Human Accomplishment
A sweeping cultural survey reminiscent of Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence.“At irregular times and in scattered settings, human beings have achieved great things. Human Accomplishment is about those great things, falling in the domains known as the arts and sciences, and the people who did them.”So begins Charles Murray’s unique account of human excellence, from the age of Homer to our own time. Employing techniques that historians have developed over the last century but that have rarely been applied to books written for the general public, Murray compiles inventories of the people who have been essential to the stories of literature, music, art, philosophy, and the sciences--a total of 4,002 men and women from around the world, ranked according to their eminence.The heart of Human Accomplishment is a series of enthralling descriptive chapters: on the giants in the arts and what sets them apart from the merely great; on the differences between great achievement in the arts and in the sciences; on the meta-inventions, 14 crucial leaps in human capacity to create great art and science; and on the patterns and trajectories of accomplishment across time and geography.Straightforwardly and undogmatically, Charles Murray takes on some controversial questions. Why has accomplishment been so concentrated in Europe? Among men? Since 1400?
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- Here's the book, it's an interesting premise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Accomplishment
Murray ranks the leading 4,000 innovators in several fields of human accomplishment from 800 BC to 1950. In each field Murray identifies a number of sources (leading encyclopedias, histories and surveys) providing information about the leading figures in the field. The rankings are made from information in these sources. A raw score is determined based on how many sources mention and on how much space in each source is devoted to a person. Then these raw scores are normalized so that the lowest score is 1 and the highest score is 100. The resulting scores are called "Index Scores".
The book obviously wasn't written with the express purpose of saying "black people have never contributed anything of any worth to music." That's such a ridiculous mischaracterization, as if that was purpose of writing the book, geez...
It's interesting that you and many others trotting out obvious falsehoods these past few days think this is a wise strategy...
It's far more interesting to write about people that have done interesting, impactful, world-changing things. And that's what he wrote about, he didn't set out to write nor did he write the most boring book he could write, he wrote an interesting book about interesting people, actions, and ideas.
If the book doesn't have enough "diversity" for your taste,
No written language was ever devised in sub-Saharan Africa prior to outside influences.
There is no indigenous tonal music tradition in sub-Saharan Africa, apart from maybe singing. The only instruments native to the continent are unpitched percussion.
The wheel was never invented in Africa.
Sometimes reality is just reality.
- Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 by Charles Murray. The author did statistical analysis to find the most influential figures in each field of endeavour, from philosophy to music.
- If I just suggest a reference without a suggested change in "point of view" you're likely to get very confused.
May I recommend as a starting point:
Be skeptical about the idea of a single number characterizing intelligence. We don't even do that for the weather.
Next, learn about the genesis of the entire IQ concept, and later efforts to academically justify past ideas about intelligence. The first really popular writings were by Galton
http://galton.org/books/hereditary-genius/text/pdf/galton-18...
Afterwards, Binet and Simon, and Terman (at Stanford, the Stanford in Stanford Binet) get at it.
Back then, IQ was really a "quotient," "mental age" divided by actual age. The concept only really makes sense in a developmental context -- after all, how are we supposed to believe that a "developmentally baseline" 23 year old is actually the pinnacle of intelligence?
Only after this did the Weschler Adult Intelligence scale come in. Read (some) of the criticisms Weschler had of the Stanford Binet here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Adult_Intelligence_Sc...
This was devised as a clinical scale. This is still one of the only widely administered and normed tests. The norming takes place only over a few thousand individuals. The types of abilities typical in an international IMO context are simply unlikely to show up in these cases, much less register statistically in the test!
It's also important to learn about the hypothesis behind "Spearman's g", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
and the mathematics behind what suggested it, "Factor Analysis," which has many capabilities but is worthy of many criticisms, including particularly that there is no obvious weigh to norm or weight any of the tests, so ultimately you end up with a judgement call for which tests to include, and how much to gather from their results.
A far more enlightening study of genius, I have found in the book "Human Accomplishment", by Charles Murray. When you're sample is all of those humans who have left a mark on history, and your measure is impact, and our remembrance of it, you learn far more about the heights of human capability, I believe, than by scoring how well people match patterns to a preconceived idea of the "right answer" on a test.
- This is the response to the reply above; I'm unable to directly respond to a comment that deep.
I thought similar things about Charles Murray, and I don't think that the Human Accomplishment book is without flaws -- it has many. Nonetheless, the whole book is worth reading. Honestly, I think it faces some serious facts on the distribution of impact on civilization.
The fact that some cultures, like classical Athens and Elizabethan and Enlightenment England, have had an outsized impact on modern science and civilization, that we have a massive debt to particular thinkers from Europe of the past few centuries, is a fact I think a serious study of great scientists needs to come to terms with. That being said, past contribution is not a good indicator of genetic, racial superiority! We should do well to ask what made those contributions possible, from nurturance, to growth, to self belief, and belief in the idea of progress.
- The linked article about architecture was just embarrassing. A classic case of someone desperately trying to universalize their personal taste (to assume survey respondents have a consistent idea of what constitutes “classical” or “modern” is a stretch). It doesn’t engage remotely with arguments from modernists who drove this change, or the scholarship on aesthetics,… very little substance for the length.
It sort of read like a sanitized version of Charles Murray’s “Human Accomplishment”, which is a “quantitative” “argument” for why Western culture is superior that commits severe epistemic mistakes [1]. Scott Alexander has some good takes, but this is not one of them.
And to give a positive example: I challenge anyone to visit The Barbican estates in London on a clear summer day, to take in the hanging gardens and constructed river, and not be awed. Modern and contemporary architecture can absolutely move the spirit.
[1]: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/07/why-is-charles-murray...
- You can't really believe this, as it's so obviously wrong.
It is also a contention that has pretty racist adherents; Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment book comes to mind. This isn't a coincidence, as suggesting that non-western peoples have contribute nothing of value to this "we" is pure western chauvinism, which is racism's non-identical twin brother.
