The bell curve
Breaking new ground and old taboos, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray tell the story of a society in transformation. At the top, a cognitive elite is forming in which the passkey to the best schools and the best jobs is no longer social background but high intelligence. At the bottom, the common denominator of the underclass is increasingly low intelligence rather than racial or social disadvantage. The Bell Curve describes the state of scientific knowledge about questions that have been on people's minds for years but have been considered too sensitive to talk about openly -- among them, IQ's relationship to crime, unemployment, welfare, child neglect, poverty, and illegitimacy; ethnic differences in intelligence; trends in fertility among women of different levels of intelligence; and what policy can do -- and cannot do -- to compensate for differences in intelligence. Brilliantly argued and meticulously documented, The Bell Curve is the essential first step in coming to grips with the nation's social problems. Presents the view that low intelligence is the cause of many of America's social problems.
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What Hacker News says
- The NLSY is the classic example of this. It was a multi-decade study over thousands of people which looked at a variety of things as the kids aged into adults and through their lives. The wealth and IQ correlation was one of the results, and if you're interested in reading more I'd recommend The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray, who were Harvard professors who primarily followed this study and reported the results in regards to IQ, as well as the other majors studies and their results.
- Murray was as far as can be determined acting in good faith.
The general argument of the Bell Curve, that people from different parts of the world have wildly different distributions on many different attributes, is (or ought to be) completely non-controversial, consistent with almost all scientific evidence and obvious.
- I am talking about books like:
- The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson
- How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne
- The Bell Curve by Charles A. Murray and Richard Herrnstein
Books that make you go "hum....". It could be about Government, Money, Society, etc. Something very different from the modern-day "4 hour work week" garbage
- All human fields of study are very messy, they are not precise sciences in the way that Newton's laws are.
IQ tests are designed to be excellent proxies for what we generally understand to be intelligence. They can be better or worse proxies depending on the circumstance. In the particular case of testing black Americans, the IQ tests are quite predictive, and the world looks like what we would expect, if the tests were indeed actually testing intelligence. What is your evidence that IQ tests are poor proxies in the case of testing African-Americans?
A great deal of data seems to show that IQ still is very predictive, even when accounting for socio-economic status. That is exactly what they were originally designed for. SAT tests for instance were designed to find students from poorer and more marginalized backgrounds who nonetheless were still very smart and could achieve if given the chance. This is all covered in the Bell Curve, and well some professors thought that Murray exaggerated the degree of certainty, no one showed that his data was false, nor that the conclusion was false.
Believe it or not, I used to be much more in your camp, but after reading a bunch of sources, including the Bell Curve, Gould's the Mismeasure of Man, dozens of papers from scientists contesting the Bell Curve, responses to those papers, and so on, I came to the conclusions I did. Personally, I would much prefer if the evidence had said otherwise. I don't like being called a racist asshat. But given the evidence is what it is, I don't think it is fair to accuse Silicon Valley of judging people by race over merit, simply based on hiring statistics.
race is not accepted as a biological handicap
That's not an accurate phrasing of my view. If a black person has a 130IQ, they have a 130IQ and their race is not a handicap. No person should view their race as a handicap, or be personally stereotyped based on their race. It is just statistically less likely that a black person has a 130IQ. And that was what the original charge was based on -- the statistical underrepresentation of black people in Silicon Valley.
- A straightforward application of evolutionary biology to Homo sapiens yields group differences as the null hypothesis. You've done nothing but construct a ridiculous strawman to refute this. Moreover, discrimination and group differences aren't mutually exclusive—it's possible that Group X's underrepresentation in Field Y is the result of both discrimination and group differences. The only way to know for sure that it's pure discrimination is to show that group differences are negligible. This requires actually measuring them (which in fact has been done in exhausting detail [1]), but even suggesting the possibility of group differences frequently leads to accusations of racism and sexism—as you've just so ably demonstrated.
[1]: See, for example, The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. Then, once you get over your knee-jerk "That's racist!!!" reflex, take a look—I mean actually read for comprehension—The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray. Maybe add a little Cavalli-Sforza (via Steve Sailer) to the mix (http://www.vdare.com/articles/052400-cavalli-sforzas-ink-clo...). You can then graduate to basically anything by Arthur Jensen. As a topper, read "Rational"Wiki's entry on Human Biodiversity (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Human_biodiversity) and cringe at the smug, supercilious tone, endless strawmanning and distortion, and at the realization that you, too, were once taken in by the ridiculous "mainstream" views. (I certainly was.)
- The standard work is The Bell Curve. They studied many thousands of Americans of every race and subculture. They found that the only significant predictor of earned income was IQ. Race, location, parental income, and so forth did not matter (on average). College attendance in particular had little affect on income, it just determined whether the career was in an intellectual-style field.
The school bussing and integration programs were tried starting in the 1960s. No benefits ever materialized, such as improved test scores, imprisonment rates, cumulative earned income by age 30, or any other standard psychology metric.
Yet the programs were continued. Clearly the purpose in continuing them had nothing to do with "disadvantaged" students, because nothing changed for them. The only explanation remaining is that the real purpose was what was being done to the non-disadvantaged students. Their schools were being filled with yahoos to knock down their potential for achievement.
You could dismiss my claim as raving racism except for one thing: you know that at the same time they also introduced word-shape memorization reading instead of phonetics, New Math, eliminated practice drills, and so forth. They really did want to knock down intellectual achievement. School integration fits very nicely into those plans.
