Has Anyone Read "The Bell Curve?"
After hearing about students on multiple college campuses protesting Charles Murray for being a racist, I decided I needed to read his book The Bell Curve.
I just finished last night and am hoping there are a few Gulchers who have also read the book as I'd love to have a discussion.
Actually, while a discussion would be great, I'd love to be educated. My background is not in psychology or social science so The Bell Curve is the only book I've read on the origin of IQ.
If you've read The Bell Curve, do you think Murray is accurate in his assertions that:
- IQ is genetic (somewhere between 40 and 80%)
- There is an IQ disparity between people of different races (this is why he's being called a racist)
By the way, shouldn't liberals love Charles Murray? He's basically saying that your IQ is largely genetic which means you can't control it (or at least not the majority of it). This means if you're below average intelligence, it isn't your fault... instead of blaming an "unjust society" for high crime or high unemployment among minority groups, liberals could be blaming genetics using Murray's work as a guideline.
I just finished last night and am hoping there are a few Gulchers who have also read the book as I'd love to have a discussion.
Actually, while a discussion would be great, I'd love to be educated. My background is not in psychology or social science so The Bell Curve is the only book I've read on the origin of IQ.
If you've read The Bell Curve, do you think Murray is accurate in his assertions that:
- IQ is genetic (somewhere between 40 and 80%)
- There is an IQ disparity between people of different races (this is why he's being called a racist)
By the way, shouldn't liberals love Charles Murray? He's basically saying that your IQ is largely genetic which means you can't control it (or at least not the majority of it). This means if you're below average intelligence, it isn't your fault... instead of blaming an "unjust society" for high crime or high unemployment among minority groups, liberals could be blaming genetics using Murray's work as a guideline.
Previous comments...
This would be interesting. They key is the size of the group of cognitively impaired vs gifted rather than a "gap", right? I'm guessing the most intelligent person minus the most impaired person is constant, but we're interested in the the distribution. My wild guess is there are fewer people with severe cognitive impairment b/c modern jobs are more cognitively intensive, so people have an incentive to work on this area. OTOH, maybe technology and higher living standards allow impaired people to live longer and have more kids than they would have in the past. I agree with Ed75 that any study of only 23 years would pick up a lot of statistical noise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmvHt...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6EAS...
In the private discussion he said that more is known now about different relevant individual genes than was known when he wrote the book in terms of a general genetic inheritance, and said that the additional knowledge would affect how he worded his conclusions but not the essence. He wasn't not 'racist' in any way.
The private discussion in the bunker was between Charles Murray and a liberal professor who had worked in the Obama administration. She was hospitalized with a concussion after being attacked by some of the 'protestors' for talking to Murray. The chickens have come home to roost. https://www.facebook.com/allison.stan...
You could watch the recording of the discussion in the bunker -- complete with 'protestors' banging on the doors trying to get in to assault them -- at http://www.middlebury.edu/newsroom/ar... -- except that the college has now blocked access to that, too.
Also, it matters what the crime is. The robbery of a liquor store in an urban neighborhood is typified: "typical" for the perpetrator's social context. However, when engineers, accountants, and lawyers at General Motors decided that settling claims in court by people who were harmed or killed was cheaper than fixing the production process, that, too, was "typical" crime -- but not called for it was.
Crimes are the result of wrongful epistemology: blanking out, rather than focusing -- or genetics...
All my anecdotal (non-scientific) experience indicates it is a cycle. Low cognitive ability --> bad choices --> poverty --> kids with low cognitive ability, and the cycle continues.
Among very successful people, there's a higher rate of having a rough childhood. A few people rise out of the cycle of poverty and are actually stronger for it. Or maybe they had stronger genetics that made them rise out of it. My impression, though, is the bad childhood steels them. Most people do not escape the cycle.
Once you're out of poverty, I suspect those genetic factors begin to predominate.
"While the media would have you believe that these problems are evenly distributed among all individuals, it simply isn't true."
I do not understand why the media would lie and say social problems are not correlated with cognitive ability. It would be an old and interesting result if we found an even distribution of social problems.