Allison Stanger: Middlebury: My Divided Campus
link
A link in that op-ed takes you to this document: "Broken Inquiry on Campus," a kind of PC / neo-pomo manifesto, apparently written by undergraduates. I'm very happy today after the game last night, and I'm not going to kill my own buzz by wading very far into that facepalmerific piece of sophistry. I hereby merely point and laugh.
A link in that op-ed takes you to this document: "Broken Inquiry on Campus," a kind of PC / neo-pomo manifesto, apparently written by undergraduates. I'm very happy today after the game last night, and I'm not going to kill my own buzz by wading very far into that facepalmerific piece of sophistry. I hereby merely point and laugh.
posted by Winston Smith at
11:02 PM
6 Comments:
Eh, if you are going to get someone controversial, at least get someone whose work hasn't been widely debunked. The trouble with Murray is that he drew conclusions from research that the researchers themselves say are not warranted.
Murray also gave policy advice that is dubious: after observing that programs like head start have measurable impact on IQ, he says they are not worthwhile because they are too expensive--which is in direct contradiction to the actual evidence (see p45, table 3 in
http://www.princeton.edu/futureofchildren/publications/docs/05_03_01.pdf )
Murray is a crank; over and over he is guilty of begging the question. He was wrong about a huge fraction of his conclusions. I don't understand why he's ever invited to college campuses.
I am not at all surprised that he was shouted down. (This happened at *Dartmouth College in the 1970s* when Shockley gave a presentation that turned out to be on racial IQ rather than superconductivity.)
I couldn't disagree with you more, PM.
Murray's stuff is actually pretty good, and largely in line with the consensus of experts on IQ. He's certainly not right about everything--but he's far more in line with the evidence than most of his critics. The objections to him are more based on politics than science. People who are way, way, way more wrong than Murray don't receive anything like the kind of reaction he does.
Furthermore, even if he's wrong, that in no way warrants shouting him down--much less physically attacking people. "I'm not surprised he was shouted down" might be taken to suggest that you think the action is not only unsurprising, but warranted. Surely you don't mean that.
I really couldn't disagree with you more.
Neither physical attacks nor shouting down are warranted IMO. (In this case or any other case)
But on the substance of Murray, I wonder what you think about this Winston:
https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Heritability.html
Dunno--thanks for this, LC. I'm eager to read it.
I *will* say that, in my experience, people strain really, really hard to try to support the less-upsetting position about race and IQ. I understand that. Me, I'm torn between (a) goddammit and (b) it doesn't matter.
I've put some work into understanding a few of the anti-TBC, and I frequently come out concluding that there's cheating afoot. So I've become a bit pessimistic...but hope springs eternal...
Again, for the record: I'm not pro-*Bell Curve.* I'm anti-Lysenkoist (in the broad sense).
I'm actually not sure I understand it 100%...so I'm asking partly for your interpretation.
Gonna try to get to it tomorrow...also was trying to find a similar-sounding argument that an anonymous left here a couple of weeks ago...something about differential rates of heritability between races.
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