."

The relevant context is the ongoing conversation in this thread that Markk said he started reading. That's why it makes sense to refer to your bringing her up and me linking her saying the argument I attributed to her. Markk sounded like he was somewhat incoherently bringing up an evolutionary argument scientific racists are wont to use that defines what scientific racism is, and it just so happens that this particular thread on this particular message board already had an example of that you initiated by citing that person in support of Sam Harris. That's the relevant context. Puffing up her credentials by referring to the fact that she edits journals, on the other hand, just sounds like trying to add credibility to her for its own sake. Should I also have posted her CVV? If you were unaware that there are some scientific racists in academia, that's relevant context to a book you are reviewing that relies on them as experts, and also odd given your awareness of credentialed people who will defend all manner of questionable positions. This, after all, is a board that mostly discusses dubious LDS apologetics that has plenty of academic defenders.

[_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.

From this article:

Lynn sits on the editorial advisory board of Personality and Individual Differences, produced by Elsevier – one of the world’s largest scientific publishers, whose titles include the highly respected journals the Lancet and Cell. Among his papers was The Intelligence of American Jews (2004), arguing that “Jews have a higher average level of verbal intelligence than non-Jewish whites”.

Both Meisenberg and Lynn also serve on the editorial board of Intelligence, a psychology journal also published by Elsevier. Meisenberg has authored at least eight articles for it over the years, including one in 2010 on the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans, and another in 2013 on the relationship between “national intelligence” and economic success.

While journals are free to publish whatever they deem worthy, subject to peer review, the choice of who to appoint to an editorial board is important because these members help shape its policy and scope. According to Elsevier’s own guidance for editors, they “should be appointed from key research institutes”. Lynn is listed on Intelligence’s board with no affiliation whatsoever.

The editor-in-chief of Intelligence is Richard J Haier, an emeritus professor in the medical school at the University of California, Irvine. When I asked him how he felt about having Mankind Quarterly editors on the board of his journal, he told me, “I consulted several people about this. I decided that it’s better to deal with these things with sunlight and by inclusion.” He continued: “The area of the relationship between intelligence and group differences is probably the most incendiary area in the whole of psychology. And some of the people who work in that area have said incendiary things … I have read some quotes, indirect quotes, that disturb me, but throwing people off an editorial board for expressing an opinion really kind of puts us in a dicey area. I prefer to let the papers and the data speak for themselves.”

Depending on how closely you followed the Sam Harris spat, Haier wrote a piece defending Harris and Murray that was widely cited as its main academic defense. The counter argument to Haier's "let the data speak for itself" is that Lynn is a notorious for shoddy work in defense of racist pseudoscience that shouldn't pass peer-review, much less allow him to sit on an editorial boards of journals with aims of being respectable. But I am a bit aghast at how underplayed the "some things that are disturbing" line is. Murray and Herstein just identify him as a foremost expert on race and ethnic differences and intelligence in the Bell Curve, and it does seem wrong to not point out his supremacist ideological beliefs and agenda underneath that. If the science was fine, then the science is fine, but it isn't. So you're just left with giving a soap box to someone who does not deserve it and uses it for advocacy of noxious views. Just because he represents a group of similarly motivated and sympathetic people in academia who share his views, that doesn't mean they by default get in on the academic conversation. Imagine if creationists got this approach to peer-review.

[_Analytics]

Murray thinks that the effects of education on differences in ASVAB scores can be accounted for by controlling for years of education and ultimately concludes that education has little to no effect on IQ. As a paper I linked in this thread shows, the efforts in the Bell Curve go wrong even on that point...

If you are trying to demonstrate you read that paper and understand it, you are failing. The paper you linked to by Winship and Korenman don't dispute any of The Bell Curve's explicit major points--none. The paper agrees with Herrnstein and Murray on many of their points (e.g. they agree that IQ has considerable predictive power for different dimensions of social and economic success such as earnings and income, job performance, and criminal behavior.) They also agree with them that educational programs have some effect on intelligence. "The issues in dispute are how much?"

The main body of the paper has two main parts. The first is a survey of the literature on the topic of how education affects IQ. The papers surveyed largely agree that education helps IQ. While this is a devastating blow to Murrayism, it is in perfect agreement with what Herrnstein and Murray actually say in their book.

Your source says, "Herrnstein and Murray as well as Ceci presumably agree that educational programs have some effect on intelligence. The issues in dispute are how much?" Winship and Korenman don't dispute any of Herrnstein's and Murray's main points, and explicitly agree with them on many:

General intelligence has considerable predictive power for different dimensions of economic and social success such as earnings and income, job performance, and criminal behavior. “In an earlier paper we analyzed the sensitivity of Herrnstein and Murray’s estimates to different methods for controlling for family background. We found that even fixed-=effect methods based on sibling pairs, perhaps the most powerful way to control for family background, produced estimates of the effect of IQ on adult behaviors and outcomes quite similar to those reported in The Bell Curve. We did, however, find effects of family background comparable in size with those of IQ, and quite a bit larger than those reported in The Bell Curve. Also, the effect of IQ was substantially reduced by the inclusion of education as a control. We concluded, as did Jencks, that the evidence suggests that IQ—along with education and family background—is an important contributor to social and economic success, but not the dominant determinant as Herrnstein and Murray stress in The Bell Curve. Because IQ is one of the important predictors of success, a logical question to ask is, What determines IQ?

The second main part of the paper critically looks at Murray's statistical analysis of the NLSY dataset and reruns the model after making some corrections. It's worth noting that the NLSY dataset is enormous and enormously complicated, and that Murray "graciously" gave Winship and Korenman the actual compiled and filtered dataset that was used in the Bell Curve analysis so that W&K wouldn't have to spend days (or weeks?) trying to figure out how to recreate it. Winship and Korenman found some errors in how Murray cleansed and summarized the data. A couple of the technical mistakes that Murray made are in fact embarrassing. After correcting those mistakes and rerunning the analysis in what is fundamentally the same analysis that Murray attempted to do and in fact did do, they concluded that the effect of education on IQ is somewhat larger than what Murray had estimated. That is great news, but in no way changes or discredits what the book actually says.

....but the bigger issue to my mind is that educational attainment is a distinct variable from quality of education. If it wasn't, we wouldn't care at all about differentials in quality of schooling in the United States. The temptation is to think about differences of quality of schools and teachers, but it goes deeper than that. Even kids with the same teachers and courses can get very different experience based on who they are. Class and race in particular are famous for producing implicit bias in teachers, which other studies show can have an effect on children's performance. Children's own culturally reinforced biases towards themselves can have that impact in fact.

But even behind that, education doesn't just happen in the classroom. It occurs by parents and the surrounding community reinforcing and prepping for the educational experience outside the classroom, starting in infancy. The ASVAB is aptitude test. It tests your knowledge of things you are taught in formal education or mental tasks formal education prepares you for. That's what their IQ dataset for a good chunk of the book is relying on. If we want to know something about to what extent that differences in scores on it reflect educational background rather than an early underlying intelligence factor, we need a more holistic picture of people's educational experience than what grade a person was in when they took the test can capture.

I'm glad you agree with Murray and Herrnstein on these points!

If Analytics adopts Murray's viewpoint here, then I'd be curious to know how he justifies caring about quality of schooling, especially on the basics, since it ultimately matters so little to the basic outcomes of schooling we care about, such as reading and mathematical ability. Isn't this a place where we can save money by making some cuts?

When you say "Murray's viewpoint here", are you talking about what Murray actually says his viewpoint is in the book we are discussing, or are we talking about Murrayism--something that isn't really even a caricature of what he actually says, but rather is a fictional set of insidious beliefs that justify the intense emotional reaction you have to reading the book?

[_Analytics]

My point is that in order for you to make your point about what you speculated Markk was thinking, there was no reason whatsoever--none--to drag me into it and associate me with "scientific racism." I predicted that you would, but you didn't have to. You could have just as easily said, "That sounds like something Linda Gottfredson, a professor at the University of Delaware and an editor of multiple academic journals, would say...." As you know, the only reason I cited her was because a casual look at her bio makes it appear she is a bona fide scholar with some standing in her field. I had know idea that accredited and highly regarded public universities grant tenure to "scientific racists."

The relevant context is the ongoing conversation in this thread that Markk said he started reading. That's why it makes sense to refer to your bringing her up and me linking her saying the argument I attributed to her. Markk sounded like he was somewhat incoherently bringing up an evolutionary argument scientific racists are wont to use that defines what scientific racism is, and it just so happens that this particular thread on this particular message board already had an example of that you initiated by citing that person in support of Sam Harris. That's the relevant context. Puffing up her credentials by referring to the fact that she edits journals, on the other hand, just sounds like trying to add credibility to her for its own sake. Should I also have posted her CVV? If you were unaware that there are some scientific racists in academia, that's relevant context to a book you are reviewing that relies on them as experts, and also odd given your awareness of credentialed people who will defend all manner of questionable positions. This, after all, is a board that mostly discusses dubious LDS apologetics that has plenty of academic defenders.

I didn't say that you should have puffed up her credentials. I merely indicated that you could have. Likewise, you could have left out the derogatory label "scientific racist." In fact there are any number of ways you could refer to her. The way you chose to do so--calling her a scientific racist and linking her to me--comes across as a blatant attempt at shaming me for trying to understand the actual arguments rather than jumping on your PC bandwagon about how evil it all is.