Charles "The Bell Curve" Murray is back with a three-part essay series on edcuation, published in The Wall Street Journal:
- Part I: The world is full of stupid people.
- Part II: Too many stupid people go to college.
- Part III: We should spend more money on the tiny fraction of people who are smart.
(You can also find them on the American Enterprise Institute site, if the WSJ links rot.)
Charles Murray bugs me, because he makes my life more difficult. Not because he's a bold iconoclast challenging the hidebound educational establishment, but because his writing on these topics has a smugly patrician and crypto-racist air that contaminates everything that even comes close to sounding related to one of his ideas. When, like the proverbial blind pig, he stumbles onto the occasional good idea (we do scant gifted education in this country, and it's a shame), he wrecks it for the rest of us.
I have, on occasion, said some things about American education that are broadly similar to some of the things Murray says. The way he says them, though, makes me feel icky. Consider this gem from part I:
Now take the girl sitting across the aisle who is getting an F. She is at the 20th percentile of intelligence, which means she has an IQ of 88. If the grading is honest, it may not be possible to do more than give her an E for effort. Even if she is taught to read every bit as well as her intelligence permits, she still will be able to comprehend only simple written material. It is a good thing that she becomes functionally literate, and it will have an effect on the range of jobs she can hold. But still she will be confined to jobs that require minimal reading skills. She is just not smart enough to do more than that.
I mean, you can just hear the condescension dripping from his keyboard, puddling at his feet, and staining the floorboards. Even leaving aside his dogged insistence that IQ is a reliable measurement of anything, this just sounds creepy. "Even if she is taught to read every bit as well as her intelligence permits"-- you can see the marks where he edited out "the poor little thing," for length reasons.
And the maddening thing is, he's rooting around blindly in a truffle-rich environment. There are good arguments to be made along some of these lines: There are a fair number of students in the educational system who would be better served by some sort of vocational training than by pushing them through high school and into college (though the Dean Dad does a nice job of explaining where he's wrong about two-year colleges. But the fact that Murray is making these arguments makes it harder for anybody who actually has credibility to make them, once he's oozed all over them.
Even when he takes a relatively inoffensive idea like "We should set aside more money for educating the best and brightest students," in Part III, he has to sneak in a slimy little aside:
The gifted should not be taught to be nonjudgmental; they need to learn how to make accurate judgments. They should not be taught to be equally respectful of Aztecs and Greeks; they should focus on the best that has come before them, which will mean a light dose of Aztecs and a heavy one of Greeks. The primary purpose of their education should not be to let the little darlings express themselves, but to give them the tools and the intellectual discipline for expressing themselves as adults.
It's absolutely maddening. He's "Uncle Al" with a think-tank job. I realize it's the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, and not a publication with an intellectual reputation to protect, but honestly, why do people keep promoting this slime?
Feh. Now I need a shower-- I've got Charles Murray all over my hands.
Comments
# 1 | dr. dave | January 19, 2007 9:54 AM
Thanks for tackling this. I read those articles linked from the Chronicle's "A&L Daily" page, and came away with the same icky feeling, but without the energy to muster up a rebuttal. It's possible to advocate beter gifted education without coming off as downright EUGENECIST about it.
# 2 | quitter | January 19, 2007 11:01 AM
Careful, you're insulting Razib's hero. He still believes the Bell Curve is Right despite being pre and post-debunked by the Mismeasure of Man.
# 3 | just a guy | January 19, 2007 11:06 AM
It's possible to advocate beter gifted education without coming off as downright EUGENECIST about it.
that's odd, I didn't see any mention of selective breeding in any of the three articles.
# 4 | Chris Goedde | January 19, 2007 12:08 PM
I didn't bother to read the articles, but from what Chad wrote it strikes me that the other problem is that Murray has a hold of the wrong end of the stick. The trouble isn't with the students, it's with a society that values credentialism over education.
# 5 | razib | January 19, 2007 1:04 PM
Careful, you're insulting Razib's hero.
charles is a friend/acquaintance of mine, yes. but just an FYI, that interview was done by matt mcintosh, not myself.
smugly patrician and crypto-racist air
and just for the record, i believe charles is a conventional middle-class midwesterner in origin (iowa). and he has two biracial daughters from his first marriage.
# 6 | Pi Guy | January 19, 2007 1:40 PM
My father is president of a two-year technical college near Tacoma. When he was visiting over the holidays, he said something about the nature of the education system that seemed so obvious that I couldn't believe that I'd never heard it before (and I'd spent 5 years teaching prior to going into induxtry).
He attended a lecture where the speaker (I believe that he said that she was the local school superintendent) said that the problem is that we treat the learning content as the variable and time as the constant. The result is that having a HS diploma doesn't really say anything about what one knows except that they showed relatively regularly over a period of 12 or 13 years. She asserts that this exactly the opposite of how it should be. Instead, she suggests that, instead, we should treat the content as the constant and, within some reasonable limits, time as the variable.
This has a number of consequences, chief among them, that it offers a means of dealing rather effectively with the kids who are gifted as well as those less so. If they're gifted, don't make them keep showing up. Move them on and let them grow. If they require more time, let them have it.
While this might be a bit off-topic, I'm curious to know what others think of this.
# 7 | natural cynic | January 19, 2007 2:19 PM
Pi Guy: If they're gifted, don't make them keep showing up. Move them on and let them grow. If they require more time, let them have it.
Absolutely right on an intellectual level; very impractical on a social level. H.S. as it is in our society is a social center and this kind of a proposal would almost necessarily wreck many of the social functions such as interating with your age cohort and it would ttally mess up any emphasis on sports [which, on the whole, is probably a good thing]. This would not go over with the general populace, but should be a good idea for a magnet school.
# 8 | Laura | January 19, 2007 2:50 PM
You linked to Dean Dad's critique of the two-year school idea, but he also goes on to discuss the problems with funneling "average Joes" into a "master craftsman" track:
Murray also misconstrues craftsmen. The reason they're well paid is that they're unionized. The unions are hard to break into, and not at all shy about flexing their muscle to keep uncertified competition away. If a flood of new people arrived on the scene, we'd either see a lot of unemployed new people or the salaries drop like stones. On top of that, it takes brains to be a good electrician or HVAC technician or carpenter. If we funnel the intellectually-weak - assuming, for a moment, that we can isolate that category - into skilled trades, most of them won't cut it there, either.
I'm also not sure how he expects "market forces" to counter the wealthy using college as a way of getting their less than brilliant and less than motivated kids the right connections, etc. Or stop less-than-wealthy people from wanting a piece of that action for their own kids.
The problem isn't that Murray is tarnishing a good idea (and if he actually had a good idea, it wouldn't be negated simply by his having it). The problem is that his argument is weakly conceived and sloppily executed, even though he does have a point about much of college (and often much of high school) being a waste of time and money.
# 9 | a quantum diaries survivor | January 19, 2007 3:05 PM
Hi Chad,
very, very well said.
This post was such a pleasure to read for me that I had my wife read it too / she is a teacher of latin and greek, and we discussed your prose. I will never master English well enough to come near it, but I do my best.
As for the contents, I did not have the guts of reading Murray's articles. I have on my shelves "the bell curve" but never made it past a rapid browsing... Thanks for taking the pains of looking inside it for us. Somebody has to do the dirty jobs...
Cheers,
T.
# 10 | sanzio | January 19, 2007 3:08 PM
Natural Cynic: Absolutely right on an intellectual level; very impractical on a social level.
I agree. Many schools are being asked to teach a social and intellectual curriculum in order to create "well rounded students." While the efficacy of these programs vary the reality is that education in the US requires some degree of both.
Perhaps this is part of the problem facing our education system. As a social curriculum is integrated does it supplant the intellectual curriculum? Ideally a strong family/community network would provide the social skills necessary to cope with life, but what if this network does not exist?
Very interesting post.
# 11 | quitter | January 19, 2007 3:31 PM
Razib said:
and just for the record, i believe charles is a conventional middle-class midwesterner in origin (iowa). and he has two biracial daughters from his first marriage.
Wow midwesterners aren't ever racist? I'll have to remind my crazy racist midwestern grandfather that he's screwing up the works, at the next seance anyway. And Murray's "bi-racial" marriage was to a Thai woman. Not all brown people are included as dumb by design in the Bell Curve. We're talking about racism against blacks not asians. Nice try though, good distraction.
# 12 | Julie Stahlhut | January 19, 2007 3:46 PM
If they're gifted, don't make them keep showing up. Move them on and let them grow. If they require more time, let them have it.
This deceptively simple formula could reduce a tremendous amount of human guilt, depression, underemployment, underachievement, and boredom. Yes, we'd have to figure out how to put reasonable limits on it -- people shouldn't be spending nine years in high school -- but really, is there any other reason for the way things are now other than someone else's convenience and a lot of not-necessarily-optimal historical contingency?
# 13 | Eric Johnson | January 19, 2007 4:15 PM
I don't understand how Mr. Murray makes your life more difficult. I can understand how the ideas he expresses in this series of editorials can be viewed as elitist and offensive by some, but I think that says more about their social and political leanings than it does about the quality or substance of his arguments. I have not read The Bell Curve, so perhaps my view of these editorials is naive, but it seems that nobody here is presenting much of an argument against what seem to me to be the main points of his articles, namely:
Now I've seen hints of objections to point number two in my list (which doesn't represent all of the assumptions or arguments that Mr. Murray's editorials contain), but I haven't seen anybody attack any of the core arguments on the basis of substance. It's obvious to me that those who have read The Bell Curve read much more into his arguments than what I see, and it seems like this is tainting their ability to treat this series of articles with anything but contempt.
I'd like to see somebody attack the ideas themselves, rather than the perceived tone in which they were presented. I'm not an academic by profession, I'm a computer programmer, and I wonder if these ideas would be less resonant if I spent more of my day in the company of academics. In short, in my limited experience, the basic ideas Mr. Murray is presenting (as I understand them and listed above) seem almost self-evident.
# 14 | just a guy | January 19, 2007 4:16 PM
Wow midwesterners aren't ever racist?
i believe the note about murray's origin was in response to the adjective "patrician".
it is a fact, of course, that the distribution of IQ in African-Americans is lower than that of Europeans-Americans, for whatever reason (invalidity of the IQ test, environmental factors, genetic factors--choose your hypothesis, or mix and match). if noting that makes one a "racist", then any hope for rational discussion is lost.
# 15 | Blake Stacey | January 19, 2007 4:20 PM
If we had schools with money, teachers who cared, teachers who knew their material, books which were engaging instead of inaccurate, "educational TV" which was not an abomination, classroom computers which did not go to waste, boys and girls who were not going hungry and a few other things I could name, we'd have a lot more "gifted children" on our hands.
I'm a recovering "gifted child". I had that stigma stuck to me all the way from K to 12; the miracle is not that I got into a wonderful college, but rather that I made any friends. This is due, at least in part, to the fact that I did not constantly denigrate everyone around me for being unable to, say, do algebra or dissect a sonnet. In fact, at every opportunity I told my classmates, "If you read some Larry Gonick books and watched a few James Burke documentaries, there wouldn't be a gap between us." Later, I developed a motto: "Yes, I am an elitist. I love my elite so much, I think everybody should belong to it."
David Brin once asked,
I think that tied in with this is a tendency to forget all the influences which educated us. Why did we turn out so well — learned, inquiring, skeptical, articulate? It is so very easy to believe that one is specially blessed with reasoning abilities which triumph over others — that I am a skeptic and a rationalist, because the Invisible Pink Unicorn touched me with His magic horn. Isn't it pleasing to be a man apart, a philosopher-king who drank Wisdom from the orbiting teapot? Evidence to the contrary is easy to ignore.
We pay a price for this vanity: it yields us callousness and condescension. In the end, it assures that intellectualism is self-limiting.
# 16 | quitter | January 19, 2007 4:39 PM
There is such a thing as absolute, objective, quantifiable intelligence (whether what we call IQ measures it or not, and whether it can even be described by a scalar period)
No.
That intelligence is a relatively fixed quantity in any individual
No.
That the distribution of intelligence is described by a normal distribution curve.
Yes.
That the current political/cultural climate mandates an egalitarian approach to education that ill-serves all but the 40% or so around the middle of the curve.
Depends on what state you live in.
That those on the lower end of the intelligence spectrum would be better served by an educational system that was less disparaging of 'practical' (i.e. 'vocational') learning
Questionable, especially given the history of warehousing kids - essentially this is an excuse to give up on people.
That the economic, cultural, and intellectual 'health' is in the hands of the relative few in the rightmost tail of the curve and that we should be doing more to ensure the vitality of this population in particular
Haven't met many politicians eh? They're not that bright, and they don't pay that much attention to those who are. I'd rather everybody have basic competence and logic skills so that such a statement may one day be true.
That an egalitarian approach to choosing what to teach is detrimental. This seems to be a stab at the so-called multi-cultural, morally relativist, academic left's (straw-man) view that diversity is strength.
High school is for basic skills for everybody, if you want to take exceptional kids out, fine. It's always been an error, however, to leave kids out. Historically, it's just a nightmare, teachers direct kids they don't like to the lower tiers, the tests are biased (and IQ is not a constant), rates of intellectual development vary etc.
Read the Mismeasure of Man first before believing too much in the validity of any standardized test as an adequate measure of what to do with kids or what to expect from them.
Just a guy:
if noting that makes one a "racist", then any hope for rational discussion is lost.
Well, based on the history of science trying to identify whatever race is down on its luck as inferior I do believe that blaming the lower scores of American blacks on IQ is fundamentally racist, elitist and classic bad science. Whether Murray himself is racist or not, I don't know, but a bias is quite clear.
Further these are fundamentally flawed comparisons between the so-called races in our country, given the level of mixing between whites in blacks in this country over the last 400 years doesn't qualify them us as a distinct "race", nor would the tiny amount of genetic variability between humans provide a good explanation considering the poor hereditability of IQ and the far superior explanations of class, institutional/persistent racism (just read about stereotype threat sometime) and environment.
Making a jump from a difference in performance on these tests and the intellectual inferiority of a whole class of people based on bad science, bad biology, and in rejection of clear causes that bias the measurement is bad science and it is ultimately racist.
# 17 | just a guy | January 19, 2007 4:55 PM
Making a jump from a difference in performance on these tests and the intellectual inferiority of a whole class of people
whoa, whoa, I don't think Murray (or any serious scientist) would claim that any class of people is intellectually inferior. He would probably say that African-Americans are underrepresented among the population of high-IQ people (above, say, 120). it's a statistical problem-- if the mean of distribution A is a little lower than that of distribution B, then at any high cutoff there will be an underrepresentation of people from distribution A.
# 18 | Eric Johnson | January 19, 2007 5:05 PM
quitter,
If intelligence isn't a scalar and isn't relatively fixed in a given individual, then what do the axes of the normal curve represent? I'm going to assume you misunderstood what I meant. I was presenting Mr. Murray's arguments and assumptions, as I understood them, in an axiomatic format, to make them easier to refute one-by-one. These aren't my assertions, and aren't appropriately answered with a 'Yes' or 'No'.
I have indeed read nearly all of Gould's popular books, including Mismeasure, which is precisely why I included the caveat in the first point (intended to be bullet points, but the html tags were stripped out). I personally don't think that intelligence can be quantified with a scalar quantity, but it seems to me that intelligence can be quantified (by a vector, tensor, imaginary number, something).
I don't know if I agree with your characterization of politicians as the keepers of society's intellectual, cultural, or (maybe except this one to a degree) economic vitality either. I view politics as it is practiced in this country as almost entirely reactive as opposed to proactive.
Can you elaborate on your 'Yes', 'No', 'Questionable' and 'Depends' answers? Again, I'm looking for real arguments either that I have misunderstood Mr. Murray's point, or that his points are flawed (and why they are so).
Thanks
# 19 | bigTom | January 19, 2007 5:38 PM
I didn't find his (Murray's) quote about the girl offensive, just where he set the bar. If he had used 2%tile instead of 20%tile the statement would have made sense. We ought to be able to get at least 98% of a cohort to have more than basic reading ability.
# 20 | Clark | January 19, 2007 6:35 PM
If they're gifted, don't make them keep showing up. Move them on and let them grow. If they require more time, let them have it.
I skipped a grade, and somehow, I managed to enjoy childhood, despite being the only junior in my driver's ed class. It can be a challenge, but moving up a grade doesn't have to be a terribe experience. (In my case, it was early on, and that probably helped quite a bit.)
I lived in Brazil for a few years, where they have a system much more like this suggestion. I don't know of anyone that was ever moved up a grade (I don't think), but nearly everyone in the population repeated something somewhere sometime. A good student in something like the 50-85% range would probably repeat 1 year. Making it through without ever repeating every year was considered an impressive accomplishment and a sign of real intelligence. Even repeating 2 years along the way wasn't such a terrible thing. In the US if someone was held back, it would be the End Of The World for that kid. He would probably be crushed. But if the system made it a common thing, people would adapt. (Though it would be a very hard adjustment) Kids could study hard, do alright on their tests and come home and tell their parents that they were moving on to 8th grade the next year, and they could be proud of that accomplishment.
# 21 | Walt | January 20, 2007 12:39 AM
just a guy, Eric Johnson: Look, Murray is a famous person, and his positions are well-known. He didn't just land on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal out of nowhere. Chad's post is addressed to people who know this context. We don't need to speculate what Murray really means: we already know.
# 22 | Bailey Hankins | January 20, 2007 2:39 AM
I don't know who this Charles Murray guy is, but I certainly didn't detect any condescension dripping from his words at all. This would seem to be your projection. I find it amazing that no rational discussion of intelligence is possible. Facts must be denied, lies must be promoted as truth.
You wouldn't deny that West Africans hold over 95% of the top 100 times in the 100 meter dash. You hopefully wouldn't deny that there was such a thing as distance and time. Is the 100 meter dash culturally biased?
No, when it comes to athletic facts, we just say that West Africans are the fastest. Just in general. We aren't being ridiculous and saying that everyone from West Africa is fast.
The funny thing is, if you test intelligence instead of foot speed, people go berserk. No intelligence test has ever been devised on which Africans outscore Caucasians. Somehow, Asians seem to be immune to the "cultural bias" and outscore Caucasians. This is all very consistent, over all kinds of intelligence tests.
A quick review of Nobel Prize winners reveal exactly the same pattern, yet people like you just can't muster the intellectual honesty to speak the truth: Caucasians are smarter than Africans.
I bet you think that is a racist statement, don't you?
Do you think the NBA is racist? I bet you don't. Do you think the 100 meter dash was rigged to help Africans win? No, that would be absurd. But you still think that IQ tests are sheer fantasy.
Admit it, you think that forcing "diversity" into intellectual areas will somehow magically change reality, don't you. You would line up Caucasians and Asians for the 100 meter dash, and cry foul when they get blown away by the West Africans.
Stop being an idiot Liberal and face facts. Stop projecting evil traits onto others just because you are too weak to stand up for the truth.
# 23 | Chad Orzel | January 20, 2007 8:39 AM
I got absolutely buried in work and meetings yesterday, so I didn't have a chance to respond to comments as they came in, so here are a bunch of replies grouped together.
Pi Guy: He attended a lecture where the speaker (I believe that he said that she was the local school superintendent) said that the problem is that we treat the learning content as the variable and time as the constant. The result is that having a HS diploma doesn't really say anything about what one knows except that they showed relatively regularly over a period of 12 or 13 years. She asserts that this exactly the opposite of how it should be. Instead, she suggests that, instead, we should treat the content as the constant and, within some reasonable limits, time as the variable.
That's a really interesting suggestion. It would essentially amount to handling all educational levels in the same manner as a Ph.D.-- it might take four years, it might take ten, but you don't get the degree until you know enough to write and defend a thesis.
I suspect the logistics would be pretty difficult to work out on a mass scale, though.
Natural Cynic: H.S. as it is in our society is a social center and this kind of a proposal would almost necessarily wreck many of the social functions such as interating with your age cohort and it would ttally mess up any emphasis on sports [which, on the whole, is probably a good thing]. This would not go over with the general populace, but should be a good idea for a magnet school.
Interestingly, an article came across my RSS feeds this week that suggested that students who start college early (at 13 or 14) tend to end up happy and well-adjusted. I didn't read it in any great detail (and now I can't find it), but it might cut against the social argument for age-grouped schooling.
I'm a little ambivalent about this. As any nerd will tell you, high school can be pretty unpleasant for those on the wrong end of the social scale (though not usually as bad as last night's lurid CSI re-run), and it's not clear that forcing these students to suffer is serving a useful purpose. On the other hand, though, people who weren't forced to learn some conventional social skills at some point are kind of hard to deal with...
This is one of the areas where I'm mad at Murray for poisoning the well, though. I think a lot of the bullying and related issues that happens in public schools are due to students who aren't particularly well served by being in school themselves, and would get greater benefits from a more focussed vocational program. And moving them out of the conventional schools would have benefits for the better students left behind. It's sort of hard to seriously advocate that sort of thing, though, when the most enthusiastic proponents are people like Murray.
Eric Johnson: There is such a thing as absolute, objective, quantifiable intelligence (whether what we call IQ measures it or not, and whether it can even be described by a scalar period)
I know, let's call it "M Theory"...
Seriously, the whole argument pretty much goes off the rails right here. Everything claim Murray makes follows from this, and I don't think this is in any way certain. Dave Munger is probably a better person to talk about that, though.
Without this point, the rest of Murray's arguments go nowhere.
I'll post some more comments in a bit, but the dog is bugging me to take her for a walk, and I need a break before I respond to Bailey Hankins.
# 24 | p-ter | January 20, 2007 9:37 AM
there is such a thing as absolute, objective, quantifiable intelligence (whether what we call IQ measures it or not, and whether it can even be described by a scalar period)...Seriously, the whole argument pretty much goes off the rails right here. Everything claim Murray makes follows from this, and I don't think this is in any way certain
I've never understood the position that intelligence doesn't exist, or isn't measurable, or whatever. 5 million years ago, there was the ancestor of humans and chimps; over that time there's been a massive divergence in cognitive abilites, one of which is intelligence. This implies that intelligence is both heritable and variable within populations (or at least was heritable and variable in that ancestral population). Whether IQ is the best measure of intelligence, who knows, but it certainly exists, has a genetic basis, and has a distribution in the populations (and if there are enough variables that contribute to it, the distribution then approaches Gaussian).
# 25 | Chad Orzel | January 20, 2007 10:35 AM
I've never understood the position that intelligence doesn't exist, or isn't measurable, or whatever.
The problem isn't with the claim that intelligence exists, it's with the claim that it's "absolute, objective [and] quantifiable." Which is inevitably quickly turned into an implicit claim that it is quantifiable by means of a single normally distributed number, which is then used to argue that large swaths of the population are uneducable.
I'm highly skeptical of any argument starting from "there's this critically important thing that we don't have a good model, but we know there must be such a model, so let's act like we have one and move on." It's one of the big reasons why I'm dubious about string theory, and they're on solid ground compared to some of the claims made about intelligence.
And now, the icky part:
Bailey Hankins: A quick review of Nobel Prize winners reveal exactly the same pattern, yet people like you just can't muster the intellectual honesty to speak the truth: Caucasians are smarter than Africans.
I bet you think that is a racist statement, don't you?
I wouldn't necessarily jump immediately to "racist," but I wouldn't have a problem with calling it idiotically naive. If you think that you've found an objective measure of intelligence in a prize that's existed for little more than a century-- a century in which people of African descent were systematically denied access to education for fifty-odd years in the developed world, to say nothing of the impoverishment of Africa itself-- well, let's just say that you might be surprised by what happens when you respond to those fascinating email offers in your inbox.
Do you think the NBA is racist?
Because of the dress code thing? No, I think that playing the race card on that issue is a childish overreaction by a bunch of spoiled millionaires who are used to being coddled to an unreasonable degree.
Oh, wait, you meant because most of the players are black? Do I think that's racist? If you mean "Do I think that the NBA is systematically excluding talented white players?" then the answer is no.
Do I think that the racial distribution of NBA players is actually a reflection of an objective and absolute underlying distribution of basketball ability? The answer there is also no, because I'm aware of the tendency for sports to be dominated by members of the economic underclass, who use sports as a route out of poverty for those who are denied access to the educational and financial resources available to the upper classes. And I'm aware that the economic underclass in the United States is overwhelmingly black, particularly in the urban areas where most basketball players come from.
In that sense, is the racial distribution of NBA players a result of racism? In an indirect way, probably. I wouldn't call it "racist," but you'd have to be a complete fool to believe that it isn't at least somewhat reflective of the racial problems of our society in general.
Things get complicated, once you leave the confines of your Happy Ayn Rand World.
# 26 | doublehelix | January 20, 2007 10:56 AM
The notion that intelligence doesn't exist is absurd. Many states in the U.S. recognize intelligence by refusing to execute those who are "mentally retarded". How do those who deny the concept of intelligence (and variation in intelligence) reconcile themselves with this?
If you have ever implicitly or otherwise described someone as "smart" or "dumb", then you believe that intelligence exists. IQ tests provide an _externally valid_ measure of the subjective evaluations we make every day.
Leftists deny that interindividual variation is in any way fixed or immutable because it threatens their faith in an ultimately egalitarian society. Trouble is, science is slowly eroding the support for that point of view. It is obvious that many commenters here have yet to realize how empirically unsound their leftist views are.
# 27 | The Cheerful Oncologist | January 20, 2007 11:16 AM
Chad, I had the exact opposite reaction to Murray's articles than you did. I found the following quotes to be particularly cogent:
Today's simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon.
[T]he problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.
[E]ven the best schools under the best conditions cannot repeal the limits on achievement set by limits on intelligence.
I am among the most emphatic of those who think that the importance of IQ in living a good life is vastly overrated.
I totally disagree, however, with Murray's opinion of who is qualified to go to college:
There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education.
Ridiculous! The only reason one should not go to college is if one does not desire to go to college. Whether the end result is a PhD or just flunking out, I can't believe that the experience would not be of value, no matter what one's I.Q. is.
Not being an educator, professor, or even an amateur expert on childhood development or intelligence I realize that my opinions don't come with any aureole of authority, but I believe that after a certain amount of basic education students should be encouraged to pursue whatever honest living they are interested in and can perform with acceptance (if not delight) for decades. Whether this journey is down the path of rigorous intellectual discipline or not will depend upon the intelligence of the traveler. Happiness lies within reach for all who pursue it - and that fact has nothing to do with education or intelligence.
# 28 | Andrew Wade | January 20, 2007 11:53 AM
They're not measuring what they think they're measuring? And no-one here is arguing that intelligence doesn't exist. Some of us may be arguing that intelligence is poorly characterized by a single number.
How do you know IQ tests are a valid measure of intelligence? Sure there's some correlation, but there's some correlation between intelligence and height as well. That doesn't make height a valid measure of intelligence.
# 29 | doublehelix | January 20, 2007 12:32 PM
IQ tests have external validity because they accurately real-world performance, including socio-economic status.
Yes, 'g', as measured by IQ, is a theoretical construct. Nonetheless, whatever it is is highly heritable, and it successfully predicts things like income, and scholastic performance, I begin to think there's something to it.
# 30 | Andrew Wade | January 20, 2007 1:48 PM
What do you mean by validity? I thought you meant that IQ accurately measures intelligence. You appear to be arguing that because IQ has some of the same correlates as intelligence, it must be measuring intelligence. That's just not so.
# 31 | Blake Stacey | January 20, 2007 1:53 PM
Today's simple truth: half of all theoretical physicists have below-average intelligence. They do not teach at Lake Wobegon University.
# 32 | doublehelix | January 20, 2007 2:01 PM
IQ tests measure the construct called g. The score on the IQ test has external validity. By this I mean that IQ is correlated with many extra-test variables, e.g., educational achievement, wealth, socioeconomic status, criminal history (or lack thereof). External validity, the test-retest reliability of IQ tests, and the high heritability of IQ, all suggest that g is a trait of brains. My original point was that IQ scores grossly reflect intuitive understanding of people's intelligence-- e.g., very low IQ is identical to mental retardation, as commonly understood. I would also proffer the point that many people can recognize high intelligence as well-- without using an IQ test.
# 33 | p-ter | January 20, 2007 2:07 PM
The problem isn't with the claim that intelligence exists, it's with the claim that it's "absolute, objective [and] quantifiable." Which is inevitably quickly turned into an implicit claim that it is quantifiable by means of a single normally distributed number
that's what statisticians spend their lives doing--turning complex things into normally distributed random variables :)
# 34 | Andrew Wade | January 20, 2007 2:17 PM
Ah, thank you. I misunderstood what you meant by external validity.
Hmm, I don't know about that that.
I'd agree with that, sure.
# 35 | Colugo | January 20, 2007 3:17 PM
Recall that Andrew Sullivan is proud of his endorsement of The Bell Curve; he wrote that Murray and Herrnstein "speak truth to power."
Thomas Sowell wrote the definitive refutation to The Bell Curve.
# 36 | Bailey Hankins | January 20, 2007 9:12 PM
So I should expect to see a flood of Nobel prize winners from West African descent in the future, eh? LOL! I'll be waiting for that. I'll also keep waiting for an all-White NBA team. Neither will happen.
Genetic variation -- read up on that. Blacks don't dominate the NBA because they all grew up in the ghetto and had no opportunities. That is more Liberal hogwash, and rather racist if you ask me. Will impoverished Mexicans take over the NBA next? No. Genetically, blacks simply have more athletic potential, and at the highest levels this makes all the difference. Way more white kids play high school basketball than black kids. Way, way more.
Like some Ohio fundamentalist, you seem to want to deny genetic variation. Do you believe in evolution?
Whites simply have more intellectual potential than Blacks, and Asians perhaps even more than Whites. As you go higher, to the best of the best, the exclusion becomes quite noticable.
Sowell tries to use the "Flynn Effect" to explain it all away, but he forgets to mention that the GAP remained exactly the same between whites and blacks. The Flynn Effect is no great mystery. IQ type questions became part of our culture. Studies show that the tests are somewhat coachable, just like coaching can help your 100 meter dash times. It doesn't disprove anything at all, so Sowell's argument is utterly empty.
# 37 | MaryKaye | January 20, 2007 9:55 PM
There's a bit of chatter going on about this topic at Brad DeLong's website as well. I don't know if this observation has been made yet or not. And, maybe it's even 'off topic' at this point... But I believe it is DeLong who observes, "...The only thing you need to know about Murray's 1994 Bell Curve book is that he and his coauthor Herrnstein suppressed all education variables from the right-hand-side of their regressions because the results when education variables were included weren't what Murray and Herrnstein wanted them to be. With education suppressed as a factor determining accomplishment, it's hard to see how the 1994 book can inform anybody about the benefits of education vs. inherited genetically-influenced smarts...."[my apologies that it's not in block quote form]. If true that's pretty damning in my book. When it comes to issues of education and intelligence I look elsewhere than Charles Murray.
# 38 | anon on the hudson | January 21, 2007 12:14 AM
IQ research doesn't seem to have any deep intellectual content. I'm still waiting for the true beleivers-Charles Murray, Steve Sailer and others-to tell us what deep theoretical structures underlie IQ and race /Bell Curve research.
What does seem very clear,after reading the writings of the race and IQ true believers is this:their main interest is find a biological justification gross economic inequality. I find this appalling.
If some people are intellectually handicapped, these would be the members of our society that would need goverment assistance to protect them wage and possibly chattel slavery.
Here is the direct hit on the Bell curve "science":the underlying biologicalmodel is massively flawed. The epigentics revolution in biology shows quite powerfully that there is a complicated interactions-not very well understood-with genes and higher levels of biological organization which are interacting with things outside the human body.
If we as a society make the decision that every child should have an educational enriched environment, then the we have to figure out a way to pay for it.
Here some of my ideas how this type of educational system could have been subsidized:
1)the 500 billion already spent on the Iraq War could have been spent on an enriched educational system for many more children
2)the 3.5 billion that goes to Israel every year-for decades this has been going on-could have spent on an on enriched educational system for many more American children.
3)the millions now being spent torturing Cuba and Venezuela could have been spent on an enriched educational system for American children.
I think you folks get the idea.
anon on the hudson
# 39 | SmellyTerror | January 21, 2007 3:25 AM
My original point was that IQ scores grossly reflect intuitive understanding of people's intelligence-- e.g., very low IQ is identical to mental retardation, as commonly understood.
The devil is in the detail.
Consider the problem when comparing distinct groups. Imagine giving an IQ test - in English - to someone who doesn't understand English. Obviously, they score poorly, but in this case we can clearly see the reason.
As we move to more subtle variations between groups, we have to consider more and more reasons and mitigating factors for variation in score. How can we judge how much of the difference is due to non-intelligence factors? At what point do the precise purmutations of test results become meaningless noise?
So yeah, it can give a gross estimate, and for two very similar people it can provide a good comparison. But when it's used to compare different groups in a society who by definition have different viewpoints and must have different reactions to the test questions, it ceases to be so clear cut. In fact, it has not been shown how it can be valid at all. Couldn't variation of test results just as easily be used to prove the overall difference in a group's response to questions, rather than underlying intelligence? Why do we assume that the response is constant, and that only intelligence is variable?
Spending entire careers to find a testing matrix that one part of the society is good at answering, and then applying that test to other parts of the society is a flawed method of comparison. If you had set out to prove a preconceived spread of intelligence, that's how you'd go about it.
# 40 | Chris' Wills | January 21, 2007 5:36 AM
Please forgive the interruption, but I understood that originally intelligence was measured for various abilities.
Dexterity, language, mathematics, artistry etc and then a silly person decided to average these, possibly, orthogonal measures and call it IQ.
It is this lumping together different skills and assigning one number that causes the problem.
It also doesn't help that many of, the self named, elite denigrate the value of practical skills whilst lauding academic/artistic craftsmanship.
I would guess that EQ is another useful measure amongst many possible.
The idea was that if someone was not very good at maths but good with their hands it might be sensible to give them advance traing in a practical subject rather than try and teach them advanced mathematics.
It could also be used to identify areas where additional education was required (compare measure against test scores, if measure implied that test score should be higher than it was find out why and rectify).
In my mind, no one number can ever be a measure of a person; especially when trying to decide if someone is good or evil.
# 41 | doublehelix | January 21, 2007 10:41 AM
Occam's razor helps cut through these thorny problems. I believe in 'g' because it is a simpler biological theory to explain variation in achievement between people (in this culture) than the theory of multiple intelligences proposed by H. Gardner et al. Besides, it has been demonstrated that scores on different intelligence tests as well as simple reaction time tests are correlated. In other words, it is likely that an individual with high mathematical or verbal intelligence will also have high intelligence in the other domain. This suggests that there is an underlying neural characteristic common to both. What Murray et al. are claiming is that g is that quality.
Anon on the Hudson's tone suggests that there should be absolutely NO LIMIT to the resources spent to improve the educational achievement of subaverage children. I have no problem with hope, but I do have a problem with those who would FORCIBLY TAKE my resources to spend on a "problem" for which (in my opinion) there is no solution. Sure, many would decry that as inhumane, cruel, pessimistic. But consider the fate of societies that have followed the model that central economic planning and massive wealth redistribution will permanently eliminate poverty. That's what Anon has in mind, and I would rather NOT participate in that utopia.
In so far as epigenetics is concerned, Anon is correct that the environment does influence gene expression. But he/she forgets a very important concept from epigenetics: That organisms "choose" their environments. As Matt Ridley said, Nature via Nurture. So sure, the environment matters. But, save for massive governmental intervention (which I would morally oppose), the vast vast majority of people will be confined to environments that are to a large extent of their own making.
# 42 | Chad Orzel | January 21, 2007 10:54 AM
Occam's razor helps cut through these thorny problems.
Occam's razor is not science. The scientific method does not consist of looking at the world, constructing multiple theories which might explain the observed facts, and then choosing the simplest.
Occam's razor is meta-science at best, and not a decisive argument in any way. Sometimes, the more complicated theory is the right one.
In so far as epigenetics is concerned, Anon is correct that the environment does influence gene expression. But he/she forgets a very important concept from epigenetics: That organisms "choose" their environments. As Matt Ridley said, Nature via Nurture. So sure, the environment matters. But, save for massive governmental intervention (which I would morally oppose), the vast vast majority of people will be confined to environments that are to a large extent of their own making.
So, not only are poor people to blame for the fact that they're poor, stupid people are to blame for the fact that they're stupid. Charming.
# 43 | Jesse | January 21, 2007 11:27 AM
IQ tests measure the construct called g. The score on the IQ test has external validity. By this I mean that IQ is correlated with many extra-test variables, e.g., educational achievement, wealth, socioeconomic status, criminal history (or lack thereof). External validity, the test-retest reliability of IQ tests, and the high heritability of IQ, all suggest that g is a trait of brains.
The fundamental problem with IQ fundamentalists is that they can't see that this set of facts doesn't add up to evidence that g is either immutable or anything to do with innate intelligence.
Suppose I design a test that amounts to me looking at your skin color, and I assign a score that is higher the whiter your skin. Call this "w". W is clearly heritable and has high test-retest reliability. In today's America, it will be correlated with a variety of "extra-test" variables: Education, earnings, wealth, criminal history.
Does this mean that w "is a trait of brains"? No, of course not. W is a trait of skin. One can argue about whether in some other society with a different history and different policies W would continue to be correlated with extra-test variables. Personally, I see no reason to think that it would be, and I see the set of correlations described above as a culturally contingent fact. But the existence of quantifiable, reliable, heritable W scores with high external validity tells us nothing about the answer to this. g scores are no different--there is nothing in the evidence about IQ that demonstrates that it is not culturally/historically contingent, and some very strong circumstantial evidence (the Flynn effect, e.g.) that it is.
Murray simply refuses to confront this issue, and is therefore not worth paying attention to. Moreover, even if we grant that IQ really is a direct function of genes, he assumes in his op ed a lot of facts not in evidence. Most glaringly, there's really no basis in the literature for the claim that somewhat low IQs within the normal range of variation impose hard ceilings on how much someone can learn.
# 44 | doublehelix | January 21, 2007 11:47 AM
Chad, you're right: Occam's razor is not science. Instead of grandstanding, why don't you address my point: that organisms create their environments, and the choices of this "extended phenotype" feed back on the organism to influence gene expression?
Do you deny that the qualities of, say, a neighborhood, rich or poor, black or white, are *to some extent* created by the individuals who reside in them? That the choices people make every day determine *to some extent* what that place looks like? Seems like what you're reacting to is the notion that poverty is not fully equivalent to "victim".
I don't understand Jesse's points. g is posited to be a trait of brains because it is behavioral variables that we measure. IQ is correlated with reaction time. Most cognitive psychologists would point to the central nervous system as the most likely substrate of variation in this variable.
Insofar as the external validity of IQ is contingent upon society, this I have no problem with. We live in an increasingly complex, knowledge based society (one that is created by the behavior of its inhabitants, which in turn is the product of genes*environment). Cognitive ability will determine an individual's status within the society. If the society were different and had different contingencies (i.e., one in which intelligence was orthogonal to status), well, that society would have to populated by very different individuals to create such a socieity. You or I perhaps would not exist in such a society. Thus, the thought experiment is not valid.
# 45 | p-ter | January 21, 2007 12:59 PM
IQ research doesn't seem to have any deep intellectual content. I'm still waiting for the true beleivers-Charles Murray, Steve Sailer and others-to tell us what deep theoretical structures underlie IQ and race /Bell Curve research.
Be careful what you wish for. If you don't really want to read the entire review (on the neurobiology of intelligence), the salient points have been summarized here.
The epigentics revolution in biology shows quite powerfully that there is a complicated interactions-not very well understood-with genes and higher levels of biological organization which are interacting with things outside the human body.
of course organisms respond to their environment (epigenetics is just a possible mechanism for how that interaction works). This has never rendered genetics meaningless, nor will it.
# 46 | p-ter | January 21, 2007 1:07 PM
Jesse--
re: intelligence, genetics, and the nervous system. click through the link in #45.
# 47 | anon on the hudson | January 21, 2007 2:04 PM
The Bell Curve true beleivers assume the reach of genes extends all the up to higher levels of biologoical organization.
This is false. After the protiens are made, thousands of higher level process and structures-interacting in- no doubt thousands of ways-take over. Serious biologist understand this obvious fact
The vaulting ambition of the Bell Curve true beievers has 0 to do with deep theoretical science. Their vaulting ambition is to provide a biological justification gross economic inequaity.
Just read the nonsense about organisms choosing their own environment.
We now know from the deciphering of the of the one domensional code of the genome that the one-to-one correspondence between gene(s) and phenotypes/complex traits is not scientifically credible anymore(outside of a few diseaes)
Here is what I beleive is the most fudamental point in this discussion:THERE IS NO SOCIETAL NEED TO GIVE ANY CHILD AN IQ TEST..ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU CONSIDER THE OBVIOUS INTENTIONS OF CHARLES MURRAY.
AS SOCIOLOGIST WILLIAM JULIUS WLSON POINTED OUT ON TV 12 YEARS ON A SUNDAY MORNING TV DEBATE WITH THE CREEPY LOOKING CHARLES MURRAY:COMBINE THE BELL CURVE WITH CHARLES MURRAYS PREVIOUS BOOK ABOUT THE SOCIAL WELFARE STATE AND SOMETHING HORRIFIC AND APALLING EMERTGES:A JUSTIFICATION FOR BRUTAL WAGE AND POSSIBLE CHATTEL SLVERY.
NO ONE SHOULD HAVE ANY DOUBT THAT THIS IS THE DIRECTION ECONOMIC REACTIONARIES SUCH AS CHARLES MURRAY AND STEVE SAILER WOULD HAVE THIS SOCIETY SLIDE TOWARDS.
THE WHOLE BELL CURVE ARGUMENT IS AN ATTEMP TO THER MORAL BARRIERS AGAINST GROSS ECONIMIC INEQUALITY.
AS I Pointed out previously,there are no deep and interesting theoretical structures involved in IQ testing "science" and race and IQ "science"
Anon on the Hudson
# 48 | anon on the hudson | January 21, 2007 2:23 PM
There is nothing deep and scientifically interesting about finding brain structures that supposedly determine whether someone has to spend the rest of their lives in extreme poverty. The "science" is illegetimate from square one.
One can probably found thousands of uninteresting correlations between different traits and intelligence.
Hey, maybe someone can do resesarch into correlation betwenn knee cap thickness and low intelligence.
All you folks out there with thick knee caps, watch out for the mad calibrators.
# 49 | Brad DeLong | January 21, 2007 3:01 PM
At least as of a decade ago, it looked as if the extra economic benefits from schooling were if anything greater for those who were relatively weak in ability, at least as measured by IQ-like test scores. We may reach the point someday where additional schooling is not providing significant benefits to large fractions of our population, but there are no signs that we are there yet:
Orley Ashenfelter and Cecilia Rouse (1998), "Income, Schooling, and Ability: Evidence from A New Sample of Identical Twins," _Quarterly Journal of Economics_
# 50 | A quantum diaries survivor | January 21, 2007 4:52 PM
Hi Chad,
sorry but I disagree with your comment on Occam's Razor. Here is what I wrote in a post on my blog today, to answer your comment:
"[...] while I usually concur with Chad's opinions, I am not sure I agree with him on this one. Occam's razor does not consist in constructing multiple theories, but rather to advise succintness in construction of a scientific theory. It is often quoted as a lex parsimoniae:
"entia non sum multiplicanda praeter necessitatem",
that is, entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity. In this sense, I believe William of Ockham gave a real contribution to the scientific method.
Whether we should include the above law in the corpus of principia outlining the way science should be done, it is open to discussion. The scientific method is based on rational reasoning, on the systematic observation of the physical world through repeatable experiments, and on the creation of theories which agree with observed empirical facts and are liable to be disproven. Is there room for Occam's razor ?
Sure, one cannot prefer a theory to another based uniquely on their relative parsimony. But the lex parsimoniae is indeed a strong guidance in the formulation of theories, so much so that scientists have interiorized it deep in the headquarters of their logical reasoning, no less than other fundamenta such as the time-ordering of cause and effect. They can construct exotic theories and they sometimes do, but they keep a restrained attitude even then. It is built in their genes.
Of course, I am talking about real scientists here, not about philosophers who come to like so much a theoretical construct to believe it must represent reality against all odds. They have abandoned the scientific method long ago. You know who I am talking about!
Long live Occam's razor. These are not times when we can lighten our baggage to travel faster: these are times when we need as much rigor as we can give to ourselves in the investigation of the physical world."
Cheers,
T.
# 51 | Chad Orzel | January 21, 2007 5:42 PM
I wouldn't say that Occam's razor is unscientific, but it is not by any stretch a decisive principle of science. It's like mathematical elegance-- a hint that you're on the right track, but not conclusive evidence of the rightness of the theory.
If the only tool you have to distinguish between two theories is that one is simpler than the other (or that one is more mathematically elegant than the other) then you need better experiments.
(There's an anecdote about some famous physicist-- for some reason, I think it was Bethe, but it might've been Feynman or Fermi or one of those people-- who was presented with a bunch of experiments that some people were claiming as evidence of a new particle discovery. Each time they showed him a bubble chamber picture that they said showed their new particle, he had an alternate explanation-- stray fields, particles not detected in the picture, all sorts of things.
(Finally, in frustration, they said "Look, we've shown you a dozen pictures, and you've given a dozen different explanations of the track. We have a single, simple theory that explains all of them."
("Yes," was the reply, "and the difference is that each of my dozen different explanations is right, and your single simple explanation is wrong." And he was right.)