The Bell Curve

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_Analytics
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _Analytics »

Always Changing wrote:Re: Disability and IQ A person with a high IQ and a physical health problem can compensate and still usually do well. A person with a low IQ and a strong body can compensate and still usually do well. A physical health problem in a lower IQ person is more disabling because they don't have the compensatory skills. They consider it so because it is so.

How can I explain this in a way those guys will understand?


Exactly!
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.

-Yuval Noah Harari
_Analytics
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _Analytics »

Chapter 9: Welfare Dependency

The Authors wrote:People have had reason to assume for many years that welfare mothers are concentrated at the low end of the cognitive ability distribution, if only because they have generally done poorly in school. Beyond that, it makes sense that smarter women can more easily find jobs and resist the temptations of welfare dependency than duller ones, even if they have given birth out of wedlock.

The link is confirmed in the NLSY. Over three-quarters of the white women who were on welfare within a year of the birth of their first child came from the bottom quartile of IQ, compared to 5 percent from the top quartile. When we subdivide welfare recipients into two groups, “temporary” and “chronic,” the link persists, though differently for the two groups.

Among women who received welfare temporarily, low IQ is a powerful risk factor even after the effects of marital status, poverty, age, and socioeconomic background are statistically extracted. For chronic welfare recipiency, the story is more complicated. For practical purposes, white women with above-average cognitive ability or above-average socioeconomic background do not become chronic welfare recipients. Among the restricted sample of low-IQ, low-SES, and relatively uneducated white women who are chronically on welfare, low socioeconomic background is a more powerful predictor than low IQ, even after taking account of whether they were themselves below the poverty line at the time they had their babies.

The analyses provide some support for those who argue that a culture of poverty tends to transmit chronic welfare dependency from one generation to the next. But if a culture of poverty is at work, it seems to have influence primarily among women who are of low intelligence.

Herrnstein, Richard J.; Murray, Charles. Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) (p. 191). Free Press. Kindle Edition.


Another bad chapter. The authors spend most of the chapter talking about how a low IQ puts you one welfare, but their own data source says that your parents' social economic status is a larger driver. It appears that according to their own data, education and your parents' social economic status explain welfare. But they won't accept that as the whole explanation, and insist on emphasizing the role of IQ.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.

-Yuval Noah Harari
_EAllusion
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _EAllusion »

For what it is worth, I successfully dug up my old materials on the Bell Curve and am slowly going through them. It's more involved on the technical side than the Bell Curve is and I'm having to gradually reteach myself some of the more sophisticated math I haven't used in nearly 20 years.

I can't find the full work online to share, though there is this paper floating out there for some reason:

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/cwinship/files/iq.pdf

That's an easier to follow paper. I don't think its discussion does enough to address how "years of education" is a poor proxy for the effect of "education" when the latter includes things like quality of curriculum, teachers, parental educational efforts, culture of reading, etc. (They vaguely reference it, but I think a few more comments could've been made.) Outside of that, it's a fine little paper for what it is. It describes a number of technical flaws in Murray and Hernstein's work.

Likewise, this paper, chapter 8 in my text, is also accessible online:

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/6823078.pdf

It is an argument for a quite modest relationship between g and wages as using the data set the Bell Curve works with. They contend Murray and Hernstein exaggerate, so feel free to peruse that if you want to see an in depth argument to that effect.
_EAllusion
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _EAllusion »

So Sam Harris has resurrected this issue from the dead and is in the process of making himself look bad again.

He accuses Ezra Klein, falsely, of defamation, then publishes an email exchange he had with him. He does this after being deceptive in his prelude. Then he looks terrible in the exchange he chose to publish. If anything Klein is far too patient and conciliatory with someone who keeps ratcheting up the rhetoric around an issue he's completely wrong about. Harris, true to form, just looks petulant and ridiculous. Yet, he's somehow convinced this looks bad for Klein to the point that he just goes public with the private exchange. It's a masterclass in jackass behavior.
_Physics Guy
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _Physics Guy »

I read this book when it first came out. Early on somewhere there was this graph showing a shotgun spread of data points that kind of spread along a line, a little bit. The text solemnly explained that this was what a strong correlation looked like, in social science. The argument followed: IF we are going to base social policy on the conclusions of social science, THEN we would have to base social policy on correlations like this. The rest of the book seemed to take for granted the premise that of course we should base policy on social science conclusions.

The authors were social scientists with ambitions to rule the world. As a natural scientist I took one look at that graph and said, "Ah, I see. It's all garbage." I wouldn't base my choice of breakfast cereal on data that full of noise. I only read the rest of the book out of idle curiosity.

The other eye-opener for me was the Flynn Effect, which was that IQ scores had been rising around the world at a rate of one standard deviation per generation. The tests are supposed to be scored in a way that makes 100 the average, so every few years they get revamped, but if you give older tests to young people their average score comes out well over 100, and if you re-score the old tests to shift the young people's average score down to 100 then you shift the average score of their grandparents down into the moron range. Somehow I don't think World War II was won by morons. I understand that the Flynn Effect has levelled off in recent years but it persisted for decades and the authors of The Bell Curve admitted that it was not understood. The shocking thing was that they simply assumed that it was due to an additional causal factor which could be controlled for like other factors, when the obvious scientific implication of an unexplained trend of that scale is that IQ tests are way not ready for prime time.

My personal experience of IQ tests has not strengthened my faith in them. I took one once to get into Mensa and there was a question whose answer was supposed to be "milk is to bottle as perfume is to atomizer". Milk hadn't come in bottles for decades at that point, and the criterion of knowing that an atomizer is a spray-bottle wasn't about intelligence at all. Maybe in 1960 it might have been a test of social class but by 1990 it was only a test of whether you read old-fashioned books and marking people down in intelligence for not knowing "atomizer" was idiotic.
_Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _Doctor CamNC4Me »

Didya makeit? Into MENSA?

Image
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.

Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
_Physics Guy
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _Physics Guy »

I squeaked in, but found the people annoying and soon stopped paying dues. There were some crackpots, and I was in grad school at the time, so I had quite enough brain strain without arguing with high-IQ crackpots. I discovered micro-brew beers instead.

So my take on Mensa was that if you made a club for people with high IQ scores you got crackpots who knew about atomizers. I was probably being unfair and my experience was likely just unlucky. I only went to a couple of meetings. To find really intelligent people, though, I think it probably works better to look for people who are accomplishing things more meaningful than taking a test.
Last edited by Guest on Wed Mar 28, 2018 2:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
_Morley
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _Morley »

Physics Guy wrote: As a natural scientist I took one look at that graph and said, "Ah, I see. It's all garbage." I wouldn't base my choice of breakfast cereal on data that full of noise.


Most social and behavioral scientists did the same.
_Physics Guy
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _Physics Guy »

Morley wrote:Most social and behavioral scientists did the same.

Good to hear. I'm not really surprised. My anecdotal evidence from the social scientists and psychologists whom I happen to know is that they're very aware of how hard it is to get a clear signal from their data, but they don't use that fact as an excuse for accepting garbage.

In a physics experiment it's easy to just pipe in another hundred million electrons, all exactly the same. With human subjects it's harder, but we can't stop studying humans just because it is hard. If physics has high standards, it's definitely not because physicists are smarter or more noble than other kinds of scientists and scholars. It's because if anything looks simple we declare it to be physics but if it looks hard we say it's somebody else's problem. I'm not sure how we got away with that, but somehow we did, because a lot of people seem to be under the impression that physics is a particularly difficult discipline which is nonetheless particularly successful. Maybe we did do something clever on that point.
_DrW
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Re: The Bell Curve

Post by _DrW »

Always Changing wrote:It is a book of exaggerations, written up to reinforce negative expectations based on social class.

There was a hardbound copy of The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murry in my carry-on bag when arriving back in Abu Dhabi in 1997. A representative of the company that was our main investor there, and who was picking me up at the airport, happened to notice it.

On the drive back to town, he asked me if I agreed with claim that there was a meaningful racial component to intelligence when comparing populations of orientals vs occidentals vs those of African descent. Before responding, I asked him if he had read the book. He said that he had and considered it to be " social pornography of the worst kind".

We were both struggling at the time to establish an Arabic technical team that could carry out environmental damage assessments from marine oil spills. It was not going well, and nerves were a bit frayed all around.

I asked if he believed that data presented by the authors to support their various claims of social stratification resulting from differences in natural intelligence as measured by IQ. He said that he did not necessarily disagree with the data presented but that the detected variations in IQ among the three general racial groups (if real) were too small to make the kinds of differences the authors attributed to them.

The topic was discussed between us on and off for several days. He found the very thesis of the book offensive. My position was that it would not hurt to take the data into consideration when setting expectations and social policy. Fact is that IQ is determined by both nature (genetics) and nurture (social environment), just like other physical attributes and abilities. The discussion eventually became so adversarial that I decided to break it off for fear of alienating our investor to the point that working with their staff became uncomfortable.

More than 20 years after those conversations, my view is that world events have made the main theses of the book more credible than they were in the '90s. And that is not necessarily a good thing.
David Hume: "---Mistakes in philosophy are merely ridiculous, those in religion are dangerous."

DrW: "Mistakes in science are learning opportunities and are eventually corrected."
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