Charles Murray's books are all worth a read. He's likely the most meticulous data guy on the American Right.
He's a libertarian, not on "the right."
‘The Bell Curve’ 20 years later: A Q&A with Charles Murray
11–19 of 19 posts
Re: ‘The Bell Curve’ 20 years later: A Q&A with Charles Murray
#12Re: ‘The Bell Curve’ 20 years later: A Q&A with Charles Murray
#13> If we hadn’t discussed race, “The Bell Curve” would have been dismissed on grounds that “Herrnstein and Murray refuse to confront the reality that IQ tests are invalid for blacks, which makes their whole analysis meaningless.” We had to establish that in fact IQ tests measure the same thing in blacks as in whites, and doing so required us to discuss the elephant in the corner, the mean difference in test scores bet…
Pretending that our instruments MUST be biased just because we don't like the measurements excuses us from searching for solutions. In one case, micronutrient fortification of iodine to increase infant IQ was opposed because saying that infants in africa were being born with lower IQs was unacceptable. Absolutely terrible.
Re: ‘The Bell Curve’ 20 years later: A Q&A with Charles Murray
#14Charles Murray's books are all worth a read. He's likely the most meticulous data guy on the American Right.
He's a libertarian, not on "the right."
He might describe himself that way, but he advocates for socially conservative values more often than libertarians do (see "Coming Apart"). He's at least a borderline case, like a Ron Paul. AEI is a right-wing think tank.
Re: ‘The Bell Curve’ 20 years later: A Q&A with Charles Murray
#15Thrilled to see another libertarian argument for universal income! I’ve been arguing this for a few years myself, and even ran some rough numbers to demonstrate feasibility in this blog post: http://squangen.com/?p=118
How is this an argument for basic income?
Seems more like an argument for positive eugenics.
Re: ‘The Bell Curve’ 20 years later: A Q&A with Charles Murray
#16> If we hadn’t discussed race, “The Bell Curve” would have been dismissed on grounds that “Herrnstein and Murray refuse to confront the reality that IQ tests are invalid for blacks, which makes their whole analysis meaningless.” We had to establish that in fact IQ tests measure the same thing in blacks as in whites, and doing so required us to discuss the elephant in the corner, the mean difference in test scores bet…
Asians and Jews beat vanilla whites at I.Q. tests, but also any other test that measures cognitive/academic ability - PISA, GRE, MCAT, LSAT, ASVAB - they're all correlated. It is truly miraculous that racist white people managed to come up with so many tests that confirm the black/white cognitive gap while simultaneously screwing them all up and biasing them in favor of east Asians.
[deleted]
Re: ‘The Bell Curve’ 20 years later: A Q&A with Charles Murray
#17> If we hadn’t discussed race, “The Bell Curve” would have been dismissed on grounds that “Herrnstein and Murray refuse to confront the reality that IQ tests are invalid for blacks, which makes their whole analysis meaningless.” We had to establish that in fact IQ tests measure the same thing in blacks as in whites, and doing so required us to discuss the elephant in the corner, the mean difference in test scores bet…
> assume a definition of intelligence where the mean of blacks vs the mean of whites is more or less equal,
How is this any more reasonable an assumption? Don't get me wrong: I don't want to believe the alternative. But I can't just discount the possibility based on personal bias in absence of evidence, which seems to be what you're advocating. IQ not being an ideal model in no way implies that every conclusion derived from it is false; that's the fallacy fallacy. Do you have anything else to support an assertion of uniform mental capacity across the human species?
Re: ‘The Bell Curve’ 20 years later: A Q&A with Charles Murray
#18This post was killed by user flags.
Re: ‘The Bell Curve’ 20 years later: A Q&A with Charles Murray
#19Charles Murray's books are all worth a read. He's likely the most meticulous data guy on the American Right.
That may be true, but "The Bell Curve" is a pretty poor book, full of questionable use of data. I wrote a fairly detailed critique of it, back in the day, which is now lost to history, but the gist was, "Murry doesn't do a very good job of making his case regarding IQ and race."
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.