The Bell Curve

'Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, said that most experts on intelligence “consider any black-white differences in I.Q. testing to arise primarily from environmental, not genetic, differences.” Dr. Collins said he was unaware of any credible research on which Dr. Watson’s “profoundly unfortunate" statement would be based.' [0] I think this video [1], does a good job of attacking a lot of race science and intelligence, though at 2.5 hours long it may be a bit too thorough. [0] [link] [1] ▶ this video edited for formatting

in “'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?” · View on HN

Some notes: " Variation in IQ during adulthood is about 70% genetic. " The proviso "during adulthood" is important: "The heritability of IQ increases with the child's age and reaches a plateau at 18–20 years old, continuing at that level well into adulthood." (Is it just me or is that a weird thing for it to do.) That being said, the Wilson Effect paper goes on to say, "It is important to specify the populations to which any results can be generalized and not misinterpret what they mean. The samples were drawn almost exclusively from Western industrial democracies. These settings have characteristic environments. Only a few of the participants were raised in real poverty or by illiterate parents, and all study participants had access to the contemporary educational programs typical of those societies. This is the domain to which we can generalize." In any case, for most of my life the variation in earring-wearing was almost 100% genetic, so there's that. " A lot of this seems to have to do with literal brain size (which is correlated with intelligence at about 0.2)... " 0.2 is not a very strong correlation. And correlations are funny. ( [link] ) " There have already been intelligence explosions. Long ago, humans got smart enough to invent reading and writing, which let them write down training data for each other and become even smarter (in a practical sense; this might or might not have raised their literal IQ, depending on how you think about the Flynn Effect). " This is a

in “We're Not Platonists, We've Just Learned the Bitter Lesson” · View on HN

No the whole book is controversial. It's a political argument for dismantling the welfare state disguised as a review of science. They laundered a bunch of work by racial eugenicists along with a bunch of other junk science methodology. ▶ this video

in “IQ tests results for AI” · View on HN

The Bell Curve has been widely debunked. A quick glance at the Wikipedia article gets you countless citations and counter arguments. For the lazy, here’s a fun video summarizing them: ▶ this video

in “"AI-first" is the new Return To Office” · View on HN

There are many ways to refute The Bell Curve . In addition to the Flynn effect, the science in it are plain bad, the policy proposals they enlist don’t necessarily follow their scientifically flawed results, it repeatedly cites a disgraced eugenicist as source, it was never peer reviewed etc. At this point, nothing in this book should be accepted as nothing more than a poor attempt at scientific racism. Let alone should anyone take any sort of scientific consensus. Other than the fact that it was wrong. This YouTube video[1] does a fair job of summarizing the bulk of what is wrong with this book. But IMO very fact that the book is an apologia for eugenicists should be enough of a critique, you shouldn’t need any more. 1: ▶ this video PS. Regarding the naming of the Flynn effect: > Flynn stated that, if asked, he would have named the effect after Read D. Tuddenham who "was the first to present convincing evidence of massive gains on mental tests using a nationwide sample" in a 1948 article

in “American IQ Scores Have Rapidly Dropped, Proving the 'Reverse Flynn Effect'” · View on HN

False & racist. Please see ▶ this video for an extended explanation of why this is a horrible position. We don't even have strong scientific evidence that Spearman's g factor is more than a statistical convenience.

in “'Algebra for none' fails in San Francisco” · View on HN

> Do you really believe an esteemed journal would actually publish it? You seem to be forwarding an idea of an information ecosystem where what is an "esteemed" journal is static. Like you cannot imagine Nature being anything but the top journal - so Nature must publish works they find suspect because otherwise nothing will change. Frankly, that's not how anything works. Groups of people organize around beliefs and there is a relatively stable (but shifting) understanding of the prestige of those organizations. Look at, for instance, the understanding around the stonewall riot / protest (depending on who is describing it). If these heterodox views are correct (and for the record I think the race 'science' that claims to show non-white people consistently test below white folks is obviously and embarrassingly wrong. I encourage you to check out this critique of the bell curve[1]) then they will, over time, become more and more accepted and their articles in "alternative" journals will be key in that process. The way that previously alternative views have come to the center is that they were published in their own "fringe" publications for years - and then, over time, as those view were more and more accepted, the papers start appearing in 'mainstream' publications. The "years in the wilderness" is a feature not a bug! You have to let subaltern movements develop their own ideas and voice outside of the mainstream to see if they really have a substantial critique of the mainstre

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You are right to be skeptical. Charles Murray is not the most reputable of scientists, and his book The Bell Curve is full of bad science to say the least, used to advocate for conservative (if not racist) policies. A fairly quick summary is available on the Wikipadia page for this book ( [link] ) where you can dive deeper by looking into the reference (I particularly recommend S.J. Gould which addresses scientific racism in length in the book Mismeasure of Man ). There is also a long video essay by Shaun ( ▶ this video ) —if you have 3 hours to spare—which does an excellent job of summarizing the bad science and political agenda of The Bell Curve.

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> i.e. that differences in distributions is a toxic topic that he has been trying to stay clear of since the Bell Curve, given all the griefs he got for it. This sentence makes it sound as if Murray was acting in good faith when writing the Bell Curve and received undue flack from susceptible people. This wasn't what happened: Murray and Herrnstein used a big corpus of explicitly racist studies (pro-apartheid South African ones for instance). This (pretty long) videos[1] offers a quite thorough review of the sources used in the book, and clearly this book isn't an honest look on a controversial topic (writing an opinionated book isn't a problem in itself, but Murray himself claimed his book to be as neutral and factual as possible, which is clearly not the case). [1]: ▶ this video

in “Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?” · View on HN

> 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. “That people from different parts of the world have wildly different distributions on many different attributes” is, as you say, obvious. But just because there's a lot of variation in many traits among humans mean there's variation in all of them, in fact we all have the same organs with the same functions, the same number of chromosomes, the same metabolic pathway to produce energy from food, etc. There are as many things that don't have variations in humans as thing that do. Don't get me wrong, I do think there is a genetic impact on cognitive ability, but this argument is really poor one. > Murray was as far as can be determined acting in good faith. When almost all your citations in your discussion about the link between “races” and intelligence, are taken from at best biased studies (from South Africa, Rhodesia or Southern US under segregation) when it's not openly racist (Richard Lynn, which has 20+ citations in the book!). If you want quick look at the quality of the sources used in this book, I highly recommend you to watch just the five minutes starting at 1'52'28[1], about the “single best study of Negroid intelligence”. [1] ▶ this video

in “Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?” · View on HN

Race doesn't exist in any real biological sense. This is clear from the genetics. [link] Quoting the SPLC's description about Murray, at [link] > Charles Murray, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has become one of the most influential social scientists in America, using racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor. See ▶ this video for a (long) lay video description of what "misleading statistics" includes, in the context of his most famous book, "The Bell Curve."

in “Nobel Disease” · View on HN

Basically the only academic work since the decline of eugenics that has tried to make this case is the bell curve by Charles Murray. It attempted to prove that the differences in IQ between races are genetic, but it's methodology was not up to the standards you would want for such a provocative claim. This video goes over a lot of the problems with the book. ▶ this video ▶ this video

in “Why People Feel Like Victims” · View on HN

The Bell Curve is filled to the brim with shoddy pseudoscience and clearly supports racist ideas that have been thoroughly debunked as summarized here ▶ this video . If you want to nitpick on how “overt” it was, fine, but that’s not a charitable way to read an argument you disagree with at all. It honestly sounds like you just found one detail that you disagreed with to call the book tripe.

in “Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber” · View on HN

On the specific topic of IQ and scientific racism, the "centrist" position of "just asking questions" has been a cloak for agendas and not caring about the truth for a while now. Exhibit A: [link] Exhibit B, what happens when you actually dig into the science behind the most well known peddler of the IQ is real and important, therefore racism is actually not a problem meme ▶ this video Note that I'm not saying there aren't good faith inquiries to be had, but it is really hard to have these with racist agendas being pushed whole claiming "neutral" questions. A few observations that I would like people to keep in mind when looking at these fields: - the people who complain about being "silenced" continue to find funding, public platforms to push their research and in some cases, tenure - the "hard questions not being raised" seem to cluster around the question of differences between "races" and less around whether the concept of race actually makes sense in humans (AFAIK geneticists generally think no), whether these differences might be socially constructed (yes, that's possible. If there are systemic social biases against groups with genetic genes the impacts of these will be 100% explained by the presence of these genes in data, but 0% genetically determined as in biologically determined). And often they are then raised to dismiss concerns about the systematic problems which might have caused the measured problems - scientific racism and shoddy science in this field has a long hi

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