‘The Bell Curve’ 20 years later: A Q&A with Charles Murray(aei-ideas.org) |
‘The Bell Curve’ 20 years later: A Q&A with Charles Murray(aei-ideas.org) |
Seems more like an argument for positive eugenics.
This argument rests on the assumption that IQ tests are good at measuring anything. Which, given recent understanding of intelligence and IQ, is very highly questionable. Establishing a single metric for intelligence is close to impossible. We know so little about how the brain works. To think that we can dilute intelligence down to a single number is IMO absurd.
If anything the mean difference between whites and blacks in IQ tests is the proof that IQ tests are essentially meaningless. Either we assume a definition of intelligence where the mean of blacks vs the mean of whites is more or less equal, or we assume IQ actually measures intelligence. We can't have both.
To me, it seems much more plausible that some quantitative metric is biased, than to assume that two groups of people have different levels of intelligence. Given that a) social science has a history of developing biased metrics, b) white people have a history of justifying racism with scientific models, c) racial distinctions are largely arbitrary. Anyone remember phrenology?
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.
WOW... this post was killed. Goes to show the paranoia that still exists (and is probably stronger these days) around debating this book.
"Synthesizing evidence from nearly a century of empirical studies, Schmidt and Hunter established that general mental ability—the psychological trait that IQ scores reflect—is the single best predictor of job training success, and that it accounts for differences in job performance even in workers with more than a decade of experience. It’s more predictive than interests, personality, reference checks, and interview performance. Smart people don’t just make better mathematicians, as Brooks observed—they make better managers, clerks, salespeople, service workers, vehicle operators, and soldiers."
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?
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.