https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Allegations_of_...

If you put that line at the beginning of your comment you'd saved me a couple of seconds reading.

Plus I'd take anything on Quillette with a huge pinch of salt - any publication that employs Toby Young and pimps Jordan Peterson has an obvious agenda.

It seems as obvious as "height is correlated with gender" to me, but feel free to go read The Bell Curve or something.

WOW... this post was killed. Goes to show the paranoia that still exists (and is probably stronger these days) around debating this book.

I did hear about the president of Harvard being fired though. I read about The Bell Curve. Damore. The list goes on and on. You must know what I'm talking about.

Maybe I'm just biased so I filter bubble out evidence that sexism is sexist.

He's a management professor.

Flagged as BS.

Far from "decades-debunked", a 2018 analysis in the Archives of Scientific Psychology found that the book "stand[s] up well to the test of time and contain[s] very little information that has since come into question by mainstream scholars." It further notes that "some readers will also be surprised to find that The Bell Curve is not as controversial as its reputation would lead one to believe." [1]

[1] http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-07714-001

"In the current study, EQCA experts wereasked what percentage of the US Black-White differences in IQ is, in their view, due to environment or genes. In general, EQCA experts gave a 50–50 (50% genes, 50% environment) response with a slight tilt to the environmental position (51% vs. 49%; Table 3). When EQCA experts were classified into discrete categories (genetic, environmental, or 50–50), 40% favored an environmental position, 43% a genetic position, and 17% assumed 50–50." - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2019.101406

> I think this video [1], does a good job of attacking a lot of race science and intelligence

'Attacking' is a good description, as the author of that video went to great lengths to mislead. For example, he says the author of The Bell Curve doesn't understand what 'hereditary' means. But the definition the video author gives for 'hereditary', and the definition given in the book he's reviewing, match almost perfectly. So how did he come to that conclusion? He went out of his way to find a live interview where the book author fumbled his answer, instead of giving the definition from the book he's reviewing, or as you more accurately put it, attacking.

It has all the classics: cursing the "educated classes," citing "The Bell Curve," and entreating the reader to join his local militia. A sprinkle of red-baiting and survivalist paranoia adds a delicate finish to an otherwise overwhelmingly fruity bouquet.

https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Her...

Suffice it to say, Murray's version of the "core of American civilization" is something I'd be very happy to see disintegrate. I doubt I'm the only one.

I took that as a dog whistle reference to 'The Bell Curve' since that is the most famous treatise for that view and a support of the conclusions that it made.

Or I could be just reading too much into it and extending Damore's thesis into race, too, is unfair.

That's the secret sauce of dog whistles...plausible deniability.

You may disagree with some of its conclusions (I personally am skeptical of its conclusions about racial differences in IQ), but to call it pseudo science is, I think, unfair. FWIW, Steven Pinker, who is about as thoughtful and level headed as they come, agrees:

https://mobile.twitter.com/sapinker/status/84691284703672320...

And, anyway, the point I was making had nothing to do with racial IQ differences. It was referring to what the rest of The Bell Curve is about (discussion of racial IQ differences makes up only about 25% of the book): how the US society’s transition away from most people working in agriculture toward most people working at desks has created a class structure stratified by intelligence.

It’s actually a shame that the book discusses racial IQ differences at all, because everyone got hung up on that and totally missed what is, IMO, a much more important point. And I think it explains a lot about current politics in the US.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-fund...

“It has always seemed to be odd that we like to call the human brain the most complex known object in the Universe, yet many of us are still prepared to accept that we can measure brain function by doing a few so-called IQ tests,” Dr Highfield said.

I wonder, what is your opinion on Murray's and Herrnstein's The Bell Curve?

The reason the book's controversial is that it builds a case that intelligence has a genetic basis, and some races are smarter (on average) than others (although there's tremendous individual variation, and environment / upbringing plays roles too).

If that's indeed the way the world actually is, would that be a truth our society could accept?

On the one hand, I'm no racist, nor do I aspire to ever be one. On the other hand, I want to say that I aspire to a proper scientific worldview, understanding the world according to evidence and reason. If I dismiss The Bell Curve's argument, am I being properly skeptical of unproven claims, or am I just going along with societal pressure and my own wish to live in a world where race really doesn't matter?

The other turns that around and says no we don't because "structural racism/sexism/classism/etc".

So, they argue against each-other because one sees the current inequality of outcome as a consequence of some sort of "biased" fairness in opportunity. And since the other side disputes the existence of that bias, they think that what's being advocated is pure equality, irrespective of any distribution of skills/talents/etc.

It's an impasse, and we'll never get passed it until we start agreeing and quantifying the possibility that there are differences between sexes/races/cultures/ages. Only then can we correct for any supposed structural biases. It's a touchy topic, and one only need look at the type of controversy The Bell Curve book caused to understand the incredible difficulty that we face trying to conclusively resolve this scientifically.

"Klein published fringe, ideologically-driven, and cherry-picked science as though it were the consensus of experts in the field"

But Sam's quote is

"At the time Murray wrote The Bell Curve, these claims were not scientifically controversial"

Whilst Klein writes

"We believe there is a fairly wide consensus among behavioral scientists in favor of our views, but there is undeniably a range of opinions in the scientific community."

There just seems to be a level of care of and detail that Harris lacks whilst Klein's writers seem to have.

It's perplexing to me that Sam Harris could possibly believe he's in the right not just in terms of the subject matter, but in terms of his behaviour.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

I'd seriously question his credibility on this topic. A bunch of cherry-picked wedding announcements plus some ivy league admission rates aren't gonna do it for me, guy.

But that stuff has been studied and I'm afraid it's not very relevant and they are really smarter.

"The bell curve" is the obvious book to recommend but so too would be the more recent "the case against education" or the documentary "three identical strangers".

For one, "race" is a very slippery concept, and as a social construction is so deeply correlated with other determinants of well-being in the US that any imputation that it is an independent causal factor is problematic at best. Murry doesn't do a great job of untangling these effects.

For two, as applied to populations, IQ isn't necessarily more than a measure of general well-being. Alternative measures of IQ correlate pretty well with the Stanford-Binet, but you know what else does? Grip strength. The strength of your hands correlates about as well with your standard IQ score as various alternative IQ measures. The most plausible explanation for this is that all these measures are metrics of well-being, not "general intelligence".

The very notion that "general intelligence" is a measurable property, like height, rather than a complex multi-variate phenomenon that cannot be unproblematically reduced to a single number is worth taking seriously.

Murray seems mostly unconcerned by all that, and insufficiently aggressive about looking for ways of challenging his own hypotheses.

I just reviewed my notes for The Bell Curve to make sure I hadn't mis-remembered the content. Out of 22 chapters, two are on race. One begins with, "The first thing to remember is that the differences among individuals are far greater than the differences between groups." In other words: knowing someone's race tells you nothing about their intelligence.

The chapters on race contain no expression of racial superiority or inferiority, nor any policies favoring discrimination. The only definition of racism that could apply is the view that there are some statistical differences between races, though the book doesn't weigh-in on how much is caused by genes vs environment. It also reiterates that these statistical differences cannot be used to infer anything about individuals.

Supporting racism (in the sense of advocating for racial superiority or discrimination) is deeply unethical, so I'd very much like to know if Murray holds such views.

Now, Murray had problems in The Bell Curve -- he didn't properly understand regression to the mean, for example. But did you students actually read it before laughing? He was pretty solid on most of the genetic topics he covered (a small part of the book).

Here's a good start to correcting your opinion about Gould: http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2009/01/a_week_with_gre.h...

"well, enough marketing for Scheme. once you try it, you'll understand. be
warned that lots of people approach Scheme the same way they approach
controversial books (The Bell Curve comes to mind): they don't read it,
they don't know any of the things it actually says, but they have a hell of
a lot of opinions about it."

If we're having a discussion about racial differences in criminal justice and you bring up that you just read The Bell Curve and IQ differences explain the gap, I'm going to start to think you're racist. Partly because you're bringing up debunked junk science. And partly because we're talking about a systemic problem that can't be addressed with the information you're bringing to the table.

"A huge number of well-meaning whites fear that they are closet racists, and this book tells them they are not. It's going to make them feel better about things they already think but do not know how to say.”
—regarding his book, Losing Ground, quoted in “Daring Research or Social Science Pornography?: Charles Murray,” The New York Times Magazine, 1994

“The professional consensus is that the United States has experienced dysgenic pressures throughout either most of the century (the optimists) or all of the century (the pessimists). Women of all races and ethnic groups follow this pattern in similar fashion. There is some evidence that blacks and Latinos are experiencing even more severe dysgenic pressures than whites, which could lead to further divergence between whites and other groups in future generations.”
—The Bell Curve, 1994

* It doesn't refute the scientific claims of the authors, but rather takes them to task for disagreeing with points Murray didn't make --- that's fair rhetorically, but fails to address the central thesis of the Vox piece, which is that popular race/IQ ideas are largely junk science.

* It asserts the authority of Charles Murray (for instance, citing him as having written an article rebutting one of Turkheimer's findings), despite Murray not being an expert on the subject --- his scientist coauthor on The Bell Curve is deceased. At one point, in this very takedown, its author even cites Murray observing that he doesn't understand the science.

* It attempts to dismiss the authors by citing James Flynn's critique of black culture, which is ironic on two levels: first, that itself is an argument that Turkheimer and Nisbett didn't make, so the pot is complaining about the kettle, and second because Nisbett himself has gotten into some trouble for making similar critiques of black culture. Memetics isn't genetics.

* It makes seemingly well-grounded arguments about the statistical validity of interventions Turkheimer talked about which, on a second reading, dissipate into handwaving --- what we're left with is a Medium blogger's conjecture against a working scientist's published results.

Turkheimer and Nisbett are at pains to point out that their views aren't uniformly shared by everyone in the field. Rather, they take Murray (and, by implication, Sam Harris) to task for summarizing a contentious scientific debate as if it were settled, but for hysteria in leftist academia. The Vox piece is far more persuasive and credible in this argument than the "takedown" you cite is in its own argument.

[1]: See, for example, The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. Then, once you get over your knee-jerk "That's racist!!!" reflex, take a look—I mean actually read for comprehension—The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray. Maybe add a little Cavalli-Sforza (via Steve Sailer) to the mix (http://www.vdare.com/articles/052400-cavalli-sforzas-ink-clo...). You can then graduate to basically anything by Arthur Jensen. As a topper, read "Rational"Wiki's entry on Human Biodiversity (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Human_biodiversity) and cringe at the smug, supercilious tone, endless strawmanning and distortion, and at the realization that you, too, were once taken in by the ridiculous "mainstream" views. (I certainly was.)

Basically, your perspective on IQ and heritability is very cartoonish. I'd suggest spending some time on wikipedia. I'd also familiarize yourself with the classic rebuttal of The Bell Curve, which clarifies the difference between heritability and genetic determinism. Culture and social complexes are heritable.

Much very reliable evidence points to the idea that Jews are more intelligent and this arises in genetics, not environment, and that Jews' track record of exemplary scholarly achievement is not an accident, but deserved. It's very difficult to look at the scientific evidence and come to any other conclusion.

The broader implications of the above will be obvious to anyone versed in current social issues. If the case can be made that there are significant IQ differences between groups and that difference arises in genetics, the secondary conclusions are obvious. By the way, possibly apropos of nothing, Charles Murray, co-author of the infamous book "The Bell Curve", is heavily quoted in the linked article. It's as though he's saying, "I told you so."

There are a million places to start if you want to find a critique, but you can start with Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man".

Lots gets published negative about those groups. Take the best-selling book <The Bell Curve> which argues that blacks have lower iq's. You say the elites push an agenda, but often that is because non-elites persuaded them to change their views. For instance, gays were pariah's until recently.

>I'm saying everyone re-writes history. Everyone makes it up. Everyone interprets it for their own political agenda.

That's simply not true. Lots of people are at least somewhat willing to be persuaded by arguments. Lots of people are willing to change their political philosophy if they are presented with reasons. I know I have changed my views on a number of important issues over the years. It is a slow process, but it happens a lot in this country. Look at how the conservative movement rose from nothing over the course of decades, fighting the elites all the way. Just because you are not objective and open to persuasion doesn't mean everyone else in the world is like you.

You know, in some countries of the world the government is so oppressive that is impossible to work to make things better, but in other countries it is possible, at least some of the time, but to do that generally requires an accurate understanding of the past. What you are saying is it is impossible to get this, and the implication is that it is impossible to make the world better. Is that what you believe? Note when I say make the world better, I mean according to a set of universal values, not ones that favor your group or country over all others. Apparently you believe such values don't exist, have I got you right on that?

I am wondering why you are so sure that it is impossible for human beings to look at history objectively. I can think of three possible reasons. One is that you just have a cynical personality. The second is you are just selfish and don't care. The third is that you are being paid by an authoritarian government like Russia or China to spread cynicism so people will give up trying to get at the truth and make the world better.

I just finished reading What Intelligence Tests Miss, by Keith Stanovich. Summary: critical reasoning skills are much much better predictor of academic and social success then IQ, and (that's the shocker) largely _not_ correlated with IQ. And this is just one of the factors which influence success. Even if a group is a few IQ points above or below average, the final effect is very unlikely to affect anything.

edit: Oh, and yes, critical reasoning skills, even if they're not as well studied as IQ is (which is a shame, but it's being corrected) have a much much smaller genetic component and are easier to change during lifetime.

Milo Yianoppolos, who most of the time markets himself as an anarchistic troll, will put on his serious face and claim that he is worried about trans people because it's a mental illness and he just wants them to be treated, rather than play along with their disease. And cite studies etc.

Then he'll have a rally and personally attack a trans student. Which isn't really how a serious scientist approaches the mentally ill.

He also attacks overweight people "for their own good" as they need to get healthy. Then he takes a picture of someone he sees at his gym to mock their weight as they work out.

The Bell Curve is a great proto-alt-right example, where the author will say with a cheeky grin that he never actually said that black people were genetically inferior, even though everyone who read it clearly got that message,whether they agree with it or not. And when he wrote a book saying black people have never contributed anything of any worth to music, why that's just objective science.

The Orwellian double talk of Trump is another classic example. More jobs via trade wars. Yes the author is right, a critique of pointless trade wars shouldn't be called anti-jobs, because journalist should be (and to some degree are) calling Trump's proposals anti-jobs themselves. Why on earth would you think this a valid example to give? It's an obvious con job.

So at some point, you realise that people are just playing a game with you.

But no, surely this man who thinks gay rights are a Marxist plot to take down capitalist America, surely he is only interested in seeking the unvarnished scientific truth?! Fool me once..

Don't get your middle age reference: are you claiming that people don't have prejudices anymore? What about your "everyone can see" statement? People still have prejudices, and they affect peoples lives, often in a bad way. You think something like "recognising criminals by their skulls" could not happen anymore today? I think it could - just think of the immunisation/autism debate.

Edit Re "blurting out": there are so many silly claims with respect to genetics, it is so easy to claim things must be so and so because of genetics. Hence my "blurting out" blurt.

Rand seems to invoke this type of strong reaction as well. Critics argue that since the country in the book is too simple, there is no value to be had there. Again, ideological disagreements allowing the critics to avoid addressing the central thrust of the book.

Here's a good research foundation: [1] This is a report with many authors created to try to bring some resolution to the discussion started by Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. Start at page 90 (section 5): Group differences.

Another more specific source is one researcher's search for a high-IQ black population. In this 12-minute video, he very specifically discusses the process of eliminating all the typical confounding factors while studying intelligence of students at South African universities. [2]

There are, of course, hundreds more studies and discussions on this, but you need to look for them yourself; none of this will be mentionable in mainstream discussion because of the morals of our overculture make it socially unacceptable regardless of truth value.

[1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.134...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxAhwYoZQKU

Not really, he's widely regarded as a fine professor of psychology. But does that really wave a magic wand over his head and grant him immunity from being judged for the self-help books he publishes? I don't think anyone reasonable person would agree with that. Also, what protection does pseudonymous authorship afford him? He's literally making a career out of touring different countries giving speeches about the moral decay of western culture.

Here's my question: Does this problem actually exist? Or is this misplaced fear about a different issue that actually does exist.

"Racial prejudice of the sort that Jews faced may or may not be part of the problem, but affirmative action certainly is. Top universities tend to admit blacks and Hispanics with lower scores because of their history of disadvantage; and once the legacies, the sports stars, the politically well-connected and the rich people likely to donate new buildings (few of whom tend to be Asian) have been allotted their places, the number for people who are just high achievers is limited. Since the Ivies will not stop giving places to the privileged, because their finances depend on the generosity of the rich, the argument homes in on affirmative action."

The Truth, which is hard to swallow for some people, is well summarized in the book "The Bell Curve." Fact is, in a pure meritocracy, some groups of people ("races") would be represented more than others. And its impossible to face this fact in America without getting shouted down.

No, it's like picking one of those and using it as the measure. If you pick 10k running time, you'll be biased towards mid-length endurance athletes. If you pick deadlift, you'll be biased towards raw strength athletes. The question of if Usain Bolt or Hafthor Bjornsson is more athletic is malformed, it requires us to ask which athletic talents we value more highly (not to mention comparing to someone like Kobe Bryant or Tom Brady, where social interaction is a component of the athletic achievement).

Similarly, most measures of IQ contain implicit assumptions about what intelligence means, and those assumptions are based on western cultural norms. Even tests designed to be less culturally biased, such as Raven's Progressive Matrices, aren't free of this issue. And this ignores cultures where decision making is often a team sport, so being forced to take a test without aid is an unusual environment, and may be, culturally, a malformed question.

> The central thesis of his book The Bell Curve is that society needs to do a better job helping people on the lower end of cognitive ability lead fulfilling and productive lives.

Right, the unstated assumption here being that they are genetically predisposed to having lower cognitive ability (and further that this ability is highly correlated along racial lines). That they are genetically inferior and society needs to cater better to their inferiority: "we should be more willing to help the cognitively disabled". Not that they may be just as well equipped as everyone else, and we should address the biases in society that mismeasure their intelligence, such as biased IQ tests and other cultural assumptions about what intelligence is.

The Bell curve doesn't engage with any of this criticism (it predates some of, but by no means all of it). It assumes that the measure is objective and valid. I've read enough of Murray, and enough criticism of him, to understand how he's wrong.

OTOH, he is correct that BA degrees have little relevance in the modern economy. They persist as a relic from the role liberal-arts colleges played before WW2 in conferring educational pedigrees on upper-class men. Higher education is much more egalitarian today, but we're still aping the educational practices of that era.

As a general rule, I don't think anyone should spend the time or money on a degree that they aren't going to use after graduation.

Quoting the SPLC's description about Murray, at https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi...

> Charles Murray, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has become one of the most influential social scientists in America, using racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo for a (long) lay video description of what "misleading statistics" includes, in the context of his most famous book, "The Bell Curve."

All of it is interesting and some is compelling, but the book is generally forbidden to be discussed in "polite" company.

The interesting thing about the book.. to reduce the "racist" attacks, the author only looked at white people throughout the bulk of the book.

>and it definitely has a large genetic component

There's a number of studies showing that IQ is "heritable", but this is different from saying it's genetic. The video above (around the 39:00 mark) and https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-psychology/cla... both get into this point. Wearing earrings is highly "heritable" despite being an arbitrary social custom, and having 10 fingers is not "heritable". It's also important to avoid falling into the conclusion that many people take about IQ that it being heritable means that educational efforts to improve it are worthless:

>Think about the relative heights of men in a poor village in an underdeveloped country 100 years ago. The average height for these malnourished men might be 5 feet 2 inches. The heritability in observed heights within this particular society can be quite high; men of tall fathers are on the average considerably taller than men of short fathers. However, this does not mean that a program of improved sanitation and nutrition could not significantly raise the average height of this group in a few generations.

The first X factor (progressives) married Protestantism with the State in order to form a more perfect society. The outcomes were temperance, euthanizing minorities and the retarded, and a massive expansion of State into the Self. Modern progressives do the same thing, but they have switched method:target and have replaced Godism with Humanism.

The second X factor is a kind of inverse p-hacking. A useful example is the debate over IQ variance. Another would be the "x is a social construct" meme. This is what happens when scienceism replaces scientific method. In summary, there are certain conclusions that must maintain, regardless of data to the contrary. Metaphorically, it is like someone setting out to walk from Los Angeles to Seoul; not impossible, unless you maintain that airplanes are global warming, powerboats are destructive capitalism, and bridges are racism embodied. This is subtly different than setting out with a goal in mind, like saying, "however long it takes, I'm getting this ship to Port in SKorea." It is saying, "we must end up in Seoul, and we know we will end up in Seoul, so wherever we end up is Seoul."

I recommend anyone who has not done so to read the Bell Curve by Murray and Hernstein. If you are the type of person that is afraid to read books that are considered verboten, skip chapter 13. It is the icky chapter that discusses race and IQ. In addition, I also recommend reading Three New Deals by Schivelbusch, The Raping of the Mind by Verloo, and The Righteous Mind by Haidt. These, in addition to many others, will help paint a picture of what is so out of wack with sociology.

And, to @AlotOfReading vis a vis your [1], applying your reasoning universally means we shouldn't trust what female researchers have to say about men, likewise we should dismiss what Researchers of Color™ have to tell us about white folks, due to the inherent biases, right?

The Bell Curve is labeled racist because it is myopic about the existence and importance of race. Race is not a valid scientific categorization: it is not based on statistical grouping of DNA, or anything concrete other than "people used to be assholes to foreigners." There is an order of magnitude more genetic + cultural diversity among each race than there are between the races.

The school bussing and integration programs were tried starting in the 1960s. No benefits ever materialized, such as improved test scores, imprisonment rates, cumulative earned income by age 30, or any other standard psychology metric.

Yet the programs were continued. Clearly the purpose in continuing them had nothing to do with "disadvantaged" students, because nothing changed for them. The only explanation remaining is that the real purpose was what was being done to the non-disadvantaged students. Their schools were being filled with yahoos to knock down their potential for achievement.

You could dismiss my claim as raving racism except for one thing: you know that at the same time they also introduced word-shape memorization reading instead of phonetics, New Math, eliminated practice drills, and so forth. They really did want to knock down intellectual achievement. School integration fits very nicely into those plans.

Fwiw I don't think you're necessarily wrong about intelligence but from what I remember The Gene (Siddhartha Mukherjee) does have a few passages contradicting this theory. Also by questioning the validity of IQ tests.

Could it also not be that jews are just more motivated to get in to STEM fields and perform well, for cultural reasons or otherwise?

Similarly, Malcolm Gladwell mentions a theory about why "Asians are smarter" which according to him may be related to hard and smart work leading to bigger rice harvests, and other factors (see here https://www.cs.unh.edu/~sbhatia/outliers/outliers.pdf).

While I have zero interest in the cultural implications and all the moral panics surrounding these issues, I don't think intelligence being mostly down to genetics is a proven fact. I find it gets extremely complicated very quickly.

Genes are hugely influenced by their environmental (cultural) triggers and those should not be ignored.

This might be true for things like the conventional laws of physics. But there are many things scientists do not agree or argue over. Quantum physics and string theory are two examples. The 1994 book The Bell Curve is another example from social sciences.

And today, we have grave reproducibility crises in science. We have people trying to apply rules about the psychological and metaphysical worlds into the doctrine of hard science. In the current crisis, we have conflicting papers published almost every week, and there is a deep political climate that cannot be denied behind much of the current research.

Even for thing that we can agree on work under experiment, like a certain class of drug, we can't explain WHY it works. We can say drug x will stop a heart attack 99% of the time and is generally considered safe in 99% of human beings, but often we're guess at the very specific interactions, based on what we see in labs, because we have no real introspection into all the complex things happening at the micro-level within the incredible complex cell systems inside of us.

Maybe one day we'll be able to see what happens at that microlevel in human bodies, and that could lead us to discover the drug isn't working at all the way we thought it was.

Science is iterative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve
> Herrnstein and Murray report that Asian Americans have a higher mean IQ than white Americans, who in turn outscore black Americans. The book argues that the black-white gap is not due to test bias, noting that IQ tests do not tend to underpredict the school or job performance of black individuals and that the gap is larger on apparently culturally neutral test items than on more culturally loaded items. The authors also note that adjusting for socioeconomic status does not eliminate the black-white IQ gap. However, they argue that the gap is narrowing.

>I know your defense is that you are not "actually" claiming that blacks are inferior intellectually to whites, you are "merely" asking the questions.

I'm not "merely asking questions" I have a thesis. That is, races (defined as geographically based populations) are different from one another in more ways than just their skin color. Of course, there is lots of overlap because we are all human.

>If you think I'm being hostile, it is because your arguments are so incredibly lame. I'm not a geneticist, but even I can refute them

You honestly aren't doing a very good job.

To cite just one example as evidence that you need to read AEI "research" more carefully, you can find the authors mention the mid-1980s inclusion of mobile homes and trailer parks as new forms of "housing consumption" in the first paragraph on page 15. I give them some credit for mentioning this, since it should be obvious even to the uninformed that aggregate measures of "housing consumption" are going to go up when you find new forms of housing to count half-way through your survey.

As far as the reputation of the AEI goes, it stopped having any when it fired David Frum for being too far left [1]. Mainstream economists find the institute laughable [2], and even conservative economists like Bruce Bartlett mock its employees as "scholars" (his quotes) [3]. Poor quality ideological broadsides like the one cited above are the norm rather than the exception. Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve" is broadly derided for racism, while Kevin Hassett and James Glassman are ridiculed in the mainstream media for backing pump-and-dump schemes like "Dow 36,000" and for seeming to be unaware of such basic economic concepts as discounted cash flow.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03...
[2] http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/10/the-uncertainty-argume...
[3] http://capitalgainsandgames.com/blog/bruce-bartlett/1601/gro...

Witch hunt.

[..] At, least not yet. “They’re going to have to prepare now,” Greenwald told OneZero of Substack. “To resist the onslaught that absolutely will be coming in their direction.”[..]

Looked up the CJR article and the reporter Clio Chang: https://www.cjr.org/special_report/substackerati.php

Was also at The Intercept. This is getting tiresome.

[..] The intention is declarative—you, too, can make it on Substack. But as you peruse the lists, something becomes clear: the most successful people on Substack are those who have already been well-served by existing media power structures. Most are white and male; several are conservative. Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, and most recently, Glenn Greenwald—who offer similar screeds about the dangers of cancel culture and the left—all land in the top ten. (Greenwald’s arrival bumped the like-minded Yascha Mounk to eleventh position; soon, Matthew Yglesias signed up for Substack, too.)[..]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence:_Knowns_and_Unk...

Well, perhaps that review is a good introduction to the criticism of The Bell Curve after all.

Regardless,

> This does seem to be murray's contention. I don't think SSC agrees though. And this is actively harmful if you subscribe to the view that it is malleable: claiming that it can't be changed and that someone is "inferior", as Murray does, probably isn't going to set them up for success.

This statement seriously makes me doubt whether you've read Murray . The central thesis of his book The Bell Curve is that society needs to do a better job helping people on the lower end of cognitive ability lead fulfilling and productive lives. The notion that less intelligent people are inferior is the complete opposite of what he actually wrote.

Some politicians call this racism, which is probably why my comment was downvoted. Nothing is further from the truth. The whole point is that less-intelligent people score equally low regardless of race.

Why different groups should have different intelligence is probably a result of evolution. It takes a better grade of ancestors to survive 20,000 years of European farming and winters.

The Bell Curve is probably the most misrepresented book ever. Indignant liberal weenies turned it into some sort of white supremacist book about race and IQ.

It's actually about how high IQ people have systematically reorganized society to their benefit, isolated themselves, and stripped lower IQ people of the sorts of employment and social systems where they do best.

> When they argue for immigration, it's because they are not affected

High IQ people argue for the liberal immigration policies that hurt laborers. Murray is opposed to such policies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

TL;DR; White people are genetically smarter than black people.

(To be transparent: I'm a white father to a black daughter... the book is bull shit IMHO)

That said: If you enjoy genetics, I'd recommend "A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived", which uses actual science and is much more recent:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30135182-a-brief-history...

The author's style is entertaining and insightful, although a bit flowery. As a reviewer on Good Reads mentioned "That was very... British."

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm

Note particularly his recent co-authored publication

Nisbett, R. E., Aronson, J., Blair, C., Dickens, W., Flynn, J., Halpern, D. F., & Turkheimer, E. (2012). Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin. American Psychologist, 67, 503-504.

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/nisbett2012groupdi...

that directly disagrees with The Bell Curve on several points and yet was published in a leading journal for professional psychologists.

Many, many other researchers have gone beyond the amateur level of research published in the popular book The Bell Curve to grapple with the issues that book brought up and refute it. A good bibliopraphy on the general subject can be found in Wikipedia userspace at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...

with plenty of recommendations for current reading in reliable sources.

The book The Bell Curve that you references doesn't make any definite inferences regarding IQ and race. It does not claim that IQ differences between races do exist. I know your defense is that you are not "actually" claiming that blacks are inferior intellectually to whites, you are "merely" asking the questions. Which is a bullshit defense since your questions are based upon faulty research that you have accepted without even doing the most basic research.

> What? That's not what I was saying at all. We are talking about the inequality between races. There is an overrepresentation of black people in the most popular professional sports in the US

There is an over representation of tall people too. There is an over representation of men... If you think I'm being hostile, it is because your arguments are so incredibly lame. I'm not a geneticist, but even I can refute them without much effort just by reading a few Wikipedia articles. Like why even reference The Bell Curve when that book was written a quarter of a century ago? It tells us nothing about modern genetic research.

Edit: You can have the last word if you want -- I'm not going to reply. I'm not interested in debating IQ and race. My reason for replying in the first place was to show that it is not true that people with your opinions are being downvoted/ignored/silenced/censured/disrespected/shunned by the media or whatever. There is no global SJW conspiracy. It's just that this "blacks have low IQ" trope have been pushed a whole lot. Try googling for "hacker news iq race" to see for yourself. It gets boring beating a dead horse.

So I tried to read the tripe, but the arguments are not persuasive unless you already believe what they are trying to convince you of.

In third world countries, there is an infrastructure to support expectations. You aren't the only poor person, there is direct feedback that "we're all in this together".

However, in the first world, there is a great amount of isolation that can be crippling. We have very fragmented communities, especially in the suburbs.

Poverty is real, and dismissing it because it doesn't seem as "legitimate" as some other place and different social context doesn't help anything. It's very naive to assume that because we've got access to "better tools" we should be grateful.

Read the Bell Curve. See how IQ is affecting the utility of the workforce in the United States. Imagine being born below the magical IQ to be effective in modern American society.

Imagine being useless to the world around you. Imagine waking up every day feeling hopeless.

Poverty has nothing to do with dirt huts. It has everything to do with feeling as though you can control the situation of your life. It has everything to do with not feeling like a net drain on the world.

Yes, because he has demonstrated his scientific objectivity by changing his point of view from time to time, digging up new evidence when scientists say his previously offered evidence is inadequate, and scrupulously honoring his most ardent opponents with credit when their counterarguments prompt him to reconsider his previous publications. What Flynn writes in the early twenty-first century about IQ is much better quality research than what he wrote in the 1970s. (It's important to point out that already by the 1980s he was being published in Psychological Bulletin, the most prestigious journal in psychology, because his articles were meeting a high standard of scholarship.) Take a look at which psychologists and sociologists praise Flynn, his research in general, or his latest book on the Amazon.com page for his latest book:

Ian Deary, Edinburgh University

Charles Murray, American Enterprise Institute & co-author of The Bell Curve

Sir Michael Rutter, Kings College London

N. J. Mackintosh, University of Cambridge

Richard Restak, American Scholar

S. J. Ceci, Cornell University

Robert J. Sternberg, PsycCRITIQUES

and others.

But then, as the article notes, if IQ is so reliant on genes, then why the Flynn Effect? Why are IQs collectively rising year-over-year in our society [2]? If it is the result of our modern society, where technology perpetually challenges us to think abstractly every waking minute of our lives, then wouldn't the Flynn Effect eventually level off at some point in the future? If it really is 80% genes (and I'm still waiting for my 23andMe results to identify the specific SNPs responsible for my Mensa membership) then how far can that 20% environmental influence take us?

These are the most interesting questions to me. Our brains exhibit a high-degree of plasticity. Making students and teachers aware of neuroplasticity can have significant positive outcomes on their education [3][4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

[3] http://www.edutopia.org/blog/neuroscience-higher-ed-judy-wil...

[4] http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/dec0...

*edited for formatting.

Yes, "now". It's not like books such as the the bell curve were published during the whole period from 1940 to today.

The problem is that when you go back and read those books they are sexist, racist, misogynistic, paternalistic and borderline fascist. So every decade or so you need to pretend academia has unfairly tarred modern research into these topic with the gilt by association from the past.

The unfortunate fact that they just reproduce the least disgusting "findings" of the past with the same methods is just glossed over.

Reading the Bell Curve today you already see all of the above inside it only after 20 years. But I'm sure this time it will be different.

"In 2010 a study published by Dr Fowler and his colleagues implicated a gene known as DRD4 in the development of political affiliation."

Yes, totally different.

If you're going to dog whistle, it's going to be to something so horrific it can't even be discussed with any pretense of academic distance or distinction.

The problem with the "dog whistle theory" though is that only dogs can hear them, so anybody who is not a dog can label anything to be a dog whistle with no real proof whatsoever.

much further separated than kids of different ethnicities in the same country

No. African-Americans, for example, have an average IQ of 85, very much like an up-market African country. Go read The Bell Curve.

only extremely bad families have a major environmental effect

The siblings in the adoptive families have nearly the full range of accomplishments of the general public. The possible explanations are (1) a sibling's accomplishments are mostly determined by internal causes, or (2) a sibling's accomplishments are substantially influenced by environment, and they experience a wide range of environments (even within the same family).

Other studies use twins raised together. The twins are more similar to each other than to their non-twin siblings, and the differences are explained mostly by IQ. This suggests that accomplishment comes mostly from internal causes.

the environments they were looking at were actually very similar

In terms of opportunity, they are extremely similar by adulthood. In the U.S., annual income at age 30 depends mostly on IQ, regardless of race, ethnicity, and other factors.

[1] http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations

I doubt anyone has ever suggested otherwise. The fact that 27% of Nobel Prize winners in the 20th century were of Ashkenazi heritage is most likely directly related to their culture and a ton of endless hard work. We are all homo sapiens. Yes some cultures are worse off than others but I see no evidence of any genetic superiority. It's not like all these academic achievers are coyly existing on a beach in a tropical environment, barely exerting any effort, and causally changing the world of science. No, it takes a ton of effort.

(My comment is based on Watson's theory on IQ and race, and books like, The Bell Curve. And I'm not promoting religion just the critical thinking skills developed by analyzing and arguing a complicated text.)

From the paper:

"The differential between the mean intelligence test scores of Blacks and Whites (about one standard deviation, although it may be diminishing) does not result from any obvious biases in test construction and administration, nor does it simply reflect differences in socio-economic status. Explanations based on factors of caste and culture may be appropriate, but so far have little direct empirical support. There is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation. At present, no one knows what causes this differential."

For instance, I think this review misses a point of Murray's that I consider important. In an article I read by Murray in the American last month [http://www.american.com/archive/2008/september-october-magaz...], his idea seems to be that core knowledge, the kind of things that we as a culture need to know, like basic American history, geography, cultural literacy, science, etc, should be taught at a much earlier age, in the K-8 curriculum, and not wait until college. He said that the average student needs to know much more about the above fields than they know now, and so it should be taught earlier, so that most people don't need a four-year college education in order to have the core knowledge necessary in a modern society.

Quote:

> Mainstream Science on Intelligence was a public statement issued by a group of academic researchers in fields associated with intelligence testing that claimed to present those findings widely accepted in the expert community. It was originally published in the Wall Street Journal on December 13, 1994 as a response to what the authors viewed as the inaccurate and misleading reports made by the media regarding academic consensus on the results of intelligence research in the wake of the appearance of The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray earlier the same year.

> A far more illuminating piece of evidence about the Murray racial worldview is found in his little-read 2003 book Human Accomplishment, the text that substantiates point 2 on the above List Of Racist Charles Murray Beliefs: Black cultural achievements are almost negligible.

> And what do you know, shockingly enough, out of hundreds of significant figures in Western music, there are almost no black people on the list. (Duke Ellington makes it.) Now, remember, this is a list of the objectively highest human accomplishments in music, and it doesn’t cut off until 1950.

> Do I have to explain why Murray’s framework is racist? Because Charles Murray thinks classical English composers were rooted in human experience and had intellectual depth (which we know, because they showed up more in the encyclopedias he picked), while black American composers (for that is what they are) were not.

etc.etc.

After the Bell Curve was published a 52 professors from around the country, representing a majority of those responding, signed a statement on the mainstream science on intelligence, saying:

> "The bell curve for whites is centered roughly around IQ 100; the bell curve for American blacks roughly around 85; and those for different subgroups of Hispanics roughly midway between those for whites and blacks. IQ is strongly related, probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic, and social outcomes. Intelligence tests are not culturally biased against American blacks or other native-born, English-speaking peoples in the U.S. Rather, IQ scores predict equally accurately for all such Americans, regardless of race and social class. Source: https://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997mainstrea...

Again, the difference in average cognitive test scores is simply not in dispute.

Some people just like to live in a fairy tale where how everyone should be treated is the same as how everyone actually is.

Over the years I have read a lot of articles on the subject - as did many others, I guess, it is a popular subject after all.

I'd say it took me more than a few seconds to come up with my example.

Or you could read The Bell Curve. It is positing a small difference between "races", a difference so small that it is very minor compared to the expected range of deviation for a populace.

The idea that there is a scientifically definable thing called "race" lacks data. That is your row to hoe if you believe other. Skeptics are not required to disprove the existence of the tooth fairy, Nessie, or "race".

Cite: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/12/17/07121...

Perhaps part of these kids' problem is that they have parents who think that being compared to Clarence Thomas is an insult.

Such theorists often cite the 1994 publication of The Bell Curve, which argued that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, as evidence that negative stereotyping of African Americans still exists.

I don't think any of the critics, nor the author of this article, have actually read The Bell Curve.

In the same way IQ tests were used to support white chauvinism by creating an Us vs Them dynamic back then, the Soviet Union was used to create the Us vs Them dynamic during the cold war and Al Qaeda is used to create it today. It's a cheap way of drumming up nationalistic support by creating a common enemy. Whether the common enemy is black people, Jewish people, the Russians, Al Qaeda, Iran, etc., it doesn't matter, they're all used to advance the same governmental policies. The Hoover Institute is today the center of this neocon philosophy.

C.f. The Power of Nightmares:
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares

Also, they receive a large amount of funding from the Bradley Institute, the same group that funds Charles Murray (author of The Bell Curve) and others who write about using IQ as part of public policy.