The Bell Curve

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

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.

This is a hugely important point that's being passed over by educators, politicians, and the electorate. Not everyone is meant to be an academic, engineer, or poli-sci radfem women's studies guru. We'd be serving hundreds of thousands of kids much, much better by tracking them for industry jobs that are in need of plumbers, electricians, drivers, carpenters, etc... All of which need some degree of certification these days.

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.

Despite being a retiree pro-military service type, I still think we ought to reduce our defense spending by 3/4 and use that money to do what you suggest and avoid running up our debt. I get we have a military industrial complex, but it's just too much bang for our bucks.

- Doc

[_Analytics]

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.

On your first point above, yes. In fact, a few years ago Murray has talked about super zip codes--areas where people grow up in relative isolation where almost everybody is above-average in almost every way.

In fact, his latest book is called Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 which discusses this trend as being an entirely new thing. I laugh at the idea of neo-nazis purchasing the book thinking from the title that the book is racist. The joke is on them though:

In Coming Apart, Charles Murray explores the formation of American classes that are different in kind from anything we have ever known, focusing on whites as a way of driving home the fact that the trends he describes do not break along lines of race or ethnicity.

Drawing on five decades of statistics and research, Coming Apart demonstrates that a new upper class and a new lower class have diverged so far in core behaviors and values that they barely recognize their underlying American kinship—divergence that has nothing to do with income inequality and that has grown during good economic times and bad.

The top and bottom of white America increasingly live in different cultures, Murray argues, with the powerful upper class living in enclaves surrounded by their own kind, ignorant about life in mainstream America, and the lower class suffering from erosions of family and community life that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness. That divergence puts the success of the American project at risk.

[Of course I'm sure that while the book says it's explicit purpose is that these trends "do not break along lines of race or ethnicity", that EA will claim that the real point of the book is about how Murray hates blacks.]

On your second point, Murray does talk about this a lot and does his best to control for it. For example, he cites studies where twins were separated at birth and put up for adoption in dramatically different environments. For example, say one twin is put into a "bad" home in a bad neighborhood and has nothing going for him, and his IQ is 85. Say his twin is put into an excellent home in an excellent neighborhood with excellent schools, where the average IQ of his adapted siblings and classmates are 110. The twin in the good home will end up with a higher IQ than the twin in the bad home, but will still be below average. Say, with an IQ of 95.

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.

Possibly. I am honestly bewildered at why Harris thought posting that email conversation with the editor of Vox would be a good thing.

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 -

The book talks a lot about this as well. Some psychologists--most notably Howard Gardner, would totally agree with your point. Murray subscribes to the competing view that something called "general intelligence" exists. Quoting from the introduction of the book:

[Charles] Spearman [a psychologist who studied this stuff a century ago] noted that as the data from many different mental tests were accumulating, a curious result kept turning up: If the same group of people took two different mental tests, anyone who did well (or poorly) on one test tended to do similarly well (or poorly) on the other. This outcome did not seem to depend on the specific content of the tests. As long as the tests involved cognitive skills of one sort or another, the positive correlations appeared....

Eventually, he hypnotized that there is something he calls g which represents "general intelligence", which is a measure of a person's capacity for complex mental work. Apparently, they've researched this a lot over the last 100+ years, and the idea still has traction with psychologists. IQ tests are now considered the best measure of "g", but as noted above, any cognitive test is going to be at least correlated with "g". As corroborated by EA's critical source, even if you don't believe "g" exists, there is robust evidence that IQ test scores are in fact highly predictive of many important socioeconomic outcomes.

Of course while IQ is predictive in a statistical sense, there is also a ton of epsilon--individual differences from the mean predicted by the model. Perhaps Gardner's more subtle views on intelligence can explain why some people with relatively low (high) IQ's do relatively well (poorly).

[_Analytics]

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.

I wouldn't trust EA on this one. I see very little relationship between what the book says and what EA thinks it says.

[_EAllusion]

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?

I am referring to the position argued in the book that you just read that and describe on solid ground. Varience in education doesn't budge IQ much, which we can adequately measure using the AQFT. One of the central theses of the book is the relatively static nature of early measured IQ. Once we understand what exactly the ASVAB tests, the implication is clear.

If you agree with that, my criticisms offered notwithstanding, then I am curious how you can justify spending so much on education, or at least education in mental tasks the AQFT directly measures. Why bother given expected meager returns of differences in educational quality on core aptitude?

It appears in answering this, you chose to ignore entirely my point about the complexities of quality of education and act as though my main point was a paper I linked that Murray and Hernstein also underestimate the effects of educational attainment on IQ. Oddly, you do this even though I made the exact same point about that paper months ago on the same thread.

As best I can tell, to the extent you didn't just avoid the question, your response is, "they said education helps some." Their arguments say quality of education matters very little. The relative immutabilty of early IQ is a central argument of the book, in fact, and one that Sam Harris describes as the one if the surest conclusions of the entire field of psych. Consequently, the logical thing to do would be to adjust the value of education on what the AQFT measures accordingly.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

This is an incredibly interesting 31-page paper produced in 2012 on this very subject:

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/paper ... 012int.pdf

I spent the morning reading it because why not.

TL;DR - There are racial differences. No one likes it, and they hope it boils down to cultural differences. see: pg 7 of the linked file

- Doc

[_EAllusion]

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.

Labeling her a scientific racist, which again is the *actual technical term for her position* that is only negative because people don't like scientific racism, is relevant in the context of identifying a core scientific racist argument the person I was responding to seemed to be making.

It appears your problem here continues to be thinking that "scientific racist" is the same as saying a pejorative like "racist." The aforementioned Lynn still calls himself a scientific racist I believe. Most of them have updated to race realist to avoid the negative connotation of the earlier term. That's why I asked if you would be happy with that. If so, problem there is that the term race realist is picking up the same negative association as scientific racist because they refer to the same thing and it's the thing being referred to that people don't like.

For someone complaining about being "PC" you sure are doing a lot of language policing to spare your feelings.

[_EAllusion]

I would add that the supplemental information EAllusion 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.

I wouldn't trust EAllusion on this one. I see very little relationship between what the book says and what EAllusion thinks it says.

He was referring to my linked article on the quality of their references to support their point on black African intelligence that you misrepresented. You ignored this line of conversation after I quoted the book saying what you said it didn't. One might say there was very little relationship between what the book says and what you think it says.

[_Analytics]

I am referring to the position argued in the book that you just read that and describe on solid ground.

I honestly don't think you understand what the book actually says. Here are some quotes from it on this topic (since it is long, I will subgenius it):

Parents buying new houses often pick the neighborhood according to the reputation of the local schools. Affluent parents may spend tens of thousands of dollars to put their children through private schools. Tell parents that the quality of the schools doesn’t matter, and they will unanimously, and rightly, ignore you, for differences in schools do matter in many important ways. But in affecting IQ, they do not matter nearly as much as most people think....

Aside from the issue of school quality is the question of whether simply going to school makes any difference to one’s intelligence. The answer is self-evidently yes. Going to school and learning how to read and write, manipulate numbers, find out about one’s culture and about the discoveries of science are going to raise scores on IQ tests compared to not going to school.

But although it is obvious that schooling itself fosters intelligence, it is far less obvious how much of the intellectual variation around us can be attributed to differences in the amount of schooling people get. If large numbers of people were getting no schooling at all, there would be cognitive disadvantages on a grand scale that could be blamed on a lack of formal education. But in modern countries, natural variation does not span so wide a range.

An example of a study that had enough natural variation in it to find an effect of schooling was done in Sweden a half-century ago. 25 IQ tests were given in 1938 to a representative sample of several hundred 10-year-old boys in public and private schools in a Swedish city. Ten years later, the boys were tested again as part of an induction examination for national military service. In addition to the two IQ scores, the boys’ home and family backgrounds and the total years of schooling were available for analysis. The average subject in the study had completed only eight years of schooling, which means that many of them had completed fewer. Fewer than 10 percent of them had finished high school, and still fewer had gone on to university.

Compared to present-day Sweden or America, the men experienced a wide range of years in school. Even so, the main determiner by far of IQ at the age of 20 was the IQ at the age of 10, by a factor of more than five times as important as years of schooling. 26 On the other hand, schooling was a significant though much weaker predictor, after holding IQ at age 10 and family background constant.

Since there was some beneficial effect of schooling, the results of the study were properly used to argue that additional years of school would pay off in higher scores. We can infer from the Swedish study that some of the Flynn effect around the world is explained by the upward equalization of schooling, but a by-product is that schooling in and of itself no longer predicts adult intelligence as strongly, assuming it did so when many people were not getting much schooling. 27 The more uniform a country’s schooling is, the more correlated the adult IQ is with childhood IQ.

The average American now gets more than three extra years of schooling compared to the time when the earliest intelligence tests were given. To be sure, years spent in school still varies in America, and it is presumably still contributing to variation in cognitive abilities. 28 But given how small the effect was in the Sweden of the 1930s and 1940s, it is unlikely to be large in America today, given the enormous compression of educational variation in America during the twentieth century (see Chapters 1 and 6).

Nevertheless, we accept the basic premise that variation in the amount of schooling accounts for some portion of the observed variation in cognitive ability. Besides not knowing how large this remaining effect is, it is hard to estimate how much more would be gained on the average by further equalization of years of schooling.

School differences can nonetheless be important. If a child is near the top of the intelligence distribution to begin with, the school can make a major difference in whether that intellectual talent is actually realized, a topic we consider in the next chapter. Or if a child has specific learning disabilities, access to the latest pedagogical techniques and technology may make a major difference. There doubtless are, in addition, pockets in America’s vast educational realm where schools are uncommonly good or uncommonly poor, in which the children are benefiting or suffering cognitively. By definition, however, these are unusual cases, not likely to show up in national data on intelligence.

This discussion has not meant to imply that the fostering of cognitive ability is the only result we want from schools. The civility, let alone the safety, of the environment may vary widely from school to school. Skillful teachers may make learning more interesting. They may infuse children with a love of learning to some extent. These are effects worth worrying about, but they do not alter the fundamental message that the data convey: Equalizing the amount or objective quality of schooling in America cannot be counted on to equalize cognitive ability much....

When quantum changes are made in education— moving from no education to an elementary education, or from 6 years of schooling to 12— then broad gains can occur, but the United States has in most respects passed this stage. Additional attempts to raise IQ through special accelerated courses have modest effects: short-term gains of two to four IQ points after extensive training. Long-term gains are less clear and likely to be smaller. In short, the school is not a promising place to try to raise intelligence or to reduce intellectual differences, given the constraints on school budgets and the state of educational science.

Herrnstein, Richard J.; Murray, Charles. Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) (p. 394-414). Free Press. Kindle Edition.

Do you take issue with anything I quoted above? What is the opposite view? A simplistic of Winship and Korenman where if somebody with a below-average IQ and a bachelor's degree from BYU-Hawaii wants to increase his IQ by 60 points and become a genius all he needs to do is go to school for 22 more years?

[_EAllusion]

Labeling her a scientific racist, which again is the *actual technical term for her position* ...

I'm sort of fascinated by this PC-language policing from you Analytics. This has long been the term that refers to the position that science, empirical reasoning, supports the existence of human racial categories in nature with some being inferior, especially intellectually inferior, to others. It has a long tradition and only really fell into total disrepute after WW II.

It's true that historical scientific racism has being so thoroughly pseudoscientific and used to justify all manner of raced-based oppression that the term has a very negative connotation. The term is nearly synonymous with racist pseudoscience for that reason. People who are scientific racists or sympathize with them have alternatively used terms like "race realism" to dissociate with that connotation and sound more respectable, but that too has problems with the same negative connotation because critics of their views still believe that involves pseudoscience to justify racist treatment of people.

You brought up a survey that is similar to the DI's "dissent from Darwinsim" list in an effort to establish how mainstream the Bell Curve's central arguments are that was collected and penned by a person who advocates scientific racism. Lest there be any confusion about that, I linked a 2ish hour video with a popular alt-right youtube host known for pushing scientific racism wherein she argues extensively for the inherent intellectual inferiority of traditionally oppressed racial groups. More specifically, at one point she gets into a back and forth with the host about how intuitively logical it is that evolutionary pressure would produce intelligence differences between racial groups. If you didn't bother to watch it, it even gets pretty haughty and condescending about it.

Markk seemed to be reaching to similar reasoning, so I connected it to your citation of someone with the same viewpoint that I already linked on this thread. Makes sense to me. I called her a scientific racist because we are specifically talking about a core view among scientific racists. It's absolutely relevant to the discussion at hand.

You took this as trying to label you a racist to discredit you, it would seem. And sure, while supporting yourself with a juiced petition you found on Wikipedia or somesuch to defend the Bell Curve compiled by a scientific racist is not a great look, that's just accurately describing what happened. What I can't quite get over is that you shame and demand not to refer to her as a "scientific racist" in the context of this conversation. But that's the term that describes the view under discussion. Even with the pejorative association, it's literally the correct term. And even when I suggest offering the more euphemistic alternative, you reject that. What word am I supposed to use to describe scientific racism then?

It looks like your answer is don't. Don't call it what it is. That might make you look bad, and we can't have that. Instead, maybe talk about the prestige of her credentials.

[_Analytics]

I wouldn't trust EAllusion on this one. I see very little relationship between what the book says and what EAllusion thinks it says.

He was referring to my linked article on the quality of their references to support their point on black African intelligence that you misrepresented. You ignored this line of conversation after I quoted the book saying what you said it didn't. One might say there was very little relationship between what the book says and what you think it says.

LOL. I'm guessing since he mentioned Japan, he was referring to the editorial you quoted that was critical of Richard Lynn. Using that as a basis to dismiss a different author's book as "not careful or concerned with isolating social factors from their claims" is misguided. Yes, there are about 24 references in the bibliography to papers by Richard Lynn. But that is only 5% of the total references. I don't know much about Richard Lynn, but I do know that one of his papers was published in Nature (Lynn, R. 1982. IQ in Japan and the United States shows a growing disparity. Nature 297:222-223), so he can't be 100% off the tracks all the time, can he?