Interesting podcast conversation between Sam Harris and Charles Murray (of "Bell Curve" fame)

[tomndebb]

@SlackerInc

Many of the objections quoted here have been from sociologists and anthropologists. As the offspring of one of each, I can assure you that those fields were extremely hostile to all of this (not just the race aspect) long before 1994.

True. That hardly made The Bell Curve iconoclastic. The whole issue has a large number of supporters and opponents. It could be compared to current Anthropogenic Global Warming or even the Theory of Evolution. It is not at all difficult to find supporters and opponents of either set of hypotheses among general scientists of one sort or another. Quite a few psychometricists were supportive of the book (at least until its blatant flaws were analyzed and revealed.

Fifty-two professors, most of them researchers in intelligence and related fields, signed an opinion statement titled “Mainstream Science on Intelligence”[sup][11][/sup] endorsing a number of the views presented in The Bell Curve. The statement was written by psychologist Linda Gottfredson and published in The Wall Street Journal in 1994 and subsequently reprinted in Intelligence, an academic journal. Of the 131 who were invited by mail to sign the document, 100 responded, with 52 agreeing to sign and 48 declining. Eleven of the 48 dissenters claimed that the statement or some part thereof did not represent the mainstream view of intelligence.[sup][11][/sup]

Getting better than 50% positive feedback from respondents from a solicited group strongly indicates that a fear of being seen as iconoclasts had little to do with their deliberate avoidance of pre-publication review.

[SlackerInc]

This latest line of argument seems strikingly at odds with the chorus we kept hearing earlier in the thread about how Murray is a charlatan, a pseudoscientist overwhelmingly repudiated by real scientists.

[GIGObuster]

@SlackerInc

This latest line of argument seems strikingly at odds with the chorus we kept hearing earlier in the thread about how Murray is a charlatan, a pseudoscientist overwhelmingly repudiated by real scientists.

Please, like if I don’t know how climate change deniers also come in the variety of also following enough science to fool the gullible. As even your source said, “racial differences in test performance are largely if not entirely environmental in origin.”

As a real scientist also tells it:

Racists love to cooperate: Sam Harris and Charles Murray

AWM recommends you read Lane’s article on the tainted sources of The Bell Curve— it’s poisonous garbage through and through. It’s bad science, something Harris should have brought up. He doesn’t. Instead, he just assumes that all of his biases are true, and that, once again, he and Chuck are the brave souls who are willing to accept the Forbidden Knowledge you peons are too cowardly to believe.

People don’t wanna hear that intelligence is a real thing, and that some people have more of it than others. They don’t wanna hear that IQ tests really measure it. They don’t wanna hear that differences in IQ matter, because they’re highly predictive of differential success in life. And not just for things like educational attainment and wealth, but for things like out-of-wedlock birth and mortality.

People don’t wanna hear that a person’s intelligence is in large measure due to his or her genes, and there seems to be very little we can do environmentally to increase a person’s intelligence — even in childhood. It’s not that the environment doesn’t matter, but genes appear to be 50 to 80 percent of the story. People don’t want to hear this. And they certainly don’t want to hear that average IQ differs across races and ethnic groups.

That was a revealing phrase: “there seems to be very little we can do environmentally to increase a person’s intelligence — even in childhood”, Sam. Sam. Sam, I want to introduce you to a word that seems to be unfamiliar to you. It’s kind of amazing that a neuroscientist hasn’t run across it before.

That word is education.

Boom. Mic drop. Done.

Now of course Harris does actually know that common English word, but what it reveals is that he has a different understanding of intelligence than most of us do. He want’s to believe that children are born with different capacities for learning, that education is something that just fills that capacity with knowledge. This is, obviously, not true — any educator should be able to tell you that brains grow in ability with use, and that the key to expanding its ability is practice.

[SlackerInc]

So you are claiming climate change deniers are not iconoclastic?!? Ehhh…

[GIGObuster]

BTW, I see that you and others are still not able to explain in any way why is that groups that investigate pseudoscience, independently of each other, agree that climate change deniers, GMO opponents, anti vaxxers, etc. are following pseudoscience. And they also see that quality on Murray and his followers.

And after decades of looking at what the most serious and most condescending groups against pseudoscience do I can say that they essentially do their reports not only by using logic, but mostly by asking the experts in the field about how most of them see an issue.

And of course it is not only the ones that investigate pseudoscience the ones that do not see Murray as an innocent. Others do note that more than once Murray has demonstrated that the blinders are on him.

None of the Above

When the children of Southern Italian immigrants were given I.Q. tests in the early part of the past century, for example, they recorded median scores in the high seventies and low eighties, a full standard deviation below their American and Western European counterparts. Southern Italians did as poorly on I.Q. tests as Hispanics and blacks did. As you can imagine, there was much concerned talk at the time about the genetic inferiority of Italian stock, of the inadvisability of letting so many second-class immigrants into the United States, and of the squalor that seemed endemic to Italian urban neighborhoods. Sound familiar? These days, when talk turns to the supposed genetic differences in the intelligence of certain races, Southern Italians have disappeared from the discussion. “Did their genes begin to mutate somewhere in the 1930s?” the psychologists Seymour Sarason and John Doris ask, in their account of the Italian experience. “Or is it possible that somewhere in the 1920s, if not earlier, the sociocultural history of Italo-Americans took a turn from the blacks and the Spanish Americans which permitted their assimilation into the general undifferentiated mass of Americans?”

Two weeks ago, Flynn came to Manhattan to debate Charles Murray at a forum sponsored by the Manhattan Institute. Their subject was the black-white I.Q. gap in America. During the twenty-five years after the Second World War, that gap closed considerably. The I.Q.s of white Americans rose, as part of the general worldwide Flynn effect, but the I.Q.s of black Americans rose faster. Then, for about a period of twenty-five years, that trend stalled—and the question was why.

Murray showed a series of PowerPoint slides, each representing different statistical formulations of the I.Q. gap. He appeared to be pessimistic that the racial difference would narrow in the future. “By the nineteen-seventies, you had gotten most of the juice out of the environment that you were going to get,” he said. That gap, he seemed to think, reflected some inherent difference between the races. “Starting in the nineteen-seventies, to put it very crudely, you had a higher proportion of black kids being born to really dumb mothers,” he said. When the debate’s moderator, Jane Waldfogel, informed him that the most recent data showed that the race gap had begun to close again, Murray seemed unimpressed, as if the possibility that blacks could ever make further progress was inconceivable.

Flynn took a different approach. The black-white gap, he pointed out, differs dramatically by age. He noted that the tests we have for measuring the cognitive functioning of infants, though admittedly crude, show the races to be almost the same. By age four, the average black I.Q. is 95.4—only four and a half points behind the average white I.Q. Then the real gap emerges: from age four through twenty-four, blacks lose six-tenths of a point a year, until their scores settle at 83.4.

That steady decline, Flynn said, did not resemble the usual pattern of genetic influence. Instead, it was exactly what you would expect, given the disparate cognitive environments that whites and blacks encounter as they grow older.

Flynn then talked about what we’ve learned from studies of adoption and mixed-race children—and that evidence didn’t fit a genetic model, either. If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn’t make a difference whether it’s a mixed-race child’s mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black mother and a white father. And it shouldn’t make much of a difference where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does: the children fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white American G.I.s and German mothers. The difference, in that case, was not the fact of the children’s blackness, as a fundamentalist would say. It was the fact of their Germanness—of their being brought up in a different culture, under different circumstances. “The mind is much more like a muscle than we’ve ever realized,” Flynn said. “It needs to get cognitive exercise. It’s not some piece of clay on which you put an indelible mark.” The lesson to be drawn from black and white differences was the same as the lesson from the Netherlands years ago: I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person’s mind but the quality of the world that person lives in.

[SlackerInc]

If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn’t make a difference whether it’s a mixed-race child’s mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black mother and a white father.

Wow, thanks for the gift. Whoever wrote this is woefully ignorant of some very basic facts about IQ’s heritability. To wit:

Parental education and maternal intelligence are well-known predictors of child IQ. However, the literature regarding other factors that may contribute to individual differences in IQ is inconclusive.

So these CDC-funded researchers investigated many other such factors and found, nope, it’s still basically those two things:

The most important finding of this study is the large proportion of variance explained by parental education and maternal IQ. The results corroborate studies showing that these factors are the predominant predictors of the child’s IQ and also suggest that the other factors included in this study may add relatively little explained variance to that of maternal IQ and parental education.

So that paternal-maternal gap actually strengthens Murray’s case.

ETA: Anecdotal, but note how well those two factors apply to Barack Obama.

[GIGObuster]

@SlackerInc

Wow, thanks for the gift. Whoever wrote this is woefully ignorant of some very basic facts about IQ’s heritability. To wit:

So these CDC-funded researchers investigated many other such factors and found, nope, it’s still basically those two things:

So that paternal-maternal gap actually strengthens Murray’s case.

ETA: Anecdotal, but note how well those two factors apply to Barack Obama.

And I can see you are still a willful ignorant, the heritibalility is not the problem.

Again the problem is to plug in an assumed genetic explanation of the intelligence differences between races: Again, the “gift” you are talking about is in reality a gift for me. It shows for the 100th time that you are incapable of ever noticing that your heritibility point is just a red herring. It says nothing about comparisons between races, especially when there are so many environmental/cultural/societal differences between these groups.

That remains the biggest point the scientific racists always have a propensity to miss…

The reason for their blinders that prevents them from noticing that must be in their genes…

[Evil_Economist]

@SlackerInc

Wow, thanks for the gift. Whoever wrote this is woefully ignorant of some very basic facts about IQ’s heritability. To wit:

So these CDC-funded researchers investigated many other such factors and found, nope, it’s still basically those two things:

So that paternal-maternal gap actually strengthens Murray’s case.

ETA: Anecdotal, but note how well those two factors apply to Barack Obama.

Did you actually try reading that study, you moron? They didn’t test paternal IQ; they only tested mothers and their children–fathers weren’t tested, so of course maternal IQ predicted offspring IQ.

You claim to be high IQ, but there’s no fucking way you actually are. You’re clearly lying.

[SlackerInc]

@Evil_Economist

You claim to be high IQ, but there’s no fucking way you actually are. You’re clearly lying.

Make it worth my while, and I’ll prove it to you. $100 wager sound good?

[Evil_Economist]

@SlackerInc

You “called it” that I might say something approving about a post that dovetailed with the things I’ve been saying? That’s genius of you! :rolleyes:

Yeah, I did fucking call it. You love posts made by the second most ignorant person in the thread. It’s the stupid leading the stupid.

[GIGObuster]

@SlackerInc

Make it worth my while, and I’ll prove it to you. $100 wager sound good?

You lost the bet already with Evil Economist, you are demonstratively incompetent by not doing a simple summary or paraphrases of what you consider are the important or new arguments Sam and Murray did talk about in the podcast.

In the latest issue, you not only show that your argument was dumb as Evil Economist noted, but even what I noted, that it had nothing to do with the alleged differences in genes between “races”, and just tap dancing around what Flinn said and the blinders that Murray showed when confronting Flinn.

[SlackerInc]

Or a higher wager would be fine, of course.

But if it makes you feel better, I do sometimes find myself amazed by some of the people in TNS. Specifically, the surprisingly large and vocal minority that loooves Trump. Regardless of how right wing they may be, I can’t comprehend how they can tolerate such an anti-intellectual, cringe-inducingly insecure and inarticulate douchebag.

Back to maternal vs. paternal IQ and heritability:

Relationship of Child IQ to Parental IQ and Education in Children with Fetal...

IQ and education for both parents were statistically correlated to child IQ. However, paternal IQ and education were not significant after accounting for maternal IQ effects.

ETA:

@GIGObuster

You lost the bet already with Evil Economist, you are demonstratively incompetent by not doing a simple summary or paraphrases of what you consider are the important or new arguments Sam and Murray did talk about in the podcast.

Get over it, I’m not fucking SparkNotes, okay?

BTW, are you ESL? Because if you are, I will cut you some slack.

[Evil_Economist]

@SlackerInc

Make it worth my while, and I’ll prove it to you. $100 wager sound good?

Dude, you’re clearly stupid. Your comment about that study was just fucking stupid–own it. And then, cherry on top, you felt compelled to say stupid shit about Obama.

No offense, but you’re clearly not as intelligent as you think you are. Your ability to understand that study was all the IQ test I need for you, and you clearly and publically scored below average.

[SlackerInc]

@Evil_Economist

Dude, you’re clearly stupid. Your comment about that study was just fucking stupid–own it. And then, cherry on top, you felt compelled to say stupid shit about Obama.

No offense, but you’re clearly not as intelligent as you think you are.

You’re good for a laugh, anyway. I won’t cast aspersions on your IQ: it’s clearly above average. But you were guilty of a kind of tic in your writing style there. You mindlessly inserted the contentless expression “no offense” in the middle of a rant that was clearly meant to offend. Next time, stop and think about what you are writing before you just spew inanities. (In general, there is almost no context in which “no offense” is appropriate, which is why you’ll rarely if ever see me use it.)

HTH

[Evil_Economist]

@SlackerInc

Back to maternal vs. paternal IQ and heritability:

Relationship of Child IQ to Parental IQ and Education in Children with Fetal Antiepileptic Drug Exposure - PMC

Why bury the lede?

There are at least three reasons why paternal IQ and education may not predict the child’s cognitive outcome. First, it may be that paternal IQ and education are so closely related to maternal IQ and education that they add no additional predictive value to child cognitive outcome; this possibility is supported at least in part by our analyses. Second, the child may spend more time with the mother so that the environmental influences related to maternal IQ and education may have a greater effect. Finally, unlike maternity, absolute confirmation of paternity requires genetic testing.

[GIGObuster]

@SlackerInc

Back to maternal vs. paternal IQ and heritability:

Relationship of Child IQ to Parental IQ and Education in Children with Fetal Antiepileptic Drug Exposure - PMC

Are you so dumb that you still don’t realize that that does not refute what **iiandyiiii **and others reported?

[tomndebb]

@SlackerInc

This latest line of argument seems strikingly at odds with the chorus we kept hearing earlier in the thread about how Murray is a charlatan, a pseudoscientist overwhelmingly repudiated by real scientists.

Not really.
He ducked review by real scientists to get his crap published. That does not mean that his themes (as opposed to the horrible nonsense he used to “explain” them) was universally rejected before he published.

There are legitimate scientists who believe that different populations have differing average intelligence. (They tend to be people who have invested their careers in psychometrics who have a vested interest in believing something about psychometrics being true.) That does not mean that those people have to accept the bad logic and miserable math that Murray and Herrnstein published, but it does mean that they would not have had a predisposition to reject The Bell Curve before it was published and examined. That Murray and Herrnstein hid their work from those people indicates that they were trying to avoid legitimate science to get their book out to a popular audience and not that they feared being called iconoclasts.

[GIGObuster]

@SlackerInc

Get over it, I’m not fucking SparkNotes, okay?

Not OK, even one of your supporters early showed how easy it was to do so in the thread, so at least we already had one that showed to have superior genes than the ones you have.

@SlackerInc

BTW, are you ESL? Because if you are, I will cut you some slack.

No need to worry, one of the reasons why I decided to join this message board was because I realized that just joining a Spanish one would be limiting as a lot of science and technology sources use English.

So, carry on, you monolingual limited one. There are cures for that condition you know…

[SlackerInc]

Whatever gave you the idea I was monolingual? I speak French assez bien, and I have also studied Russian and Spanish.

[GIGObuster]

@SlackerInc

Whatever gave you the idea I was monolingual? I speak French assez bien, and I have also studied Russian and Spanish.

That is why I pointed that bit at the end, I was covering my bases. Anyhow, you showed that do know better about how to learn and what teachers do, so stop being a jerk and report the points that you think are important from the podcast or shut up.