'The Bell Curve' 20 years later: A Q&A with Charles Murray

'The Bell Curve' 20 years later: A Q&A with Charles Murray

October marks the 20th anniversary of “The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life,” the extraordinarily influential and controversial book by AEI scholar Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein. Here, Murray answers a few questions about the predictions, controversy, and legacy of his book.

Inherited Intelligence | The Scientist Magazine®

Inherited Intelligence | The Scientist Magazine®

Tests of spatial memory, tool use, communication, and other cognitive abilities in chimpanzees have revealed that aspects of intelligence, including general intelligence, are inherited. The results, published today (July 10) in Current Biology, complement similar findings from human studies, and lend support to the theory of general intelligence—wherein an individual’s overall cognitive prowess influences his or her more specific abilities.
“This is really major evidence that . . . those estimates of the heritability of human intelligence are probably dead on,” said Alexander Weiss, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh in the U.K., who was not involved in the study. “Anyone sensible and objective looking at this, who had any doubts about the heritability of human intelligence . . . should put those worries to rest.”

In Hopkins’s study, 99 chimps were subjected to 13 different tests covering a range of specific cognitive skills. The team then applied a statistical process called a principal component analysis (PCA), which essentially identified links between the individual tests. That is, the PCA determined whether an animal’s ability in one test was linked to its ability in any of the other tests. If such links were found, those tests were lumped together into one subgroup, or component. From this analysis, the 13 cognitive tests were divided into four components.
After the tests were completed, each chimp had scores both for overall (general) intelligence—calculated from all 13 tests—and for each of the four components. Tallying these intelligence scores with the chimps’ known relatedness to one another, the team confirmed that general intelligence scores were heritable, as were the scores for two of the four components—those that included spatial memory and communication ability.
“Some people think you can partition or parcellate intelligence . . . so you have a logical arithmetic one, and a language one, and a music one,” said Hopkins.  But, said Weiss, “[Hopkins’s study] is a really strong piece of evidence in favor of general intelligence—the view that there is a single underlying factor for intelligence.”
Interestingly, a human genome-wide association study (GWAS) published in Nature Communicationsthis week (July 8) also provided evidence for general intelligence, showing that approximately half of the genetic variations linked with ability in mathematics are also those linked with ability in language.
Hopkins said that, with enough animals, similar GWASs could be performed in chimpanzees. Candidate genes could then be compared between humans and chimps to see how the genetic component of the two species’ intelligence has evolved.
Ultimately, it is probably no surprise that, like human intelligence, chimp intelligence is heritable, given that “we were the same species for 23 million years,” said Sally Boyson, a professor of psychology at Ohio State University. However, it had never actually been confirmed, she said. “We can surmise, we can speculate, we can think, ‘Oh, probably,’ but [Hopkins’s group] went out and did it.” 

Factor Analysis of Population Allele Frequencies as a Simple, Novel Method of Detecting Signals of Recent Polygenic Selection: The Example of Educational Attainment and IQ | American Renaissance

Link: http://www.amren.com/news/2014/01/factor-analysis-of-population-allele-frequencies-as-a-simple-novel-method-of-detecting-signals-of-recent-polygenic-selection-the-example-of-educational-attainment-and-iq/ (via shareaholic.com)

Race and intelligence...

Book Review: Born Together—Reared Apart - WSJ.com

Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303552104577436333754014866.html?mod=djemITP_h (via shareaholic.com)

Some findings go down easy: As most would expect, identical twins raised apart have virtually identical heights as adults. Some findings seem obvious after the fact: Genes, but not upbringing, have a pretty big effect on personality traits like ambition, optimism, aggression and traditionalism. Other findings perennially cause outrage: The IQs of separated identical twins are almost as similar as their heights. Critics of intelligence research often hail the importance of practice rather than inborn talent, but a three-day test of the Minnesota twins' motor skills showed that how much you benefit from practice is itself partly an inborn talent.

The Minnesota study's IQ results hit a nerve years before their publication in 1990, overshadowing other controversies that might have been. Many of its findings are bipartisan shockers. Take religion, which almost everyone attributes to "socialization." Separated-twin data show that religiosity has a strong genetic component, especially in the long run: "Parents had less influence than they thought over their children's religious activities and interests as they approached adolescence and adulthood." The key caveat: While genes have a big effect on how religious you are, upbringing has a big effect on the brand of religion you accept. Identical separated sisters Debbie and Sharon "both liked the rituals and formality of religious services and holidays," even though Debbie was a Jew and Sharon was a Christian.

....

"Born Together—Reared Apart" is an excellent book for a serious, statistically literate reader who already knows the basics of twin research. But livelier, more accessible introductions are already on the market—most obviously Ms. Segal's earlier "Entwined Lives" (1999). "Born Together—Reared Apart" is, however, a joy to read when she describes the awe of reuniting twins—and the joy of seeing many become soul mates before her eyes. And despite her focus on academic research, Ms. Segal shares some of her casual observations, such as that one pair of identical twins both held their beer glasses with a pinkie hooked underneath.

Ms. Segal has little patience for those who fear the social consequences of the Minnesota Study. The facts are on her side. Scientific support for the effect of heredity on ability, character, and success has been mounting for decades, but Western societies are more tolerant than ever, and more inclined to treat their members as individuals. Hatemongers have no need to appeal to heredity. Nazis used genetics to rationalize genocide. Communist regimes rejected genetics as "bourgeois" and murdered millions for their counterrevolutionary family backgrounds. When a powerful movement wants to commit a heinous crime, it makes up a reason. The wise response isn't to argue the science but to insist that we should treat others with common decency, no matter what the science says.

Paradigms and Demographics: The News: Children Behaving Badly

Paradigms and Demographics: The News: Children Behaving Badly

It's called "definition of character".

As I watch the world, read the news and watch as little of it as I can on TV, I have concluded that the lefties may be right about IQ. Lefties are always trying to publish studies that show that leftists have a higher IQ than conservatives. Well…..I’m not so sure they aren’t right. Why? Because in order to bring reality into line with what they believe requires an enormous level of mental ability and logical gymnastics that must be mentally and emotionally exhausting in order to make the insane things they say and do seem right. Conservatives only have to concern themselves with what is right and what is wrong based on what they see; as in one and one is two. Try making it three or four or fifty without sounding insane. At this only the left can excel; making insanity seem rational to the casual observer.

I watched O’Reilly this week - I can’t take too much of O’Reilly because I think he’s a phony - and he had Monica Crowley and Alan Colmes on. Colmes did the five things that are common among the leftists. He wouldn’t stop talking, he interrupted, he talked over everyone, he subtly changed the subject and spewed out logical fallacies by the minute.

Changing the subject is one of fallacies they use constantly in order to prevent a response to their already insane views. If you doubt me watch Geraldo when he is on and Bob Beckel on The Five. They won’t shut up and they won’t let others have their say without zings that have nothing to do with the subject at hand.  At least Geraldo is charming....Beckel is.....well.....Beckel. This is a common problem. They’re talking when they should be listening. They remind me of unruly children, and like all unruly children a good slap would do them a world of good.

It really is true….…“Brought up on lies, a society cannot mature or take on responsibility. It is an adolescent society, with all the characteristics of adolescence—needing a leader and his imitators, being aggressive and quick to take offence, simultaneously lying and trusting.”

That is the left. That is what we see on the news. Children behaving badly! That must be why the Main Stream Media identify so readily with the youthful losers in the Occupy Wall Street movement versus the rest of the country that readily identifies with the adults in the Tea Party Movement. 

IQ, conservatism and racism

Link: http://www.google.com/reader/view/?hl=en&tab=my#stream/user%2F11614470787439797294%2Flabel%2FJJR

From Jon J Ray's blog.  He frequently posts the entire content of articles, so he won't mind his entire essay being posted here.  :-)

IQ, conservatism and racism

On 22nd January I commented on claims by two Canadian psychologists to the effect that conservatives and racists have low IQs. One look at the study told me that it was brainless so I just reproduced the journal abstract and pointed out two of the things that made it brainless. I didn't see any point in a detailed look at the paper.

The study has however become much celebrated in Green/Left quarters, with the ineffable Monbiot in the vanguard. Monbiot's entry into the discussion has however energized a few ripostes from conservatives, with the most amusing point being that after Leftists telling us for decades that IQ scores are meaningless they suddenly have done an 180 degree turn and treat them as highly meaningful!

I thought I might add something to what I regard as the two best conservative responses to the original article. The first is in The Telegraph and makes a number of good points, all of which are worth reading.

I want to say more about just one of them: The point that IQ was measured during childhood (10 or 11 years of age) and that such measures are unreliable. That is however a matter of degree and of purpose. They are accurate enough to be a useful guide to who will benefit from a selective (more demanding) education, for instance.

An interesting aspect of scores at that age, however, is what I call the chimpanzee effect. In brief, this effect is that dummies mature faster so a relatively high score in childhood can lead to a relatively low score in adulthood. So it is quite possible that the high scorers in the data used by the Canadian authors became relatively low scorers later on. So if the high scorers in that body of data were later found to be liberals, it is quite possible that the same people were dummies in later life! So the data could be said to show the opposite of what the authors claim. The data could be said to suggest that it was the liberals who were the dummies.

That is all just speculation, however, The truth is that the data are incapable of telling us which way around it went at all.

That little point is really just a bit of fun, however. The second article by statistician Briggs is by far the most pointed. Briggs had a strong enough stomach to read the whole article. And when he did, he basically found that the authors had misrepresented their results. The correlations with IQ were in fact negligible. They were statistically significant but statistical significance is only a correction for small sample size and the sample sizes in the data used by the Canadians were large.

So statistical significance is irrelevant. It is other forms of significance we have to look at. Let me put it this way: What the Canadians found was (roughly) that out of 100 high IQ people, 51 would be liberals and 49 would be conservatives. Such a near-even split means of course that IQ is essentially irrelevant to ideology, or is not a socially or scientifically significant predictor of ideology.

Now we come to "racism". The correlations between conservatism and racism were more substantial. Briggs rightly detects the flaw in that. The correlation is between WHAT THE AUTHORS SAY is conservatism and racism and there is no external validation of either measure. So all I want to do is draw attention to something I set out long ago: That even eminent Leftist psychologists have NO IDEA what conservatism is. A much noted paper in the field even identified Stalin, Khrushchev and Castro as conservatives! Can you get any madder than that? So it is no wonder that when they use their questionnaires to predict how people will vote, they find that "conservatives" AS IDENTIFIED BY THEM are just as likely to vote Democrat as Republican (for instance). How clueless can you get? What is going on of course is that Leftist psychologists swallow hook line and sinker of Leftist propaganda about conservatives. They believe that conservatives really are as Leftist propaganda describes them. It would appear that they never bother to talk to any actual conservatives to find out what they really think.

By contrast, I am a conservative so a questionnaire that I devised based on a thorough knowledge of what conservatism actually is, did what the Leftist questionnaires could not: Provided a substantial prediction of vote. See here. So once again the arrogance and ignorance of the Left has led them to a false understanding of reality and scientific work that is futile and useless. The work by the two Canadian authors certainly tells us NOTHING about the correlations with conservatism. I have written more extensively elsewhere about the relationship between conservatism and IQ.

For reference, the Canadian study is: "Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact" by Gordon Hodson and Michael A. Busseri

Which fields have the highest GRE scores?

Which fields have the highest GRE scores?

via Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog by Steve Sailer on 1/27/12

Razib at GNXP Discover has a good graph showing grad school specialties by GRE scores. Fields that score exceptionally well in verbal and quite well in math include Classical Language, Classics, History of Science, Philosophy, Russian, Comp Lit, and Linguistics. Physics of course does well in math, but is also strong verbally (i.e., no surprise, physicists tend to be smart). Low in math, low in verbal include PE, Criminal Justice, and Social Work.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Science and Anti-Science

Leftist anti-science

The major theme in Democrat attacks on GOP Presidential contenders at the moment seems to be that they are "anti-science". As usual, if we want to see what is true of Leftists, we just have to look at what they say about conservatives. Leftists are such good "projectors" that they would be star employees in any movie house. And the multiple fallacies in global warming theory reveal who are the religious believers and who is pro-science.

And if belief in God is anti-science, what are we to make of core Leftist beliefs such as "all men are equal"? Such beliefs are clearly false in any physical sense. They are anti-science beliefs. They are religious (metaphysical) beliefs. And even though I am an atheist I think that belief in "all men are equal" is a lot nuttier than belief in God. Anybody can see with their own eyes that the Leftist belief is false. As many have argued, Leftism is a religion too.

I am very pleased however to present a third argument that it is the Left who are anti-science. Brilliant young American philosopher Nathan Cofnas has given me permission to present a small excerpt from his forthcoming book Reptiles with a conscience. See below:

Just as some conservatives, mainly religious conservatives, are opposed to science that they perceive as threatening to their religious beliefs, many liberals are opposed to science that they perceive as threatening to their liberal beliefs.

For example, when president of Harvard Larry Summers suggested and provided evidence that innate, biologically rooted differences in aptitude between the sexes explain some of female underrepresentation in quantitative fields, two motions to censure him were introduced by two professors of humanities—anthropologist J. Lorand Matory and sociologist Theda Skocpol—and the ultimately successful movement to fire him was led almost entirely by other professors of humanities, most with no training in psychometrics.

In April 2005 I had an e-mail correspondence with a well-known critic [Nancy Hopkins from MIT] of Larry Summers' comments on women's underrepresentation in quantitative fields. Summers said that, because men have a larger variance in math ability, among those qualified to teach mathematics at top universities, which he suggested requires ability corresponding to a math IQ of 160, about 20 percent are women.

I pointed out to this critic that Summers provided data in support of his hypothesis, whereas I had not seen her provide data in any of her public rebuttals of him. She began her response to me with the statement that she is "interested only in the truth!"

She then explained that real potential in mathematics is not measured by the tests on which Summers' data were based. She wrote: "The top math students in North America are not measured by the SAT score and its tail as Summers suggested, but rather by a much more competitive test that measures the true math genius whiz kids. This test is called the Putnam competition.…

This year, 1 of the 5 Putnam Fellows is a girl. In addition, this year, 4 of the top 15 students in the competition… were women."

As politely as I could, I pointed out that one out of five is 20 percent, and four out of fifteen is about 27 percent, which is consistent with Summers' assertion that males are overrepresented at the high end of ability at a ratio of 1:5.

Her response was to tell me that I "cannot listen to the facts that are put before [me]" and that "Old folks like…[me] should retire gracefully into the sunset."

Her response was very curious to me (not just because I was a seventeen-year-old high school student at the time, which presumably she didn't know). Why, if Summers said that woman are underrepresented at the high end of ability at a ratio of 1:5, would this critic counter with evidence that confirms exactly that?

She is not stupid. She is a scientist at a top university, and entirely capable of realizing that her own data support the very hypothesis she opposes. If she has no commitment to accepting the implication of evidence, why cite evidence? And why assert interest in truth so emphatically? If she has the intellectual capacity to realize that her own argument is invalid, why would she expect that argument to convince anyone else?

I think that I now can answer these questions. Truth is a value to almost everyone. But most people have many other values to which they are more committed than they are to truth—like in this case, commitment to the belief that the male and female populations have the same distribution of all cognitive abilities and proclivities.

When truth conflicts with more important values, people do not outright deny truth or its importance; they pay as much homage to truth as possible without compromising their more important values. One way of doing this is to pretend to use the method of discovering truth—namely, appealing to empirical evidence or logical argument—to arrive at their predetermined conclusion.

--

The Wheel of the Year: Now available on Amazon Kindle

The Official Manual for Spice Cadets: Now available on Amazon Kindle

Political Correctness

Ultimate Issues hour today (11/9/10) dealt with Political Correctness, and Dennis' theory about why the phenomenon exists.

Dennis defines PC as the denial of painful truths. His springboard for this definition was a letter to the editor in response to his essay in the Jewish Journal, "Are People Basically Good?"

He discusses this letter in his response:

"Most revealingly, Mr. Beckmann writes, 'What a sad world it would be if we all believed as Dennis Prager that mankind is inherently evil.'

I did not write that man is inherently evil. I wrote that he is not basically good. And, yes, that does make the world sad. So do disease, earthquakes, death and all the unjust suffering in the world. But sad facts remain facts. A distinguishing characteristic of liberals and leftists is their aversion to acknowledging sad facts (the Soviet Union wasn’t evil; Islam has no more moral problems than Judaism or Christianity; the Palestinians don’t seek Israel’s destruction; there are no inherent differences between boys and girls, just sexist upbringing; the United Nations isn’t a moral wasteland, it’s mankind’s greatest hope; the list is almost limitless)."

Balint Vazsonyi wrote that political correctness originated under Communism, and the term was devised to distinguish "politically correct" things from "factually correct" things. The whole point of "politically correct" is that it refers to things that are *not* factually correct. A political correctness is something which we agree to claim, even though at some level we know it's not true. (Or at the very least, we fear it might not be true?)

One symptom of PC is that when someone goes against PC, the response is one of indignation, and taking offense. In short, one "strikes a nerve". When you strike a nerve in a discussion of purported truths, I think that's a sign you've wandered afoul of someone's notion of PC.

Now to the morsel that provokes my comment here. Dennis claimed that PC exists only on the left. I suppose that's a reasonable belief, particularly if Mr. Vazsonyi has correctly identified the origination of the term. Something invented on the left may be supposed to have stayed on the left. However, I suspect the notion that PC exists only on the left may itself only be politically correct. I can think of at least a few examples of things which provoke the same sort of indignation that Dennis saw in response to his piece. Nerves are just as easily struck on the right as on the left.

I could mention evolution, but I wont. (Oops, I guess I just did. "This is not the Droid you are looking for.") I actually have another example of a topic that strikes Dennis right on an exposed PC nerve: IQ.

Dennis doesn't seem to like the notion of IQ. When "The Bell Curve" came out, he expressed considerable outrage at the notion that people might actually believe in differences in IQ, and he was most especially outraged at the notion that people actually believed different races might have different average IQs.

His argument has been along the lines of: 1) There is no difference between races, so there can be no difference in average IQ between races.
2) IQ doesn't mean anything.
3) If someone claims to find a difference in average IQ, this finding is either wrong (see point 1) or meaningless (see point 2).
4) Anyone who fails to see the validity of the preceding three points is SIXHIRB.

As a result of this PC attitude, the question, "what if there are real differences" may not be asked or considered in any way. The absolute homogeniety, as opposed to equality, or different racial and ethnic groups is taken as an article of faith, because believing otherwise is just not PC.

Found: genes that make kids smart | The Australian

Found: genes that make kids smart | The Australian

The Nnylf Effect

From Steve Sailer's blog, a discussion of creativity:

Anyway, I do want to explain why IQ tests are more useful than creativity tests. We use IQ-like tests for all sorts of predictive purposes, such as law school admissions. The LSAT is pretty good at predicting whether you are smart enough to not flunk out of law school and to pass the bar exam. So, the LSAT can help you avoid disastrous life choices -- spending years studying a subject that's not really that much fun and is very expensive and end up still not being smart enough to be a lawyer.

The AFQT/ASVAB helps the Air Force figure out if it's worth sending you to avionics school or truck driving school. Neither one is all that much fun

In contrast, there isn't much need for tests to see how good you'll be at playing the guitar or playing tennis or whatever. Why not? It would be useful to have a genetic test that would tell the parents of young athletes how tall they'll end up being. But for most fun things, the best test of how good a guitar player or basketball player you'll be is to pick up a guitar or basketball, get some coaching, and practice, practice, practice. You'll figure out soon enough if you in the top half or the bottom half of the population distribution. And if you don't like playing tennis, it really doesn't matter if you have a high TQ score on some hypothetical test because people who do will be better at it, and why play a game you don't like? As for figuring out if you are in the 99.9999th percentile or 99.99999th percentile of tennis players, well that's what they hold Wimbledon for. Not test you take as a little kid is going to predict that.

Creativity is similar. The way to show you are creative is to be creative. The last thing we need are people claiming sinecures on the grounds that they have the proper creativity credential.

 

 

IQ, Parasites, and GDP

Steve Sailer looks at the paper, Parasite prevalence and the worldwide distribution of cognitive ability.

The Economist reports on the paper, from the perspective that the prevalence of parasites in different regions causes variations in population IQ. Energy used to fight off parasites isn't available to build brain cells.

But which is cart, and which is horse?

Could smarter people have moved to places with fewer parasites, or developed sanitation programs that reduce the number of infections?

Evolution and Creativity

From the Wall Street Journal, Evolution and Creativity: Why Humans Triumphed.

Neanterthal man had as much brains as modern humans, and was imaginative and creative. Why didn't they invent the light bulb?

Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years—the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly progressing technologies. Once "progress" started to produce new tools, different ways of life and burgeoning populations, it accelerated all over the world, culminating in agriculture, cities, literacy and all the rest. Yet all the ingredients of human success—tool making, big brains, culture, fire, even language—seem to have been in place half a million years before and nothing happened. Tools were made to the same monotonous design for hundreds of thousands of years and the ecological impact of people was minimal. Then suddenly—bang!—culture exploded, starting in Africa. Why then, why there?

The answer lies in a new idea, borrowed from economics, known as collective intelligence: the notion that what determines the inventiveness and rate of cultural change of a population is the amount of interaction between individuals. Even as it explains very old patterns in prehistory, this idea holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead—because ideas are having sex with each other as never before.

Basically, man is the Ultimate Resource.

But the sophistication of the modern world lies not in individual intelligence or imagination. It is a collective enterprise. Nobody—literally nobody—knows how to make the pencil on my desk (as the economist Leonard Read once pointed out), let alone the computer on which I am writing. The knowledge of how to design, mine, fell, extract, synthesize, combine, manufacture and market these things is fragmented among thousands, sometimes millions of heads. Once human progress started, it was no longer limited by the size of human brains. Intelligence became collective and cumulative.

In the modern world, innovation is a collective enterprise that relies on exchange. As Brian Arthur argues in his book "The Nature of Technology," nearly all technologies are combinations of other technologies and new ideas come from swapping things and thoughts. (My favorite example is the camera pill—invented after a conversation between a gastroenterologist and a guided missile designer.)
....
There's a cheery modern lesson in this theory about ancient events. Given that progress is inexorable, cumulative and collective if human beings exchange and specialize, then globalization and the Internet are bound to ensure furious economic progress in the coming century—despite the usual setbacks from recessions, wars, spendthrift governments and natural disasters.

The process of cumulative innovation that has doubled life span, cut child mortality by three-quarters and multiplied per capita income ninefold—world-wide—in little more than a century is driven by ideas having sex. And things like the search engine, the mobile phone and container shipping just made ideas a whole lot more promiscuous still.

Science, Faith, and Not Ruling Out Possibilities

Science, Faith, and Not Ruling Out Possibilities

Much has been said in the last two days about a Harvard law student's e-mail to a couple of other students — an e-mail that was some months later apparently widely forwarded by one of the recipients (without the sender's permission). The e-mail led to much criticism of the sender, coverage in Above The Law, the Boston Globe, an AP wire story, and the Harvard Crimson, a condemnatory statement from the Dean of Harvard Law School, an apology from the sender, and more.

I thought I'd say a few words about this, both in this post and in some others to come, because this seems to me to go to the heart of what a university should be, of what we should want our society to be, and of a scientific approach to questions of scientific fact. 

I would have happily avoided this topic if I could have. But I feel an obligation — as a professor, as a tenured professor, and as someone who feels strongly about the need to treat scientific questions as scientific questions and not as articles of faith — to speak up about it. I am not naïve enough to be surprised that an e-mail such as this would lead to public condemnation and a public outcry. But that the reaction has been unsurprising doesn't mean that it has been proper.

Let me begin with the e-mail, which was apparently a follow-up to a conversation between the student and the recipients at a dinner shortly before:

… I just hate leaving things where I feel I misstated my position.

I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair. (Now on to the more controversial:) Women tend to perform less well in math due at least in part to prenatal levels of testosterone, which also account for variations in mathematics performance within genders. This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQs and just like I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria. I don't think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn't mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.

I also don't think that there are no cultural differences or that cultural differences are not likely the most important sources of disparate test scores (statistically, the measurable ones like income do account for some raw differences). I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects. One example (courtesy of Randall Kennedy) is that some people, based on crime statistics, might think African Americans are genetically more likely to be violent, since income and other statistics cannot close the racial gap. In the slavery era, however, the stereotype was of a docile, childlike, African American, and they were, in fact, responsible for very little violence (which was why the handful of rebellions seriously shook white people up). Obviously group wide rates of violence could not fluctuate so dramatically in ten generations if the cause was genetic, and so although there are no quantifiable data currently available to "explain" away the racial discrepancy in violent crimes, it must be some nongenetic cultural shift. Of course, there are pro-genetic counterarguments, but if we assume we can control for all variables in the given time periods, the form of the argument is compelling.

In conclusion, I think it is bad science to disagree with a conclusion in your heart, and then try (unsuccessfully, so far at least) to find data that will confirm what you want to be true. Everyone wants someone to take 100 white infants and 100 African American ones and raise them in Disney utopia and prove once and for all that we are all equal on every dimension, or at least the really important ones like intelligence. I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.

Please don't pull a Larry Summers on me,

CRIMSON DNA

Here's my thinking on the e-mail itself; I'll have a few more posts shortly about some of the reaction to the e-mail.

1. Whether there are genetic differences among racial and ethnic groups in intelligence is a question of scientific fact. Either there are, or there aren't (or, more precisely, either there are such differences under some plausible definitions of the relevant groups and of intelligence, or there aren't). The question is not the moral question about what we should do about those differences, if they exist. It's not a question about what we would like the facts to be. The facts are what they are, whether we like them or not.

Given this, it seems to me that the proper approach to this question is precisely the same as the proper approach to other questions of scientific fact. One absolutely should not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. Likewise, to give examples involving three groups I myself belong to, one absolutely should not rule out the possibility that Jews are (say), on average, genetically predisposed to be more acquisitive, or more loyal to their narrow ethnic group than to broader groups, or that whites are genetically predisposed to be more hostile to other racial groups, or that being nonreligious is genetically linked, and that people who have those genes are genetically predisposed to be more likely to commit crime or cheat on their spouses or what have you. One should also obviously be willing to be convinced by evidence that shows that, by controlling for the right variables, we would see that those groups are, in fact, identical to other groups under the same circumstances. 

One should not rule out possibilities in the absence of conclusive evidence, for the simple reason that one then has no factual basis to rule out those possibilities. And since on many things the evidence will rarely be conclusive, one shouldn't rule out those possibilities categorically at all. And one should also be open to the evidence that exists, and to being convinced by it in one or the other direction (to the degree of conviction that is warranted by the evidence).

Now some claims may be so contrary to our current understanding of the world that we might say something like this: We shouldn't rule out the possibility in principle, but in practice the probability is so vanishingly small that we should exclude it from our analysis. That, for instance, might be one's view about claims that werewolves exist. First, it's just hard to imagine, given current science, what possible mechanism there might be that would turn humans into wolves every full moon. Second, one would think that if werewolves existed, we'd have good evidence of them, since proving their existence would be pretty easy.

But we still know very little about which genes produce intelligence, how exactly those genes operate, and even how intelligence can be defined. We obviously have vastly more left to learn about this. And there is certainly reason to believe that intelligence is heritable in some measure among individuals (though there is hot debate about the degree to which this is so). Such heritability, coupled with the possibility of differing selection pressures in different environments, provides a potential mechanism through which there conceivably could be intelligence differences among racial or ethnic groups.

So at this point it seems to me that the only scientifically sensible conclusion about this question, which I stress again is a question of what the facts really are, is that we can't be sure that there are no such differences: Again, we cannot rule out either the possibility that there are racial differences in intelligence, or that there aren't.

Or at least we cannot rule them out as a scientific judgment. (Perhaps there's some expert somewhere out there who is so knowledgeable and brilliant that he feels he can accurately predict all that we will ever know about this field, and therefore can rule out one or the other possibility; I doubt it, but in any case I'm pretty sure that no-one is this discussion is that expert.) Obviously, each of us has the perfect right to rule any factual possibility out as a matter of faith, moral, religious, or whatever else. We can say "I don't care what the evidence might say, I rule out this possibility because of my moral beliefs." Or we can say "My moral beliefs are actually capable of indicating to me not just what I should do, but what the scientific facts about the world actually are, and therefore I am completely confident about what those facts are, based on my confidently held moral beliefs."

But surely there ought to be no obligation on other people to adopt this sort of faith-based view on scientific questions. That's why it seems to me that the author's statement that "I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent" — or a similar statement, as I suggested, about Jews, or whites, or the irreligious — is perfectly proper, and in fact is the way that people should approach scientific questions of all sort.

2. Of course, I take it that some people were inferring from the e-mail that the author doesn't actually mean just that she doesn't rule out this possibility, but rather that she actually thinks the possibility is likely true. If so, then to critique the e-mail one would have to further discuss whether in fact the possibility is likely true under the current, highly limited state of scientific knowledge. 

But there is no need to do that here. This e-mail was a follow-up to an earlier conversation, which apparently was not recorded. It was intended to be a private e-mail to other students who were parts of that conversation. One can't tell whether the e-mail was (a) actually a means of implicitly asserting that there probably are intelligence differences, or (b) a rebuttal to an allegation that the author wasn't scientifically minded enough in the discussion over dinner and was wrongly foreclosing scientific possibilities, or (c) part of a discussion about the nature of scientific evidence, or anything else. Sometimes, one might legitimately draw inferences about a person's views based on a statement that was meant to be self-contained, to the point of justifying public criticism of the inferred views and not just the literally stated ones. But one can't infer from this snippet of the broader conversation that the author means anything other than what she says: that she does not rule out a certain possibility, a possibility that I think cannot scientifically be ruled out.

I considered whether some of the language of the e-mail, such as (emphasis added) "In conclusion, I think it is bad science to disagree with a conclusion in your heart, and then try (unsuccessfully, so far at least) to find data that will confirm what you want to be true" suggests that the student believes that there is no existing data strongly suggesting the absence of genetic differences. If that were the right interpretation, then we'd have to discuss whether there is indeed such data. 

But my reading of this, given both this sentence and the rest of the e-mail, is that the author is saying that there has been no success in (to go further down the paragraph) "prov[ing] once and for all that we are all equal" in intelligence, and in providing evidence that would make one "100% convinced that this is the case." That's a restatement of the first sentence in the e-mail, and again it strikes me as being quite scientifically accurate: There can't be, at this stage of our knowledge (and possibly at any stage), proof "once and for all" that there are no such racial differences in intelligence.

3. On then to just a brief response to what I imagine would be some likely reactions.

a. Some might argue that belief in racial differences in intelligence could cause all sorts of immoral and harmful social and legal reactions. That might be so. But it's different from the question that the student was writing about, which is what is actually true. Lots of other facts that are actually true can yield, and have yielded, harmful social and legal reactions. That doesn't make those facts any less true — nor does it make it somehow improper for people to even be open to the possibility that certain facts might, in fact, be true.

b. Some might point to the history of unsound claims about racial differences in intelligence. And the history of errors in a field should indeed teach people to avoid those particular errors. But there's no "three strikes and you're out" for scientific theories: That some people in the past have posited various unsound theories with some general thesis doesn't mean that all theories with a related thesis are guaranteed to be false. One still cannot rule out the possibility that some other theory in that genre will in fact be correct. Again, that's just the way facts are: If something is true, people's having thought a bunch of similar-sounding things that are nonetheless false doesn't affect that truth.

c. Some might point out that intelligence and race are "socially constructed," which is certainly true in the sense that different societies may draw racial lines in different places, and may define what constitutes intelligence — or how it should be tested — differently. But while we can't just assume that there are some obviously correct definitions of either term, science often operates with terms that don't have an inherently correct definition. What usually happens is that people come up with possible definitions, there's debate about those definitions, there are studies done using different definitions, some results emerge that are common over a wide range of definitions and others that are highly sensitive to the definitions, and so on. Yet the right approach throughout this process is, again, precisely to "not rule out the possibility" that under some set of plausible definitions some result might be true, and to be willing to "be convinced" that under some set of plausible definitions some other result might be true.

It's also possible that over time it will turn out that the definitional question is so difficult (or the required measurements are so difficult) that no real pattern emerges in the results. Say, for instance, that under some definitions of intelligence one sees one result and under others one sees the opposite result, and there seems to be no good basis to choose any particular definition over another. That might mean that we have to reformulate the question, and that the original question might be abandoned as not accurately answerable in its original form. We can't rule out that possibility, either. But neither can we just assume that this is sure to happen.

d. Finally some might just argue that even the openness to the possibility that there may be racial differences in intelligence will offend people, and that the author should have recognized that the e-mail she sent to a couple of people might be forwarded to others who might be offended.

But this presupposes that it's somehow wrong for people in a free country to discuss scientific questions because of the possibility that some people might learn about that and be offended. That can't be right. 

It especially can't be right for students at a research university. But I think that it can't be right for anyone anywhere. I realize that in the real world there might be bad consequences to speakers who offend others, however legitimate the speaker's position — which, I stress again, is a position of openness to scientific evidence — might be. But we should work against that phenomenon, and its tendency to suppress honest discussion about scientific questions. We should not just give in to it as inevitable and, worse still, somehow right.

Disclosure: The student who wrote the e-mail will be clerking for the same judge for whom I clerked, so I thought I'd note this in case some thought it relevant. But I don't know her personally (perhaps I have talked to her once by phone, but I'm not sure I've even done that), and this post has nothing to do with the indirect employment connection.

The Practical Costs of Condemning Openness to Distressing Answers on Factual...

The Practical Costs of Condemning Openness to Distressing Answers on Factual Questions

(Eugene Volokh)

I've blogged a good deal so far about why I disapprove of the condemnation of the student who e-mailed a couple of friends saying that she "absolutely do[es] not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent." But let me turn to a more practical problem with such condemnation.

I would love it if all of us could one day say, with confidence, that there is no difference in intelligence among racial groups. If that is factually true, it would be a truth which would have lots of good social consequences.

I expect that it's unlikely that we could say this with great confidence any time soon, simply because scientists are only beginning to understand the precise genetic mechanisms that may yield differences in intelligence. But we might be able to say it with some confidence, and possibly increasing confidence. (At the same time, for the reasons I mentioned below, I can't rule out the possibility that this will prove not to be so, for the simple reason that the world is as it is, and I can't rule out possible answers to scientific questions just because I don't like them.)

But what would this take, at least for the nearly all of us who can't do the underlying scientific research ourselves? It would take what it usually takes for us to speak with confidence about scientific matters (especially ones that can't be demonstrated using physical proofs of concept, the way that a working electric motor can demonstrate the likely truth of certain theories about electricity). It would take a trustworthy consensus among a wide group of researchers that have carefully, open-mindedly, and skeptically examined the question, the same sort of consensus that makes us confident about so many claims about physics, medicine, biology, astronomy, and more.

And such a trustworthy consensus can only develop if people approach the issue without ruling out possible answers. Say scientists are free to run experiments aimed at testing the hypothesis that blacks are less intelligence than whites (and vice versa), and free to publish and defend results that they think show this hypothesis. Say that journalists and intelligent outsiders are free to examine such data, discuss it, write about it, and point out what they think might be the scientists' errors, whether individual errors or systematic, groupthink-reinforced errors. 

Say that after this is done for some time, the great bulk of objective scientific observers, who have evaluated the theories, and have had to defend their own evaluations against criticism, conclude that the evidence strongly supports the no-racial-differences-in-intelligence hypothesis, and refutes the racial-differences-in-intelligence hypothesis. And say that as new things are learned about intelligence and about human genetics, or new measurement devices are developed, the open process I just described keeps operating. Then we laypeople would be able to conclude, with a great deal of confidence based on the trustworthy scientific consensus, that there are no racial differences in intelligence.

But say scientists know that it's likely professional suicide to argue that some evidence supports the racial differences hypothesis, or undermines the no racial differences hypothesis. Or say they are assured by their colleagues that it's safe to go where they think the evidence might lead, but they see people across the quad in another university department being publicly excoriated for even accepting the possibility of the outcome that those scientists suspect might be worth testing for. Or say that journalists or outsiders who think there might be scientific groupthink undermining the soundness of the scientific process suspect that it's likely professional suicide to challenge no-racial-difference arguments.

At that point, the very attempt to suppress the openness to the possibility that there might be racial differences will make it impossible to disprove that possibility. Even if then the scientific community loudly says, "The evidence is clear: There are no racial differences in intelligence," that statement should no longer be credible to us. Scientific consensus is trustworthy only to the extent that it's the result of a process in which scientists — and others — are free to espouse all rival views. To the extent that espousing some views is too dangerous, the consensus that then emerges without the expression and discussion of those views stops being reliable.

So if you hope — as I do — that there are no racial differences in intelligence, and want to be able to reach that conclusion at some point with confidence based on science, not faith, you should be defending people who express an openness to the alternative scientific claim (that there are racial differences). It is only through such openness, and through allowing people to defend that claim, that the position that you hope is true can actually be demonstrated to be true.

IQ vs Common Sense

Bruce G Charlton looks at why very intelligent people are seen as lacking common sense.

...my suggested explanation for this association between intelligence and personality is that an increasing relative level of IQ brings with it a tendency differentially to over-use general intelligence in problem-solving, and to over-ride those instinctive and spontaneous forms of evolved behaviour which could be termed common sense. Preferential use of abstract analysis is often useful when dealing with the many evolutionary novelties to be found in modernizing societies; but is not usually useful for dealing with social and psychological problems for which humans have evolved ‘domain-specific’ adaptive behaviours. And since evolved common sense usually produces the right answers in the social domain; this implies that, when it comes to solving social problems, the most intelligent people are more likely than those of average intelligence to have novel but silly ideas, and therefore to believe and behave maladaptively. I further suggest that this random silliness of the most intelligent people may be amplified to generate systematic wrongness when intellectuals are in addition ‘advertising’ their own high intelligence in the evolutionarily novel context of a modern IQ meritocracy. The cognitively-stratified context of communicating almost-exclusively with others of similar intelligence, generates opinions and behaviours among the highest IQ people which are not just lacking in common sense but perversely wrong. Hence the phenomenon of ‘political correctness’ (PC); whereby false and foolish ideas have come to dominate, and moralistically be enforced upon, the ruling elites of whole nations.

There's lots more at the link.

Critical Thinking

Are You a Cognitive Miser?

Are You a Cognitive Miser?

Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

A) Yes.

B) No.

C) Cannot be determined.

This is from this month's Scientific American — article unfortunately costs money. It's about "dysrationalia," which is what happens when people with nominally high IQ's end up thinking irrationally. A phenomenon I'm sure we've all encountered, especially in certain corners of the blogosphere.

And the answer is the first option. But over 80 percent of people choose the third option. Here's the solution: the puzzle doesn't say whether Anne is married or not, but she either is or she isn't. If Anne is married, she's looking at George, so the answer is "yes"; if she's unmarried, Jack is looking at her, so the answer is still "yes." The underlying reason why smart people get the wrong answer is (according to the article) that they simply don't take the time to go carefully through all of the possibilities, instead taking the easiest inference. The patience required to go through all the possibilities doesn't correlate very well with intelligence.

OK, what about calling me susie?

The Numbers Guy looks at some of the latest "spanking new" research on corporal punishment. Spanking Research Needs a Time Out - WSJ.com

Statistical analysis of spanking's effects on cognition are clouded by many complicating factors. Effects can be attributed to the wrong cause, statisticians say; rather than spanking causing problems in children, it is possible that their existing cognitive problems can make spanking more likely. Moreover, any effects of spanking are difficult to measure and probably small. And unlike, say, a study on prescription drugs that removes a misleading placebo effect, no ethical study can assign some children to be spanked. Instead, parents must be trusted to remember and share their disciplinary practices.

Daniel Mundfrom, a statistician at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, says that even without accounting for other factors, spanking at age 1 explained less than 1% of the variation in cognitive ability at age 3. In other words, maybe spanking does lower intelligence, but not by much.
....
Martin Wells, a statistician at Cornell University, re-ran the statistical test to check whether regional variations in IQ -- which is lower in Latin America and Africa -- could account for the IQ differences Prof. Straus found. After accounting for regional variations, Dr. Wells found the effect of spanking vanished. Dr. Wells plans to use the Prof. Straus's research in the classroom to demonstrate why it is important to consider alternative explanations.

The psychology of intellectual elitism

Barbara Oakley looks at how some of the brightest people stop thinking. Kiss my APA! | Psychology Today

The introduction to Westen's session was a real eye-opener. The moderator was so confident everyone in the room was a staunch Democrat that he jokingly interrupted his disclaimer that the APA couldn't be seen as endorsing any particular political party with repeated exhortations of "Barack!" (You might think I'm kidding, but I'm not.) Party unity thus assured, the session began.

A brief video of an embarrassing Jennifer Lopez-inspired slip of the tongue by Fox newscaster Shepard Smith led to Westen's first key point: the general public associates the word liberal with negative connotations that, (he confidently assured us), were untrue – elite, tax and spend, out of touch, big government. The word conservative, on the other hand, had no negative associations.

Hold on a minute. Has Westen studied this? If so, why didn't he present the results so we could judge for ourselves? It would be interesting to analyze Westen's own word linkages. As he spoke, I heard the word conservative disdainfully associated with racist, intolerant, and narrow-minded.

How do bright people get this way?

How can Drew Westen, a remarkably intelligent man, make the kinds of one-sided statements he made, and why did no one in the room question the sheer inanity of what was being presented?

My theory – call it the "Oakley effect" – is that really smart people often don't know how to accept and react constructively to criticism. (A neuroscientist might say they "have underdeveloped neurocircuitry for integrating negatively valenced stimuli.") This is because smart people are whizzes at problems that only need one person to figure out. Indeed, people are evaluated from kindergarten through college prep SATs on the basis of such "single solver" problems. If you are often or nearly always right with these kinds of problems, your increased confidence in your own abilities would be accompanied by an inadvertent decrease in your capacity to deal with criticism. After all, your experience would have shown that your critics were usually wrong.

But most large-scale societal issues are not single solver problems. They are so richly complex that no single person can faultlessly teach him or herself all the key concepts, which are often both contradictory and important. Yes, smart people have an advantage in dealing with such problems, because they've got natural brain-power that allows them to hold many factors in mind at once, bringing formidable problem-solving skills to bear. But smart people have a natural disadvantage, too: they're not used to changing their thinking in response to criticism when they get things wrong.

In fact, natural smarties – the intellectual elite – often don't seem to learn the art of soliciting the criticism necessary to grasp the core issues of a complex problem, and then making vital adaptations as a result. Instead, they fall in naturally with people who admire, rather than are critical, of their thinking. This further strengthens their conviction they are right even as it distances them from people of very different backgrounds who grasp very different, but no less crucial aspects of complex problems. That's why the intellectual elite is often branded by those from other groups as out of touch.