You haven’t really started doing internet science until you’ve started ignoring evidence that’s inconvenient to your pre-existing beliefs.
Anyway, I answered your challenge, now it’s your turn. Show me one study that shows that all differences in IQ between races (as they are popularly understood) are due entirely to genetic characteristics of those races.
Now, now. I don’t think you stopped thinking because someone called you a racist. I think you have your cause and effect swapped.
On that note I have to say to the other posters that listen to anti-science that **Chen019 **also started having a disgust with evidence that does not conform to what he believes, and with the ones that investigate and report that evidence.
His path has been nothing sort of a big cautionary tale, first he started as a mild scientific racist, then a nativist, then a climate change denier*, and now in GD he is a proud Holocaust denier.
Really guys, you need to get better sources or friends, you are getting poisoned slowly, but surely.
*Those items -Climate change denial and nativism- came together from him and others in a thread showing how powerful interests (when I checked their sources) are not having a problem with supporting bigotry and anti-science at the same time.
This is a straw man, no? It’s a far stronger argument – to the point of being absurd – than Murray ever makes. I believe that in The Bell Curve’s own words the authors were “agnostic” on the subject of genes v. environment, leaning to both having a role (full disclosure: like everyone else, I have not read the book).
That’s is their great sin, right? The correlation between IQ and positive outcomes (education, wealth, etc.) is a fact. The existence of “g,” the general intelligence IQ tests purport to measure, is widely accepted in the relevant scientific community. Observed gaps in IQ scores between somewhat arbitrary but socially significant groupings of people with varying degrees of shared ancestry and correlated genes (i.e., “races”) are likewise a fact. Intelligence being largely heritable is a fact.
The Bell Curve survives at least this far in any honest assessment, I think. But its authors take the additional step of attempting to assess how genetics v. environment plays a role in the observed racial gaps in America, and come to a relatively measured conclusion: “we aren’t sure, but a bit of both probably contribute.”
For this Murray, who had the misfortune to survive until the book’s publication, has become a pariah, an embodiment of “pseudoscientific racism.” Is this really fair? As Salvor argues at length above, there are at least a priori reasons to think that groups of people segregated by culture and geography might develop somewhat different genes, on average. The mental consequences of those differences could be unmeasurably small, but the idea is not a ridiculous one.
It’s not like Murray denies the role of environment. In this very podcast, and I believe in the book as well, Murray uses the analogy of corn planted in Iowa vs. corn planted in the desert (white Americans’ environment is Iowa; black Americans’ is the desert). Later, he describes meeting black students at Harvard as an undergraduate, and assuming that they’re innately smarter than he is, given his environmental advantages (I assume this predated affirmative action, which he does not care for). These do not strike me as the musings of a raving racist.
I’m sufficiently uncomfortable with this topic and sufficiently uneducated in the relevant fields that I’m resistant to the conclusion that racial IQ differences are significantly genetic in origin - but I honestly don’t know the right answer. Are East Asians better at spacial reasoning than Caucasians, on average, due to different allele frequencies rather than cultural or environmental factors? That’s a question for science to answer, if it cares to. I don’t see how the answer can be an obvious “No, you #%#% racist.”
By the way, I just made an account on these forums, as I just listened to this podcast, thought Murray seemed somewhat mistreated, and was curious as to the response. I, uh, promise that I’m not an enthusiastic racist running to a new environment to spew my bile.
It’s the argument **Salvor **is making, so he should back it up.
“Black” people aren’t a race, so that’s factually wrong.
Certain subgroups of African Americans share common West African ancestry, but a) not all of them, b) the typical “African American” has maybe 25% European ancestry, and c) many “white Americans” have African heritage.
Also, there have been various studies showing that a) there’s no relationship between percentage of African heritage and average IQ (which, if correct, immediately disproves the theory that black people have lower average IQ because of genetic characteristics of the “black” race, but which is consistent with different treatment of people with black skin), b) black children raised under similar conditions as white children in a community which doesn’t discriminate against them have similar average IQs, and c) black average IQ is increasing over time, and is currently higher than average white IQ from 50 years ago.
None of this conclusively proves that the “genetic” argument is wrong, but it’s a lot of fucking evidence that has to be ignored by people like Salvor. Luckily, ignoring this evidence is easy for **Salvor **because he’s profoundly ignorant, and has made no effort whatsoever to educate himself. You can’t ignore what you don’t know!
**Salvor **is ignorant and verbose, a bad combination. There are actual intelligent people commenting on this thread–you should read what they say and skip over **Salvor’s **posts.
Yes, because here you are missing a lot of history, and Murray and Sam also act as if things like this did not happen:
https://mediamatters.org/research/2007/04/04/youve-got-to-be-taught-to-hate-and-fear/138489
Much more in the link.
No problems… so far.
But see, this is where I have a hard time seeing this as anything but an unusually well-intentioned defamation campaign. The article you link suggests that he’s a blundering dilettante who stepped outside his field - “Trained as a Ph.D. in political science but without any formal credentials in economics or psychometrics” - but his co-author was an eminent psychologist and behavioral economist. Similarly, the circumstances surrounding the book’s publishing and review process seem irrelevant. The passage goes on to give this summary of the book’s thesis:
As I said, I have not read the book, but if that’s in fact its thesis Murray did an absolutely terrible job advancing it in this podcast. It sounds like a caricature of his argument, in fact, framed in language to make it seem maximally mustache-twirling. I am reasonablycertain that the book does not argue that “all racial barriers to advancement have been removed from American society” - recall Murray’s folksy analogy to corn I paraphrased above. This all just seems flatly dishonest.
The second quote argues experts in psychometrics, etc. crushed the book on publication for its reliance on flawed studies purporting to demonstrate the heritability of IQ. But those studies were correct, and my understanding is that they were widely accepted in the field even at the time of the book’s publishing. From the “IQ heritability” Wikipedia page:
Even if Murray and his coauthor were wrong about IQ’s heritability-- and it appears that they were not – judging a published result to be correct when it is not does not make someone a pseudoscientist, much less a racist. At this point, psychology has a rather embarrassing list of high-profile results that appear to have been mythical.
Look, I won’t pretend to be an expert in this field. I’m just some random citizen with a degree in an unrelated science trying to make sense of the world. But it sure seems to me that much of the ire directed Murray’s way is entirely unfair, bordering on deliberately malicious.
Now we are running into trouble…
Again, he and his co-author decided to not subject their research to peer review, in contrast a Nobel laureate in economics did publish his criticism of the book on a peer reviewed journal.
Could you clarify–are you saying that this is accurate, but that’s it’s not an accurate summary of someone else’s credentials, therefore it’s malicious? So if someone were to say" **Evil Economist **isn’t a brain surgeon." I could counter by saying, “yes, but Ben Carson is, therefore you’re defaming me”?
They were, the sooner you give it up, the healthier you will be in the future. As pointed before, Murray’s work is one of the poster boys that many experts do point at when they talk about how “psychology has a rather embarrassing list of high-profile results that appear to have been mythical.”
You think the “circumstance” of not having research peer reviewed is irrelevant?
I’m finding your posts here very credible. Very credible.
No, no - I’m saying the implication is that Murray isn’t qualified to do this kind of research, but whether or not that’s true he wrote the book with someone who evidently was. The fact that Herrnstein died just before The Bell Curve was published doesn’t mean that Murray authored it alone. This at least warrants a mention in any honest sentence about the qualifications of the book’s authors. The sentence in question is clearly crafted to suggest that Murray was a racist know-nothing from another field who embarrassed himself by stepping into the deep end of the pool when he couldn’t swim. Here it is in full:
Don’t you think Hernnstein warrants a mention here? It’s not just “Murray’s work,” after all, and it seems likely that the real psychologist did the heaving lifting re: interpreting the relevant literature.
Again, I am not an expert in this field, but I am pretty sure that the heritability is simply established science:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
The line I quoted above (estimating nearly 80% heritability in adults) is from an American Psychological Association “task force” from 1996, which I think formed in response to the furor about The Bell Curve.
The Bell Curve may be somewhat or substantially wrong, but I really don’t think this is the reason. Edit - I should add that the heritability of IQ is no way “Murray’s work,” as I understand it. He simply used it as a fact in his broader argument.
It’s a ~900 page book largely aimed at a popular audience… Do those typically get peer reviewed? I’m quite confused by this objection.
Not my problem that you want to show others that you did not read the thread.
The hereditability is not the issue, the problem was that Murray and others did go from that to claim that there was a difference with that and with intelligence between races, and also related to genes.
And here you show that you did not bother to read the cited article from MediaMatters that I made.
If you had read it and stopped to show to others how ignorant you want to be, you would had noticed (unwillingly) why there is a big objection, Murray and others claim to do science when in reality they did not. They have an agenda already made.
It’s very simple. If you want it to have legitimacy as science, it has to go through the rigors of science.
The rigor is what grants the legitimacy. If you don’t want to have to go through those rigors, it is not science; it’s opinion.
Err, the heritability was most certainly the issue in the sentence of mine you quoted. What does this have to do with reading the thread? I said “Even if Murray and his coauthor were wrong about IQ’s heritability [etc., etc., typically pompous prose]”; you replied “They were…”; I replied that I thought you were mistaken. At no point were were discussing anything but the heritability of IQ.
Obviously the heritability of IQ is not what pissed everyone off (although a surprising number of people choose to simply reject it). The “difference” you reference is similarly settled science - there really are differences in the mean values between (self-identified) racial groups in IQ test results, and not always in favor of white people.
Those gaps may or may not be genetic in nature - that’s the question, right? I don’t see much of a chance that there aren’t some environmental contributions (my money would be on “most to all environmental,” but my money is worthless because I don’t know enough), but I also don’t see the point of publicly destroying anyone who tries to study the issue if we don’t like their conclusions.
Ok, but it’s either right or wrong on its merits, irrespective of its venue, and it’s hardly the only book of its type. Is Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature” illegitimate because it was published through the conventional press, such that I should ignore its argument? Certainly, I personally have to make some sort of decision on what I think about all of this, and in this particular case most of The Bell Curve’s argument is in fact derivative of accepted, peer-reviewed science (it even piggybacks on a notorious article from a real-deal peer-reviewed journal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Much_Can_We_Boost_IQ_and_Scholastic_Achievement%3F). Since most of its premises appear to be uncontroversial, I have to grapple with the rest of it.
Well, it’s true that it’s hardly the only book that espouses racism and gets compliant fools to believe in it. The OP of this thread thought, I guess, that he was defending Sam Harris by claiming Harris didn’t tackle Murray about the science, just whether the forbidden knowledge was just too, too perilous. But without the science, what the fuck is anyone doing paying attention to this schmuck?
Lots of people, especially on this board, think to hide behind the science-ish fig leaf. This thing looks like racism, but it’s totally science! If you disagree, you are totally against science!
If it’s science, completely legit science, the methodology is the absolutely most important thing. Not the results, not the hypothesis, the methodology. And that’s the part Murray’s supporters are so quick to handwave away.
Any bozo can come up with a hypothesis. Any demagogue can find “solutions.” Any nitwit can leap to conclusions. The scientist uses appropriate methodology and then invites other scientists to poke at that methodology with a sharp stick.
Last year, I spent weeks shepherding peer review for research grants. Teams of ten experts went into every single grant proposal for hours. The poked and argued and questioned and then wrote extensively on every single aspect of every single proposal. That is rigor. Hiding from that is not a circumstance. Hiding from that is disqualifying.
So, if you want to spend time thoughtfully contemplating an opinion piece you acknowledge you don’t have the science chops to actually review, be my guest. I’m sure it will be very valuable to the OP. He needs friends.
Anytime I see a post or thread from our esteemed OP, I usually just skip right over it. He’s just a contrarian. Every single thing he posts is an argument against something that is overwhelmingly already established. He posts simply to be a contrarian, he is not genuine.