12 ms·

From the author of the overtly racist Bell Curve.

by recusancy 13y ago

speeder 13y ago
Care to explain?
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  The book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve Reading the summary at the top of the Wiki entry, it's already not surprising the book has been labeled racist. Any book that discusses race, inheritance, and socioeconomic class always gets called racist.
  - speeder 13y ago
    Actually this book sounds fascinating, must be a interesting read, agreeing with it or not.
    - rlanday 13y ago
      I’m reading it now; it is fascinating, because the idea that it’s possible to measure intelligence and used it to predict probabilities for individual and group outcomes is one of the most useful, strongest-supported ideas in all of the social sciences, yet many people either misunderstand the state of scientific consensus (“IQ doesn’t really measure anything, intelligence tests are largely bogus”) or actively try to deny that this is possible for political purposes (“many people are disadvantaged because of low socioeconomic status, but we can equalize everything with more government spending“). Understanding something other people don’t should allow you to gain an economic advantage somehow; there should be sort of arbitrage opportunities to profit from the knowledge differential. For example, many people think having a four-year college degree adds x amount of value because the average college graduate earns y more dollars over their lifetime than the average non-college graduate, and this means that everyone should go to college. But if you understand that a large part of x actually comes from the inherent value in being intelligent, and a large part of the reason students of top universities make better workers is that they were really smart even in high school, not necessarily because a university education is worth what students are paying, perhaps instead of hiring only from top universities, you can hire students straight out of high school based on their SAT scores (yes, the SAT measures intelligence) and train them yourself? Universities use a multitude of signals when deciding who to admit (test scores, essays, reference letters, extracurriculars), so in addition to trying to determine intelligence, they’re also trying to determine other character traits, but The Bell Curve (at least I think this is where I read it) presents some data related to job hiring that shows intelligence is the trait that’s most measurable and provides the most predictive power.
  - thwest 13y ago
    That's an incredibly cheap dismissal that's simply not true. There are plenty of books that look at those issues from a humanist perspective. 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.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      That's an incredibly cheap dismissal that's simply not true Examples, please, of books that investigate socioeconomic status & race that have not been called racist? Because I can't think of any. By the way, I'm not talking about literary explorations of race like "Huckleberry Finn". Although that was called racist too. There are orders of magnitude more genetic [...] diversity among each race than there are between the races. Hold it right there, buddy. License, registration, and sources please. Mostly sources.
      - comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
        Well, you could read Stephen Jay Gould's The Mis-measure of Man. 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".
        speeder 13y ago
        I wonder then, what about the Melanesians that have 6% of DNA of a unique population? Or that asians and whites have wildly different reactions to milk. Or that some diseases only affect blacks, or whites, or whatever? This is not data? People use freely the same techniques to categorize humans, to categorize other animals with significant variations in their species, why only humans you must not use the word "race" and use other words to describe the same thing?
- recusancy 13y ago
  He wrote a book arguing the black people, as a race, are less intelligent than white people.
  - Tichy 13y ago
    Have you read it?
    - recusancy 13y ago
      Am I wrong?
      - Tichy 13y ago
        Well I read it because I wanted to know if it was really racist or not. Unfortunately that was 16 years ago, so I am not 100% sure of my conclusion anymore. But I think ultimately I didn't think it was racist. I seem to remember they explicitly wrote about the effect of environments. Would have been curious to get an opinion by somebody who read it recently.
  - agilebyte 13y ago
    They seem to be saying that nature & nurture is at play. Your comment mentions only the first bit.
  - Afforess 13y ago
    Some ethnic groups do have different average levels of intelligence. Ashkenazi jews, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence My own guess is that for some blacks, there has not been enough time for the Flynn Effect to occur for them to catch up with the general population. This is not due to any fault in them, but a result of no/substandard education for many generations. I imagine in a few generations any difference from the average will disappear. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
makmanalp 13y ago
I think there could be a better explanation for this: There is an impression that your IQ score is a fixed thing that you're born with, but in reality you can "study" for the IQ test and get better scores at it. There is also the whole issue that IQ scores have been rapidly rising in the past few decades. This might just mean that IQ score merely acts as a proxy for socioeconomic status and education level and a bunch of other factors, and it doesn't really measure your true maximum intelligence potential. Thus, the fact that some groups have lower IQ than others wouldn't necessarily point to them being inherently / genetically disadvantaged. As an aside, I don't know anything about the book or the authors' alleged motivations, but if they truly had no agenda, it's not very fair to be called racist because the result of your research says something politically incorrect, and you conveyed your true results to the best of your knowledge. This kind of torches-and-pitchforks behavior is just as bad for the advancement of knowledge as fudging up the numbers for ideological motivations.
- rlanday 13y ago
  I think your explanations are largely incorrect. I’m currently partway through reading The Bell Curve; it investigates a number of things people often attribute to socioeconomic status and tries to compare the effects of socioeconomic status and intelligence. An IQ score is literally your score on an IQ test; I think it’s more correct to talk about g (“general factor”) which is the principal component of intelligence you get if you measure a group of people on a battery of tests, and is the most predictive way to summarize an individual’s mental ability in a single number. A good IQ test is highly “g-loaded”, that is, it does a good job predicting someone’s scores on other tests that are g-loaded to some degree. Intelligence, as with most traits, is influenced to some degree by genetics and to some degree by environments. This can be (approximately) measured by comparing differences in intelligence between people of varying degrees of relatedness (somewhere between being identical twins and being randomly selected people), who grew up either in the same families or separated. Usually people are interested in pairs of siblings or identical twins where one was raised by families of different socioeconomic statuses. When The Bell Curve was written, the authors said the consensus was that intelligence is between 40%–80% genetic, but I think it’s now thought to be on the high end of that. Intelligence is actually more influenced by genetics in adults than in children, which is the opposite of what you’d expect if environment actually did have a large effect. When you say you can “study” for an IQ test, I think this is kind of tautological; e.g., you could memorize the answers to the hard problems, but intelligence is largely stable through life. It’s true that IQ scores have been rising for several decades (the Flynn effect), but I don’t think it’s ever been explained really well (maybe fewer people growing up in damaging environments?), it’s not clear whether or not people are actually getting smarter or they were just scoring better for some reason, and I think there’s evidence that the trend is starting to stall or maybe even decline since the mid 1990s. Intelligence and socioeconomic status are certainly correlated, but I think it would actually be more correct to say “socioeconomic status is a proxy for intelligence” than the other way around. If intelligence is mostly genetic, with a small environmental factor, as it seems to be, and more intelligent people make more money on average, which they do, then socioeconomic status is certainly largely influenced by intelligence, and the heritability of intelligence at least partially explains why social mobility isn’t higher than it is. It’s probably the case that there’s some intelligence benefit from environmental factors resulting from socioeconomic status, but you can’t just try to throw out all the differences correlated with socioeconomic status, because there’s certainly some (likely more) influence in the other direction. If measured average test score differences exist between genetic groups of people (they do), these differences again have to be some amount genetic in origin and some amount environmental. The amounts for between-group variation are probably similar to the amounts for within-group variation, but there are reasons why they might not be exactly the same. People often claim the tests are biased; what you can do to rule this out is to look at individual questions that certain groups of people get wrong more often, since it’s more likely that individual items are biased than that every question is biased by exactly the same amount. You can also look at things the tests predict, and see if they have the same predictive power across groups. For example, if someone claims the SAT is biased against racial minorities, you can look at college students in different racial groups and their SAT scores and see if the students in different groups with different average test scores do better or worse in college classes (I don’t know a good source off the top of my head, but to the best of my knowledge, the SAT is equally predictive across racial groups). I strongly agree that the people claiming that psychometrics researchers have a racist agenda to prove white (or Asian?) superiority have a political agenda themselves, whereas the research in question seems to me pretty statistical, honest, and carried out without regard to the conclusions, and the researchers seem like they have to be very brave to carry out (or at least publicize) this research in the current political climate.

From the author of the overtly racist Bell Curve.

speeder 13y ago

Care to explain?

sliverstorm 13y ago
The book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve Reading the summary at the top of the Wiki entry, it's already not surprising the book has been labeled racist. Any book that discusses race, inheritance, and socioeconomic class always gets called racist.
- speeder 13y ago
  Actually this book sounds fascinating, must be a interesting read, agreeing with it or not.
  - rlanday 13y ago
    I’m reading it now; it is fascinating, because the idea that it’s possible to measure intelligence and used it to predict probabilities for individual and group outcomes is one of the most useful, strongest-supported ideas in all of the social sciences, yet many people either misunderstand the state of scientific consensus (“IQ doesn’t really measure anything, intelligence tests are largely bogus”) or actively try to deny that this is possible for political purposes (“many people are disadvantaged because of low socioeconomic status, but we can equalize everything with more government spending“). Understanding something other people don’t should allow you to gain an economic advantage somehow; there should be sort of arbitrage opportunities to profit from the knowledge differential. For example, many people think having a four-year college degree adds x amount of value because the average college graduate earns y more dollars over their lifetime than the average non-college graduate, and this means that everyone should go to college. But if you understand that a large part of x actually comes from the inherent value in being intelligent, and a large part of the reason students of top universities make better workers is that they were really smart even in high school, not necessarily because a university education is worth what students are paying, perhaps instead of hiring only from top universities, you can hire students straight out of high school based on their SAT scores (yes, the SAT measures intelligence) and train them yourself? Universities use a multitude of signals when deciding who to admit (test scores, essays, reference letters, extracurriculars), so in addition to trying to determine intelligence, they’re also trying to determine other character traits, but The Bell Curve (at least I think this is where I read it) presents some data related to job hiring that shows intelligence is the trait that’s most measurable and provides the most predictive power.
- thwest 13y ago
  That's an incredibly cheap dismissal that's simply not true. There are plenty of books that look at those issues from a humanist perspective. 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.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    That's an incredibly cheap dismissal that's simply not true Examples, please, of books that investigate socioeconomic status & race that have not been called racist? Because I can't think of any. By the way, I'm not talking about literary explorations of race like "Huckleberry Finn". Although that was called racist too. There are orders of magnitude more genetic [...] diversity among each race than there are between the races. Hold it right there, buddy. License, registration, and sources please. Mostly sources.
    - comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
      Well, you could read Stephen Jay Gould's The Mis-measure of Man. 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".
      - speeder 13y ago
        I wonder then, what about the Melanesians that have 6% of DNA of a unique population? Or that asians and whites have wildly different reactions to milk. Or that some diseases only affect blacks, or whites, or whatever? This is not data? People use freely the same techniques to categorize humans, to categorize other animals with significant variations in their species, why only humans you must not use the word "race" and use other words to describe the same thing?
recusancy 13y ago
He wrote a book arguing the black people, as a race, are less intelligent than white people.
- Tichy 13y ago
  Have you read it?
  - recusancy 13y ago
    Am I wrong?
    - Tichy 13y ago
      Well I read it because I wanted to know if it was really racist or not. Unfortunately that was 16 years ago, so I am not 100% sure of my conclusion anymore. But I think ultimately I didn't think it was racist. I seem to remember they explicitly wrote about the effect of environments. Would have been curious to get an opinion by somebody who read it recently.
- agilebyte 13y ago
  They seem to be saying that nature & nurture is at play. Your comment mentions only the first bit.
- Afforess 13y ago
  Some ethnic groups do have different average levels of intelligence. Ashkenazi jews, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence My own guess is that for some blacks, there has not been enough time for the Flynn Effect to occur for them to catch up with the general population. This is not due to any fault in them, but a result of no/substandard education for many generations. I imagine in a few generations any difference from the average will disappear. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

makmanalp 13y ago

I think there could be a better explanation for this: There is an impression that your IQ score is a fixed thing that you're born with, but in reality you can "study" for the IQ test and get better scores at it. There is also the whole issue that IQ scores have been rapidly rising in the past few decades. This might just mean that IQ score merely acts as a proxy for socioeconomic status and education level and a bunch of other factors, and it doesn't really measure your true maximum intelligence potential. Thus, the fact that some groups have lower IQ than others wouldn't necessarily point to them being inherently / genetically disadvantaged. As an aside, I don't know anything about the book or the authors' alleged motivations, but if they truly had no agenda, it's not very fair to be called racist because the result of your research says something politically incorrect, and you conveyed your true results to the best of your knowledge. This kind of torches-and-pitchforks behavior is just as bad for the advancement of knowledge as fudging up the numbers for ideological motivations.

rlanday 13y ago
I think your explanations are largely incorrect. I’m currently partway through reading The Bell Curve; it investigates a number of things people often attribute to socioeconomic status and tries to compare the effects of socioeconomic status and intelligence. An IQ score is literally your score on an IQ test; I think it’s more correct to talk about g (“general factor”) which is the principal component of intelligence you get if you measure a group of people on a battery of tests, and is the most predictive way to summarize an individual’s mental ability in a single number. A good IQ test is highly “g-loaded”, that is, it does a good job predicting someone’s scores on other tests that are g-loaded to some degree. Intelligence, as with most traits, is influenced to some degree by genetics and to some degree by environments. This can be (approximately) measured by comparing differences in intelligence between people of varying degrees of relatedness (somewhere between being identical twins and being randomly selected people), who grew up either in the same families or separated. Usually people are interested in pairs of siblings or identical twins where one was raised by families of different socioeconomic statuses. When The Bell Curve was written, the authors said the consensus was that intelligence is between 40%–80% genetic, but I think it’s now thought to be on the high end of that. Intelligence is actually more influenced by genetics in adults than in children, which is the opposite of what you’d expect if environment actually did have a large effect. When you say you can “study” for an IQ test, I think this is kind of tautological; e.g., you could memorize the answers to the hard problems, but intelligence is largely stable through life. It’s true that IQ scores have been rising for several decades (the Flynn effect), but I don’t think it’s ever been explained really well (maybe fewer people growing up in damaging environments?), it’s not clear whether or not people are actually getting smarter or they were just scoring better for some reason, and I think there’s evidence that the trend is starting to stall or maybe even decline since the mid 1990s. Intelligence and socioeconomic status are certainly correlated, but I think it would actually be more correct to say “socioeconomic status is a proxy for intelligence” than the other way around. If intelligence is mostly genetic, with a small environmental factor, as it seems to be, and more intelligent people make more money on average, which they do, then socioeconomic status is certainly largely influenced by intelligence, and the heritability of intelligence at least partially explains why social mobility isn’t higher than it is. It’s probably the case that there’s some intelligence benefit from environmental factors resulting from socioeconomic status, but you can’t just try to throw out all the differences correlated with socioeconomic status, because there’s certainly some (likely more) influence in the other direction. If measured average test score differences exist between genetic groups of people (they do), these differences again have to be some amount genetic in origin and some amount environmental. The amounts for between-group variation are probably similar to the amounts for within-group variation, but there are reasons why they might not be exactly the same. People often claim the tests are biased; what you can do to rule this out is to look at individual questions that certain groups of people get wrong more often, since it’s more likely that individual items are biased than that every question is biased by exactly the same amount. You can also look at things the tests predict, and see if they have the same predictive power across groups. For example, if someone claims the SAT is biased against racial minorities, you can look at college students in different racial groups and their SAT scores and see if the students in different groups with different average test scores do better or worse in college classes (I don’t know a good source off the top of my head, but to the best of my knowledge, the SAT is equally predictive across racial groups). I strongly agree that the people claiming that psychometrics researchers have a racist agenda to prove white (or Asian?) superiority have a political agenda themselves, whereas the research in question seems to me pretty statistical, honest, and carried out without regard to the conclusions, and the researchers seem like they have to be very brave to carry out (or at least publicize) this research in the current political climate.