A Truly Craptastic Essay On Charles Murray
By this dude, one Nathan J. Robinson. There's a lot of huffing and puffing about how, despite the fact that Murray is routinely attacked unfairly, he really is a big fat racist anyway! Which could be, of course....but you can't prove it by this piece of crap essay. Or not by the first half, anyway, which was all I could manage. I stopped at the point where Robinson notes that Murray shows that whites, blacks, and hispanics of equal IQs tend to fare equally well. Then this:
For a person of left-wing values, what any correlation between IQ and success means is that the structure of rewards in society should be readjusted so that they do not disproportionately favor people who have some particular random arbitrary characteristic (like being good with numbers), just the same as a society in which the elite is comprised solely of people who are good painters would also be unfair.This is the sort of insanity that makes the left genuinely bizarre: we should re-engineer society so that good characteristics and bad characteristics are equally rewarded. Because intelligence is a "random, arbitrary characteristic." Jesus, do these people ever listen to themselves?
Not wasting any more time on this nonsense.
posted by Winston Smith at
8:33 AM
7 Comments:
There is one question I have about the I test: if it's such a good indicator about intelligence, then why aren't grades roughly constant over the years? Instead, they've gone up 10 or 15 points across the board. I don't think people are becoming more intelligent.
Nutrition is a serious drag on intelligence. When IQ scores were suppressed at the turn of the 20th Century, people averaged like 5'5", to get a feeling for the nutritional deficit at the time. There's also some contribution to the fact we are less exposed to disease as previously, which impairs brain development. Developed nations rate of increase in IQ has basically stalled, which is consistent with those explanations, because we've basically plateaued on improved nutrition/disease exposure.
Some of it is definitely better education (if you test someone in a remote tribe in the Amazon, they'll literally score a 0 because the cognitive skills have not evolved within their culture at all), but we really shouldn't discount how different people were at the turn of the 20th Century and today.
And it's not just nutrition. If it were IQ alone, I'd be more willing to believe this theory. But there is also pregnancy, and there the metrics are much, much better. Even after adjusting for genetics, diet, class, health of the mother (including smoking, drinking, etc) black women have a much (2x or more) higher rate of stillbirth and complications. There has been study after study on this. They all return the same result. So: why is it so, and would the same cause affect IQ? The apparent answer is stress, and the obvious answer is yes. (Drown your brain in cortisol, and you will do yourself real damage.)
This came out yesterday, on just this topic (except for the IQ conjecture.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/magazine/black-mothers-babies-death-maternal-mortality.html
That has does nothing to confirm or deny an explanation of IQ differences over different time periods.
Also regarding stress, my understanding is that stress hormone levels are not clearly different across races (see https://www.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1152/japplphysiol.00256.2004 which corrects for stress hormones by muscle mass), and it's also very likely prima facie genetics determine reactivity to stress hormones as well. And if you are going to use it to explain IQ differences, you'll have to deal with the fact that the differences in stress hormones between men and women is far greater than the difference between races (men suffer much more stress than women), with there being no implied gender difference in IQ.
Another interesting tidbit from that article, whites actually have higher cortisol levels than blacks/hispanics. They are lower on two other stress-related hormones, and the differences are not statistically significant for any once adjusted from creatinine levels secreted by the muscular-skeletal system.
Correlation doesn’t imply causation. That’s all you need to know behind the “science” of Charles Murray.
That's not going to cut it, DA. Who doesn't know that? Not Murray, surely, who is careful not to make that error.
The problem for denialists here is that correlation is damn strong evidence of causation, other things being equal. And lots of alternative explanations look less and less plausible all the time.
If the conclusion weren't politically incorrect--of if groups highest up in the "progressive stack" had the highest IQss--progressives would be telling us that "the science is settled."
The vast majority of actual IQ researchers consider racial IQ differences to be proven. If such appeals to professional consensus are supposed to carry great weight in the case of global warming, why not in the case of IQ differences?
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