"The Bell Curve": Twenty Years Later, Q&A With Charles Murray

[ksen]

I haven't read it, but oh do people have opinions about it.

I read it and I have an opinion about it.

- - - Updated - - -

When I found the original link on twitter it came a long with this quote:

"Charles Murray: Natural ability is luck, massive redistribution is fair and inevitable, and basic income is the way"

I think that pretty much gets to the crux of what's relevant about the book.

lol

 

[ksen]

Why would we assume such was the case?

An IQ test is not a test to determine how well you deal with real world situations.

You could easily speculate that a person with a low IQ needs to develop better real world skills because they are less self sufficient.

And of course having sex and having children is something humans are driven by powerful forces to do.

It is only within a Christian context and in a society that doesn't take care for the poor that this is ever considered a bad choice.

I still contend that with minor variations in scores on IQ tests you may be looking at nothing but a difference in motivation and desire to do well on the test. Just because you have X intelligence doesn't mean a test you take yourself will expose X to others.

There's a limit to how many resources can be devoted to taking care of the poor. Until the last few hundred years it wasn't even an option.

But apparently there's no limit at all to how much resources the wealthy can keep taking for themselves.

 

[doubtingt]

This was a very controversial and discredited book.

No, most of the ideas in the book about general intelligence have not been discredited and remain consistent with established facts and reasoned mainstream positions within the fields of science that study human intellectual performance.

In fact, at the height of the emotional reaction (and nearly all the opposition was emotional, not scientific), a group of 52 of the most prominent scholars and academics who actually research cognitive processes wrote a public statement in order to clarify the actual scientific support for most of what Murray said about intelligence. (The article was both published in a premiere peer-reviewed scientific journal and for a broader audience in the Wall Street Journal.

Their statement points to the mountain of scientific data supporting the reliability and validity of general tests of intelligence to capture stable propensities to engage in abstract reasoning in context where specific specialized prior knowledge is of limited direct use, and that these propensities are predictive of intellectual performance and rate of learning across many domains. They also point out the strong evidence for heredity influence and racial differences on culturally unbiased tests, and that while racial difference could be entirely due to education, nutrition, and experiences (i.e., "nurture"), numerous efforts to demonstrate this have so far been unsuccessful.
Note that many of the scientists that signed it had never published anything about race and IQ (only intelligence more generally), but were experts in knowledge of the literature. Also note that the existence of a general factor (a cluster of basic skills that relate to each other and apply to many cognitive tasks) does not preclude the existence of other more domain or context specific cognitive skills. This is where critics of general intelligence go off the rails, by creating a false dichotomy where either general intelligence exists or their are a number of specialized skills. Both can be and are true. General intelligence is just of special interest, precisely because it captures such general skills that have some impact on so many cognitive tasks, and because it captures variance in one ability to acquire new knowledge since it is not so dependent upon how much old knowledge one has acquired.

Probably the best person to read is Stephen Jay Gould if you can find his criticism.

One of Gould's most salient points was that it is impossible to attach an objective score to human intelligence. It is too many things and eliminating bias in testing is extremely difficult.

Like nearly all of the more popular critiques, Gould's was rooted more in ideology than any actual knowledge of cognitive science of which he had little. Gould's critiques in his book "Mismeasure of Man" have themselves been far more discredited than the central (actual) ideas of The Bell Curve. His critique may be "one of the best", but that isn't saying much.

People with IQ's of 150 can't fix their own car but their mechanic with a 110 IQ can.

Well, that statement shows some severe misconceptions about many things including what the concept of general intelligence is, basic statistical issues like sample size, and how the contributions to a difference in scores on any measure depend upon whether one is comparing single cases are aggregated scores between large samples. There are mentally challenged chimps that could be taught to fix a car better than most human adults currently can. What do you draw from that? Any specific skill level for highly specialized task will be a function of exposure and training interacting with basic capacities to learn and improve with that training; capacities that are sometimes task specific and sometimes more general. None of that in any way contradicts the notion of general intelligence or the validity in its measurement, or the kinds of statements that about intelligence you wrongly think have been discredited.

 

[doubtingt]

When I found the original link on twitter it came a long with this quote:

"Charles Murray: Natural ability is luck, massive redistribution is fair and inevitable, and basic income is the way"

I think that pretty much gets to the crux of what's relevant about the book.

lol

What do you find lol worthy about that?

Underlying Murray's statement are 4 very reasonable and scientifically grounded factual claims, plus one subjective moral stance.

The factual clams are:

1. There is variance in natural abilities (note the plural since Murray nor anyone who accepts the reality of general intelligence denies multiple cognitive abilities).
2. Which abilities you have and how much is largely a matter of luck, since you do not choose them and they are not given out based upon merit.
3. Those abilities have some impact upon professional and economic success, not just directly but via their interaction with the fluctuating nature of an economy.
4. Top down (i.e., government) redistribution of income can be employed to counter the inequalities due to luck (and thus in part abilities).

The subjective moral stance is that because the wealth inequalities are bad and because they are in part the product of luck based abilities rather than any merits or 'earned' rewards, it is justified and desirable to redistribute that wealth.

So, precisely which of these claims or stances do you find laughably incorrect?

 

[AthenaAwakened]

The Bell Curve Flattened

The Bell Curve criticisms from Wiki

INEQUALITY BY DESIGN: Myths, Data, and Politics

 

[ksen]

lol

What do you find lol worthy about that?

Underlying Murray's statement are 4 very reasonable and scientifically grounded factual claims, plus one subjective moral stance.

The factual clams are:

1. There is variance in natural abilities (note the plural since Murray nor anyone who accepts the reality of general intelligence denies multiple cognitive abilities).
2. Which abilities you have and how much is largely a matter of luck, since you do not choose them and they are not given out based upon merit.
3. Those abilities have some impact upon professional and economic success, not just directly but via their interaction with the fluctuating nature of an economy.
4. Top down (i.e., government) redistribution of income can be employed to counter the inequalities due to luck (and thus in part abilities).

The subjective moral stance is that because the wealth inequalities are bad and because they are in part the product of luck based abilities rather than any merits or 'earned' rewards, it is justified and desirable to redistribute that wealth.

So, precisely which of these claims or stances do you find laughably incorrect?

The ones where he ultimately blames it on blacks just being dumb.

 

[fromderinside]

The Bell Curve was a book I had never heard of before, but after coming across this article on Twitter it looks like it had some pretty influential ideas in it, and they seem to point in the general direction that most of the liberal thinkers on this board do. Most of them are nothing new to the forum: universal basic income, increasingly intellectual elite, automation, post-industrial economy.

Anyway, surely many of you have likely read this book so I thought I'd get a thread rolling and get your already cemented opinions about it out of your brains, as often seems to happen when I post about a book.

It is a very influential book, but for all the wrong reasons. It gets used as a lightning rod for racial politics in the US, because it claims that black people are, mentally, inferior to whites.

The idea behind the Bell Curve is basically the modern incarnation of eugenics - the idea that there those who are genetically superior, and those who are genetically inferior, and that society needs to be reformed to recognise this difference, and deal with it in a sensible fashion. Politically this is an unpopular view because it generally results in some mild form of fascism, but the book doesn't get into specifics on that. Instead it focuses on charting the differences between groups, and the social implications of what this means.

In doing so it has to establish several points.
-It has to establish that these are fixed genetic, heritable differences, rather than anything else.
-It has to establish that IQ is a measure of inherent ability or potential.
-It has to establish that these differences are meaningful on a practical level

Ironically for a book about the social implications of a science, it is the at the scientific level that the book really fails, since it fails to establish any of these points in a convincing manner. It tries to do so simply by rejecting or dismissing alternatives - by shifting the burden of proof onto detractors, precisely because none of these assumptions do well in testing.

For a start, while it is clear that IQ is highly inheritable, there's very little evidence that it is fixed or genetic. Education makes a vast difference to IQ test scores, as does practice. Simply being raised in an environment where formal testing is normal gives one a huge boost, leading to IQ test results tending to reinforce existing social boundaries. Similarly, improving nutrition improves IQ test results. Inheritable does not means genetic - wealth, social class, and education are also highly inheritable characteristics.

It's hard to define what the authors really mean by inherent ability or potential. There is this idea that IQ represents some X-factor underlying all human cognitive performance, but there's no real evidence for this view. Certainly researchers have come up with measures of mental ability, particularly around emotional or social reasoning, that correlate very poorly with IQ.

But the biggest gap by far is in the area of demonstrating that these values represent a practical difference. Gould's criticisms are the most famous, mainly because he goes into the most detail. It boils down to:
-The differences being described between groups are very small.
-The individual differences between people in the groups are extremely large.
-The authors, intentionally or otherwise, blur the differences between differences between groups and differences within groups
-The result is that they are declaring as significant for the country, differences which are not statistically significant predictors of individual achievement.
Or to put it another way...
-Being a particular race is not a significant predictor of your IQ. Nor is being in any of the other disadvantaged or advantaged groups that they discuss.

This kind of statistical mistake is unfortunately quite common in the social sciences, where the actual computation is done by a computer, and scientists may not pay as much attention to the validity of their results as they should.

Since everybody ignored you I thought your input needed repeating. You to Togo.

 

[doubtingt]

The Bell Curve Flattened

The Bell Curve criticisms from Wikilin

INEQUALITY BY DESIGN: Myths, Data, and Politics

Contrary to your links to unpublished or non peer-reviewed opinion by non-experts who do not specialize in the study of human cognitive processes, here is a link to the statement published in a scientific journal I mentioned earlier summarizing the actual state of the scientific field and mainstream thought on the issues, signed by 52 generally respected cognitive scientists who publish data related to these issues in the top journals.

The article starts with:

Many commentators have offered opinions about human intelligence that misstake current scientific evidence. Some conclusions dismissed in the media as discredited are actually firmly supported.

The article goes on to list 25 claims and conclusions that are mainstream ideas that are (and continue to be) published with empirical support in the top peer-reviewed journals, and in Cognitive Psychology textbooks, and other scholarly publications. Those mainstream claims are counter to much of what is being claimed in your links, most of it being exactly the kind of unscientific dismissals of general intelligence this article was written to refute.

Most of Murray's basic claims about general intelligence and tests of it and group differences are consistent with those mainstream claims. Murray's predictions about the future and speculations about policy are another matter and inherently go beyond the state of the research about general intelligence.

 

[doubtingt]

What do you find lol worthy about that?

Underlying Murray's statement are 4 very reasonable and scientifically grounded factual claims, plus one subjective moral stance.

The factual clams are:

1. There is variance in natural abilities (note the plural since Murray nor anyone who accepts the reality of general intelligence denies multiple cognitive abilities).
2. Which abilities you have and how much is largely a matter of luck, since you do not choose them and they are not given out based upon merit.
3. Those abilities have some impact upon professional and economic success, not just directly but via their interaction with the fluctuating nature of an economy.
4. Top down (i.e., government) redistribution of income can be employed to counter the inequalities due to luck (and thus in part abilities).

The subjective moral stance is that because the wealth inequalities are bad and because they are in part the product of luck based abilities rather than any merits or 'earned' rewards, it is justified and desirable to redistribute that wealth.

So, precisely which of these claims or stances do you find laughably incorrect?

The ones where he ultimately blames it on blacks just being dumb.

Nothing of the sort is implied by the quote, so why did you lol at that quote?

 

[fromderinside]

there is no God selecting which mutations take place nor when they take place.

In the above purpose statement rests my essential critique of any correlational 'evidence' for some general feature like intelligence. We are wired opportunistically with the result that there are multiple repeats of process in many areas of the brain. For instance we have at least eight memory processes located with different connections that may or may not communicate with other memory forms for instance. Please explain the 'design' here. There may be observed trends toward some characteristic neural processes but they don't add up to meaningful inheritance of something called 'intelligence'.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Contrary to your links to unpublished or non peer-reviewed opinion by non-experts who do not specialize in the study of human cognitive processes, here is a link to the statement published in a scientific journal I mentioned earlier summarizing the actual state of the scientific field and mainstream thought on the issues, signed by 52 generally respected cognitive scientists who publish data related to these issues in the top journals.

The article starts with:

Many commentators have offered opinions about human intelligence that misstake current scientific evidence. Some conclusions dismissed in the media as discredited are actually firmly supported.

The article goes on to list 25 claims and conclusions that are mainstream ideas that are (and continue to be) published with empirical support in the top peer-reviewed journals, and in Cognitive Psychology textbooks, and other scholarly publications. Those mainstream claims are counter to much of what is being claimed in your links, most of it being exactly the kind of unscientific dismissals of general intelligence this article was written to refute.

Most of Murray's basic claims about general intelligence and tests of it and group differences are consistent with those mainstream claims. Murray's predictions about the future and speculations about policy are another matter and inherently go beyond the state of the research about general intelligence.

I will now ask what I have asked every bell curve defender since the book and the 52 signatories came to light.

In a field populated by for more the 52 people, why did only 52 people sign?

 

[AthenaAwakened]

BTW

http://publicsociology.berkeley.edu/publications/producing/hout.pdf

from the pdf FIRST PAGE

* This working paper is based on research reported in our book Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve
Myth, published by Princeton University Press. Thanks to Clem Brooks, Clare Brown, David James, Christopher Jencks,
Lutz Kaelber, David Levine, Patricia McManus, Robert K. Merton, and Michael Reich for their comments and to Richard
Arum and Amy Shalet for their research assistance. We are grateful for the financial support we received from the
Committee on Research and the Survey Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Send comments to:
Michael Hout, Russell Sage Foundation, 112 East 64th Street, New York NY 10021; email: mikehout @ rsage.org.

And the book was reviewed.

 

[ksen]

The ones where he ultimately blames it on blacks just being dumb.

Nothing of the sort is implied by the quote, so why did you lol at that quote?

Well dad, I lol'ed at the quote because someone was serious quoting that shitty racist as if he has anything important to say about anything.

 

[Trausti]

In the above purpose statement rests my essential critique of any correlational 'evidence' for some general feature like intelligence. We are wired opportunistically with the result that there are multiple repeats of process in many areas of the brain. For instance we have at least eight memory processes located with different connections that may or may not communicate with other memory forms for instance. Please explain the 'design' here. There may be observed trends toward some characteristic neural processes but they don't add up to meaningful inheritance of something called 'intelligence'.

Huh? Of course intelligence is inheritable. How do get from the simple tool kit of homo habilis to the smart phone of behaviorally-modern homo sapiens without intelligence being inheritable?

 

[AthenaAwakened]

From the Slate Article

In fact, The Bell Curve is a relentless brief for the conservative position in psychometrics and social policy. For all its talk of reflecting a consensus, the sources it draws upon are heavily skewed to the right. Herrnstein and Murray used quasi-nutty studies that support their position (as Charles Lane demonstrated in the New York Review of Books), and ignore mainstream studies that contradict it (as Richard Nisbett showed in the New Republic). The data in The Bell Curve are consistently massaged to produce conservative conclusions; not once is a finding that contradicts the main thesis reported in the text. (shows how Herrnstein and Murray have made the convergence in black-white IQ scores, which they claim to find "encouraging," look smaller than it actually is.) The Bell Curve's air of strict scientism doesn't preclude the use of lightly sourced or unsourced assertions, such as the statement that the median IQ of all black Africans is 75, or that "intermarriage among people in the top few percentiles of intelligence may be increasing far more rapidly than suspected" (no footnote). Though they piously claim not to be doing so, Herrnstein and Murray leave readers with the distinct impression that IQ is the cause of economic success and failure, and that genetic difference explains the black-white IQ gap.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

The Tainted Sources of ‘The Bell Curve’

All Brains Are the Same Color

 

[Trausti]

From the Slate Article

In fact, The Bell Curve is a relentless brief for the conservative position in psychometrics and social policy. For all its talk of reflecting a consensus, the sources it draws upon are heavily skewed to the right. Herrnstein and Murray used quasi-nutty studies that support their position (as Charles Lane demonstrated in the New York Review of Books), and ignore mainstream studies that contradict it (as Richard Nisbett showed in the New Republic). The data in The Bell Curve are consistently massaged to produce conservative conclusions; not once is a finding that contradicts the main thesis reported in the text. (shows how Herrnstein and Murray have made the convergence in black-white IQ scores, which they claim to find "encouraging," look smaller than it actually is.) The Bell Curve's air of strict scientism doesn't preclude the use of lightly sourced or unsourced assertions, such as the statement that the median IQ of all black Africans is 75, or that "intermarriage among people in the top few percentiles of intelligence may be increasing far more rapidly than suspected" (no footnote). Though they piously claim not to be doing so, Herrnstein and Murray leave readers with the distinct impression that IQ is the cause of economic success and failure, and that genetic difference explains the black-white IQ gap.

Well . . .

 

[doubtingt]

I have bolded/underlined and then responded to the portions I thought were the most problematic. Also, see my link in my prior post to the article detailing the state of the science in 1994, and note that every one of this points is supported by even more evidence today, published in the top tier cognitive science journals.

The Bell Curve was a book I had never heard of before, but after coming across this article on Twitter it looks like it had some pretty influential ideas in it, and they seem to point in the general direction that most of the liberal thinkers on this board do. Most of them are nothing new to the forum: universal basic income, increasingly intellectual elite, automation, post-industrial economy.

Anyway, surely many of you have likely read this book so I thought I'd get a thread rolling and get your already cemented opinions about it out of your brains, as often seems to happen when I post about a book.

It is a very influential book, but for all the wrong reasons. It gets used as a lightning rod for racial politics in the US, because it claims that black people are, mentally, inferior to whites.

The idea behind the Bell Curve is basically the modern incarnation of eugenics - the idea that there those who are genetically superior, and those who are genetically inferior, and that society needs to be reformed to recognise this difference, and deal with it in a sensible fashion. Politically this is an unpopular view because it generally results in some mild form of fascism, but the book doesn't get into specifics on that. Instead it focuses on charting the differences between groups, and the social implications of what this means.

In doing so it has to establish several points.
-It has to establish that these are fixed genetic, heritable differences, rather than anything else.

Murray's core arguments and the implications he draws do not depend upon genetic determinism. All that needs to be assumed is that factors outside of direct control combine to impact early brain development in a manner that creates relatively stable differences in various cognitive abilities that have an impact on cognitive performance (either directly and/or via effects upon rates of learning from practice and experience). If, the causes of these developmental differences were factors impacting fetal development, how exactly would that change his arguments? It would still mean that individual's differ due to "luck" factors outside their control. It would only make a small difference to the stability of existing group level differences. It would allow for a bit more instability and "mobility" from generation to generation, but still quite limited. Plus, group level differences are not his focus.

-It has to establish that IQ is a measure of inherent ability or potential.

IT only has to establish that there are measures showing relative stability in a related basic cognitive processes that impact performance and rates of improvement in performance across many intellectual tasks, such as reading comprehension, logical reasoning, arithmetic, scientific argumentation, etc.. This has been very well established and is mainstream cognitive science with a mountain of data many times larger now than it already was 20 years ago when the book was written.

-It has to establish that these differences are meaningful on a practical level

With the number of intellectual tasks that the g-factor predicts performance on, the only way it is not practically meaningful is if essentially all of formals education (which seeks to develop skills on these very tasks) has no practical meaning. Even then, IQ test still have meaning in determining success within formal education and thus upon everything that is in turn impacted by one's schooling, both in terms of grades, graduation, college attendance, degree type, etc..

Ironically for a book about the social implications of a science, it is the at the scientific level that the book really fails, since it fails to establish any of these points in a convincing manner. It tries to do so simply by rejecting or dismissing alternatives - by shifting the burden of proof onto detractors, precisely because none of these assumptions do well in testing.

For a start, while it is clear that IQ is highly inheritable, there's very little evidence that it is fixed or genetic. Education makes a vast difference to IQ test scores, as does practice. Simply being raised in an environment where formal testing is normal gives one a huge boost, leading to IQ test results tending to reinforce existing social boundaries. Similarly, improving nutrition improves IQ test results. Inheritable does not means genetic - wealth, social class, and education are also highly inheritable characteristics.

It's hard to define what the authors really mean by inherent ability or potential. There is this idea that IQ represents some X-factor underlying all human cognitive performance, but there's no real evidence for this view. Certainly researchers have come up with measures of mental ability, particularly around emotional or social reasoning, that correlate very poorly with IQ.

But the biggest gap by far is in the area of demonstrating that these values represent a practical difference. Gould's criticisms are the most famous, mainly because he goes into the most detail. It boils down to:
-The differences being described between groups are very small.
-The individual differences between people in the groups are extremely large.

In nearly every behavioral or medical experiment the group differences are a fraction of the individual differences among people within a group. This does nothing to undermine inferences about the contributors to the differences. In addition, if biology were the cause of general intelligence, then even if those biological factors had some relation to race, one would still expect larger within group differences in IQ than between group differences. This is because the difference in the biological factors will almost always be greater between the most extremely different members of a single group, then between the most prototypical and statistically "central" members of different groups. Nothing about this in any way undermines the central points of that book.

-The authors, intentionally or otherwise, blur the differences between differences between groups and differences within groups.

Yes, because the issue is not merely group level differences but individual differences that can sometimes manifest as differences at the group level if the factors that determine the differences are partially related to the factors that define group membership. The group differences are not the point. They are used just as an illustration and because most people (especially critics of his books) view society entirely in terms of groups and their different outcomes rather than variance at the individual level. Most of their critiques and those who focus everything on race care only about making the aggregate outcomes between groups the same by any means neccessary, no matter what injustices must be done at the individual level. To them, it does not matter whether an individual white person actually got advantages over an individual black person. All that matters is that giving special treatment to the black person over the white (even if the black person already had more advantages) will make the group level aggregate outcomes more equal. The Bell Curve authors do not see group level unequal outcomes as the sole problem to be addressed, and refer to them in service of a larger point about individual differences.

 

[doubtingt]

Nothing of the sort is implied by the quote, so why did you lol at that quote?

Well dad, I lol'ed at the quote because someone was serious quoting that shitty racist as if he has anything important to say about anything.

Ah, so it is an fallacious ad hominem dismissal of an idea based in your emotional feelings about the speaker, with those feeling themselves rooted in massive ignorance about the science to which he is referring.

I'd expect nothing less from you (or I guess "nothing more" would be more accurate).

 

[ksen]

Sure, because you should always just let racism dressed up in science slide right on by.