Prominent Black Intellectual Dr Walter Williams Decries Failure In Black Education, Implies That "The Bell Curve" Analysis Was Right
Mark Mushette
"liberal" education system the U.S.
public and elementary and high schools continue to fail badly and more
money is not the answer. It would
seem that recommendations given in the definitive book on American
education, "The Bell Curve:
Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life" is the only way to go.
George Bush's attempted remedy "No Child Left Behind" as been a colossal,
abysmal failure,
and an expensive one for American taxpayers. President Reagan wanted the
federal Department of Education
abolished. Bush should have listened to him and to the authors of "The
Bell Curve".
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/printer-friendly.asp?ARTICLE_ID=50912
--
The freer a market is the more
abundantly it produces wealth.--Charles
Murray
Lambourn Watch
Drunken lying attention whore John Ross "Mark Mushette" Lambourn took a shit
out of the wrong orifice and mumbled:
[right wing extremist racist garbage snipped as a service to Usenet because it
has no relevance whatsoever to the article he's linked to]
What difference does it make if he's Black? You racist right wing fascist
prick. If a black man said he loved Hitler, would you take it to be an
endorsement from blacks world wide, as you apparently have done here in your
own racist way.
The bell curve has nothing to do with your so-called Liberal education system
and you seem to be the only one convinced that it has any merit.
THE BELL CURVE IS NOT EVEN MENTIONED IN THE ARTICLE BY DR. WILLIAMS YOU LINKED
TO!
The only implication is in your booze addled feeble mind.
You're nothing but another lying right wing onion head and a blow hard. Go
find a job, asshole. Stop wasting people's time with this crap. You're a
disgrace to Conservative politics and are doing far more damage with your
dishonest, racist Usenet lunacy than you imagine.
You could always claim that the Canadian education system left you behind, but
that's not the case because you're a high school drop out and a gullible
know-nothing.
Walter E. Williams (born 1936) is an American economist. He received his Ph.D.
from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1972. He has been a
Professor of Economics at George Mason University since 1980, and chairman of
that University's Economic's department from 1995 to 2001. Previously, he has
been on the faculty of Los Angeles City College, California State University -
Los Angeles, Temple University, and Grove City College. Williams is known for
his outspoken libertarian and sometimes conservative views. He is a popular
columnist and author of books aimed at a general audience, and is a very
popular occasional guest host of Rush Limbaugh's radio program and Lawrence
Kudlow's Kudlow & Company TV program.
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
Mark Mushette
--
The freer a market is the more
abundantly it produces wealth.--Charles
Murray
"Lambourn Watch" <lamb...@dizum.com> wrote in message
news:44ae4ed1$0$18484$8826...@free.teranews.com...
***
Holy cow, what a silly, incoherent rant. Can't you do better than this,
Mark?
Abner Hayseed
comprehend written text.
Get treatment for your mental illness, John. Your basic illiteracy and lack
of education is compounded by the fact that your mind is fogged by senile
dementia caused by a life on the booze.
dan
the US black community; and it isn't racism.
Young black kids idolise basketball players, rappers, and (in a way)
drug dealers. They see that as the way to move up in this world, instead
of education.
Thank God that guy had the guts to look at his own group and say
somethings wrong....
......and it isn't racism
Dan
tyreen...@hotmail.com
>
> That doesn't take away from the fact that the original poster completely
> distorted the opinions of Dr. Williams. He should be sued.
He should be sued!!!!!
That's a good one.
HAHAHAHA!!! ROTFLMAO !!!
You FAG.
All the best
Tyreen Blaque
Abner Hayseed
"Robert P." <robertp...@shan.net> wrote in message
news:44ae87d9$0$18540$8826...@free.teranews.com...
> dan <d...@none.com> wrote:
>
> > Well, it isn't racist garbage. There's something definitely wrong within
> > the US black community; and it isn't racism.
> >
> > Young black kids idolise basketball players, rappers, and (in a way)
> > drug dealers. They see that as the way to move up in this world, instead
> > of education.
> >
> > Thank God that guy had the guts to look at his own group and say
> > somethings wrong....
> >
> > ......and it isn't racism
> >
> distorted the opinions of Dr. Williams. He should be sued.
The impotent racist broom pushing cocksucker Tyreen had a comment for you.
He's got a hate on for blacks, but only because of the fact that he was anally
raped in prison dozens of times because he was some Bubba's bitch.
I guess that will teach Tyreen not to sell kiddie porn.
tyreen...@hotmail.com
<SNIP>
Listen up,Abner Dickweed,one only needs to read some of your postings
to realise you are a known homosexual.
I'm right, aren't I,you are a queer ?
I thought so,now,why don't you just sashay on down to the bathouse,all
your friends of the moment are waiting for you.
HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!
Reformation
I noted no quotation marks.
If poor black educational performance embarrasses you, realize that
screaming "racism" and hurling profanities will do nothing to change
the facts.
Oh I know that political correctness has indeed stiffled any serious
discussion about the problem.
But I notice that PC doesn't have the grip it once had.
People get sick and tired of petty little tyrants eventually.
The PC thought police only delay the inevitable....the TRUTH.
Personnaly I agree with the conclusions arrived at in the "Bell
Curve".
It agrees with the facts as I've seen them.
I know how to think and process information and nobody can tell me I
haven't see
what I HAVE seen.
I am completely immune to pejoratives.
Somebody who thinks they can persuade my intellect using terms such as
"racist" "bigot" etc.....
probably would find it impossible to comprehend the infinitesimally
small influence it has upon me.
Compare it to a dog barking, the noise that a birds wings make, the
sound of a foot upon grass....I pay more attention to those sounds than
the Leftist spewing of "racism" and "bigot" etc.
Just so you know.
Anyhow all that PC has done regarding low black IQ is preveting anyone
from fixing the problem.
Fixing it ?
Yes. Genetically.
Stupidity will probably be regarded a genetic disease in the future.
Actually EVERYONE could use an IQ boosting.
Without fascist political correctness, research into the genetic basis
of intelligence may uncover
a "cure".
Oh...but you PC sourpusses.....you endlessly resentful black peole who
think if they scowl and scream enough it'll intimidate white and asian
folk into ignoring the elephant of black sociopatholgies....
if you want to continue...be my guest.
Not only do you pay the biggest price....but you don't intimidate
people nearly as much as you fancy you do.
The "bad assed black man" act you put on......it makes us laugh
mostly.
Oh your crime is no joke. Your murdering, raping, stealing is no joke.
But your character....that's a joke. The fact that blacks think we
don't know....that's a joke.
Oh but don't worry....white/asian science will probably save your
sorry asses in the end.
It won't be white Liberals though,
Christopher
> Where did Mark suggest Walter Williams mentioned the Bell Curve ?
> I noted no quotation marks.
Mark dishonestly titled the post "Prominent Black Intellectual Dr Walter
Williams Decries Failure In Black Education, Implies That "The Bell Curve"
Analysis Was Right" and also reenforced his subject with additional comments of
the same fallacious nature in the body of his post, posing his own opinion as
that of Dr. Williams. There was no such implication by Dr. Williams.
Why are you having difficulty discerning this? Do you have a comprehension
problem?
>
> If poor black educational performance embarrasses you, realize that
> screaming "racism" and hurling profanities will do nothing to change
> the facts.
Why are you conjuring up baseless assumptions about a contributors motivations?
It's clear that he was pissed off at the original poster because of his
dishonesty and had nothing to do with what you falsely contend.
In fact, you're as dishonest as the original poster by feigning ignorance and
dreaming up wild fantasies about what other people are saying, when they have
said nothing of the sort.
Try better next time if you want someone to hold a meaningful discussion
because this one is over.
jpar...@hotmail.com
> Personnaly I agree with the conclusions arrived at in the "Bell
> Curve".
> It agrees with the facts as I've seen them.
> I know how to think and process information and nobody can tell me I
> haven't see
> what I HAVE seen.
You're obviously not very intelligent and allow your prejudices interfere with
your objectivity.
Curveball
The New Yorker, November 28, 1994
STEPHEN JAY GOULD
The Bell Curve, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray (Free Press; $30),
subtitled Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, provides a superb
and unusual opportunity to gain insight into the meaning of experiment as a
method in science. The primary desideratum in all experiments is reduction of
confusing variables: we bring all the buzzing and blooming confusion of the
external world into our laboratories and, holding all else constant in our
artificial simplicity, try to vary just one potential factor at a time. But
many subject defy the use of such an experimental method?particularly most
social phenomena?because importation into the laboratory destroys the subject
of the investigation, and then we must yearn for simplifying guides in nature.
If the external world occasionally obliges by holding some crucial factors
constant for us, we can only offer thanks for this natural boost to
understanding.
So, when a book garners as much attention as The Bell Curve, we wish to know
the causes. One might suspect the content itself?a startlingly new idea, or an
old suspicion newly verified by persuasive data?but the reason might also be
social acceptability, or even just plain hype. The Bell Curve, with its claims
and supposed documentation that race and class differences are largely cause by
genetic factors and are therefore essentially immutable, contains no new
arguments and presents no compelling data to support its anachronistic social
Darwinism, so I can only conclude that its success in winning attention must
reflect the depressing temper of our time?a historical moment of unprecedented
ungenerosity, when a mood for slashing social programs can be powerfully
abetted by an argument that beneficiaries cannot be helped, owing to inborn
cognitive limits expressed as low IQ scores.
The Bell Curve rests on two distinctly different but sequential arguments,
which together encompass the classic corpus of biological determinism as a
social philosophy. The first argument rehashes the tenets of social Darwinism
as it was originally constituted. "Social Darwinism" has often been used as a
general term for any evolutionary argument about the biological basis of human
differences, but the initial nineteenth?century meaning referred to a specific
theory of class stratification with industrial societies, and particularly to
the idea that there was a permanently poor underclass consisting of genetically
inferior people who had precipitated down into their inevitable fate. The
theory arose from a paradox of egalitarianism: as long as people remain on top
of the social heap by accident of a noble name or parental wealth, and as long
as members of despised castes cannot rise no matter what their talents, social
stratification will not reflect intellectual merit, and brilliance will be
distributed across all classes; but when true equality of opportunity is
attained smart people rise and the lower classes become rigid, retaining only
the intellectually incompetent.
This argument has attracted a variety of twentieth?century champions, including
the Stanford psychologist Lewis M. Terman, who imported Alfred Binet's original
test from France, developed the Stanford?Binet IQ test, and gave a hereditarian
interpretation to the results (one that Binet had vigorously rejected in
developing this style of test); Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, who
tried to institute a eugenics program of rewarding well?educated women for
higher birth rates; and Richard Herrnstein, a co?author of The Bell Curve and
also the author of a 1971 Atlantic Monthly article that presented the same
argument without the documentation. The general claim is neither uninteresting
nor illogical, but it does require the validity of four shaky premises, all
asserted (but hardly discussed or defended) by Herrnstein and Murray.
Intelligence, in their formulation, must be depictable as a single number,
capable of ranking people in linear order, genetically based, and effectively
immutable. If any of these premises are false, their entire argument collapses.
For example, if all are true except immutability, then programs for early
intervention in education might work to boost IQ permanently, just as a pair of
eyeglasses may correct a genetic defect in vision. The central argument of The
Bell Curve fails because most of the premises are false.
Herrnstein and Murray's second claim, the lightning rod for most commentary
extends the argument for innate cognitive stratification to a claim that racial
differences in IQ are mostly determined by genetic causes?small difference for
Asian superiority over Caucasian, but large for Caucasians over people of
African descent. This argument is as old as the study of race, and is most
surely fallacious. The last generation's discussion centered on Arthur Jensen's
1980 book Bias in Mental Testing (far more elaborate and varied than anything
presented in The Bell Curve, and therefore still a better source for grasping
the argument and its problems), and on the cranky advocacy of William Shockley,
a Nobel Prize?winning physicist. The central fallacy in using the substantial
heritability of within?group IQ (among whites, for example) as an explanation
of average differences between groups (whites versus blacks, for example) is
now well known and acknowledged by all, including Herrnstein and Murray, but
deserves a restatement by example. Take a trait that is far more heritable than
anyone has ever claimed IQ to be but is politically uncontroversial?body
height. Suppose that I measured the heights of adult males in a poor Indian
village beset with nutritional deprivation, and suppose the average height of
adult males is five feet six inches. Heritability within the village is high,
which is to say that tall fathers (they may average five feet eight inches)
tend to have tall sons, while short fathers (five feet four inches on average)
tend to have short sons. But this high heritability within the village does not
mean that better nutrition might not raise average height to five feet ten
inches in a few generations. Similarly, the well?documented fifteen?point
average difference in IQ between blacks and whites in America, with substantial
heritability of IQ in family lines within each group, permits no automatic
conclusion that truly equal opportunity might not raise the black average
enough to equal or surpass the white mean.
Disturbing as I find the anachronism of The Bell Curve, I am even more
distressed by its pervasive disingenuousness. The authors omit facts, misuse
statistical methods, and seem unwilling to admit the consequence of their own
words.
The ocean of publicity that has engulfed The Bell Curve has a basis in what
Murray and Herrnstein, in an article in The New Republic last month [Oct. 31,
1994], call "the flashpoint of intelligence as a public topic: the question of
genetic differences between the races." And yet, since the day of the book's
publication, Murray (Herrnstein died a month before the book appeared) has been
temporizing, and denying that race is an important subject in the book at all;
he blames the press for unfairly fanning these particular flames. In The New
Republic he and Herrnstein wrote, "Here is what we hope will be our
contribution to the discussion. We put it in italics; if we could, we would put
it in neon lights: The answer doesn't much matter."
Fair enough, in the narrow sense that any individual may be a rarely brilliant
member of an averagely dumb group (and therefore not subject to judgment by the
group mean), but Murray cannot deny that The Bell Curve treats race as one of
two major topics, with each given about equal space; nor can he pretend that
strongly stated claims about group differences have no political impact in a
society obsessed with the meanings and consequences of ethnicity. The very
first sentence of The Bell Curve's preface acknowledges that the book treats
the two subjects equally: "This book is about differences in intellectual
capacity among people and groups and what those differences mean for America's
future." And Murray and Herrnstein's New Republic article begins by identifying
racial differences as the key subject of interest: "The private dialogue about
race in America is far different from the public one."
Furthermore, Herrnstein and Murray know and acknowledge the critique of
extending the substantial heritability of within?group IQ to explain
differences between groups, so they must construct an admittedly circumstantial
case for attributing most of the black?white mean difference to irrevocable
genetics?while properly stressing that the average difference doesn't help in
judging any particular person, because so many individual blacks score above
the white mean in IQ. Quite apart from the rhetoric dubiety of this old ploy in
a shopworn genre?"Some of my best friends are Group X"?Herrnstein and Murray
violate fairness by converting a complex case that can yield only agnosticism
into a biased brief for permanent and heritable difference. They impose this
spin by turning every straw on their side into an oak, while mentioning but
downplaying the strong circumstantial case for substantial malleability and
little average genetic difference. This case includes such evidence as
impressive IQ scores for poor black children adopted into affluent and
intellectual homes; average IQ increases in some nations since the Second World
War equal to the entire fifteen?point difference now separating blacks and
whites in America; and failure to find any cognitive differences between two
cohorts of children born out of wedlock to German women, reared in Germany as
Germans, but fathered by black and white American soldiers.
The Bell Curve is even more disingenuous in its argument than in its
obfuscation about race. The book is a rhetorical masterpiece of scientism, and
it benefits from the particular kind of fear that numbers impose on
nonprofessional commentators. It runs to 845 pages, including more than a
hundred pages of appendixes filled with figures. So their text looks
complicated, and reviewers shy away with a knee?jerk claim that, while they
suspect fallacies of argument, they really cannot judge. In the same issue of
The New Republic as Murray and Herrnstein's article, Mickey Kaus writes, "As a
lay reader of 'The Bell Curve,' I am unable to judge fairly," and Leon
Wieseltier adds, "Murray, too, is hiding the hardness of his politics behind
the hardness of his science. And his science, for all I know, is soft.... Or so
I imagine. I am not a scientist. I know nothing about psychometrics." And Peter
Passell, in the Times: "But this reviewer is not a biologist, and will leave
the argument to experts."
The book is in fact extraordinarily one?dimensional. It makes no attempt to
survey the range of available data, and pays astonishingly little attention to
the rich and informative history of its contentious subject. (One can only
recall Santayana's dictum now a cliché of intellectual life: "Those who cannot
remember the past are condemned to repeat it.") Virtually all the analysis
rests on a single technique applied to a single set of data?probably done in
one computer run. (I do agree that the authors have used more appropriate
technique and the best source of information. Still, claims as broad as those
advanced in The Bell Curve simply cannot be properly defended?that is, either
supported or denied?by such a restricted approach.) The blatant errors and
inadequacies of The Bell Curve could be picked up by lay reviewers if only they
would not let themselves be frightened by numbers?for Herrnstein and Murray do
write clearly, and their mistakes are both patent and accessible.
While disclaiming his own ability to judge, Mickey Kaus, in The New Republic,
does correctly identify the authors' first two claims that are absolutely
essential "to make the pessimistic 'ethnic difference' argument work": "1) that
there is a single, general measure of mental ability; 2) that the IQ tests that
purport to measure this ability...aren't culturally biased."
Nothing in The Bell Curve angered me more than the authors' failure to supply
any justification for their central claim, the sine qua non of their entire
argument: that the number known as g, the celebrated "general factor" of
intelligence, first identified by British psychologist Charles Spearman, in
1904, captures a real property in the head. Murray and Herrnstein simply
declare that the issue has been decided, as in this passage from their New
Republic article: "Among the experts, it is by now beyond much technical
dispute that there is such a thing as a general factor of cognitive ability on
which human beings differ and that this general factor is measured reasonably
well by a variety of standardized tests, best of all by IQ tests designed for
that purpose." Such a statement represents extraordinary obfuscation,
achievable only if one takes "expert" to mean "that group of psychometricians
working in the tradition of g and its avatar IQ" The authors even admit that
there are three major schools of psychometric interpretation and that only one
supports their view of g and IQ.
But this issue cannot be decided, or even understood, without discussing the
key and only rationale that has maintained g since Spearman invented it: factor
analysis. The fact that Herrnstein and Murray barely mention that factor-
analytic argument forms a central indictment of The Bell Curve and is an
illustration of it vacuousness. How can the authors base an 800-page book on a
claim for the reality of IQ as measuring a genuine, and largely genetic,
general cognitive ability?and then hardly discuss, either pro or con, the
theoretical basis for their certainty?
Admittedly, factor analysis is a difficult mathematical subject, but it can be
explained to lay readers with a geometrical formulation developed by L. L.
Thurstone, an American psychologist, in the 1930s and used by me in a full
chapter on factor analysis in my 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man. A few
paragraphs cannot suffice for adequate explanation, so, although I offer some
sketchy hints below, readers should not question their own IQs if the topic
still seems arcane.
In brief, a person's performance on various mental tests tends to be positively
correlated?that is, if you do well on one kind of test, you tend to do well on
the other kinds. This is scarcely surprising, and is subject to interpretation
that is either purely genetic (that an innate thing in the head boosts all
performances); the positive correlations in themselves say nothing about
causes. The results of these tests can be plotted on a multidimensional graph
with an axis for each test. Spearman used factor analysis to find a single
dimension?which he called g?that best identifies the common factor behind
positive correlations among the tests. But Thurstone later showed that g could
be made to disappear by simply rotating the dimensions to different positions.
In one rotation Thurstone placed the dimensions near the most widely separated
attributes among the tests, thus giving rise to the theory of multiple
intelligences (verbal, mathematical, spatial, etc., with no overarching g).
This theory (which I support) has been advocated by many prominent
psychometricians, including J. P. Guilford, in the 1950s, and Howard Gardner
today. In this perspective g cannot have inherent reality, for it emerges in
one form of mathematical representation for correlations among tests and
disappears (or greatly attenuates) in other forms, which are entirely
equivalent in amount of information explained. In any case, you can't grasp the
issue at all without a clear exposition of factor analysis?and The Bell Curve
cops out on this central concept.
As for Kaus's second issue, cultural bias, the presentation of it in The Bell
Curve matches Arthur Jensen's and that of other hereditarians, in confusing a
technical (and proper) meaning of "bias" (I call is "S?bias," for
"statistical") with the entirely different vernacular concept (I call it
"V?bias") that provokes popular debate. All these authors swear up and down
(and I agree with them completely) that the tests are not biased?in the
statistician's definition. Lack of S?bias means that the same score, when it is
achieved by members of different groups, predicts the same thing; that is, a
black person and a white person with identical scores will have the same
probabilities for doing anything that IQ is supposed to predict.
But V?bias, the source of public concern, embodies an entirely different issue,
which, unfortunately, uses the same word. The public wants to know whether
blacks average 85 and whites 100 because society treats blacks unfairly?that
is, whether lower black scores record biases in this social sense. And this
crucial question (to which we do not know the answer) cannot be addressed by a
demonstration that S?bias doesn't exist, which is the only issues analyzed,
however correctly, in The Bell Curve
The book is also suspect in its use of statistics. As I mentioned, virtually
all its data derive from one analysis?a plotting, by a technique called
multiple regression, of social behaviors that agitate us, such as crime,
unemployment, and births out of wedlock (known as dependent variables), against
both IQ and parental sociometric status (known as independent variables). The
authors first hold IQ constant and consider the relationship of social
behaviors to parental socioeconomic status. They then hold socioeconomic status
constant and consider the relationship of the same social behaviors to IQ. In
general, they find a higher correlation with IQ than with socioeconomic status;
for example, people with low IQ are more likely to drop out of high school than
people whose parents have low socioeconimic status.
But such analyses must engage two issues?the form and the strength of the
relationship?and Herrnstein and Murray discuss only the issue that seems to
support their viewpoint, while virtually ignoring (and in one key passage
almost willfully hiding) the other. Their numerous graphs present only the form
of the relationships; that is, they draw the regression curves of their
variables against IQ and parental socioeconomic status. But, in violation of
all statistical norms that I've even learned, they plot only the regression
curve and do not show the scatter of variation around the curve, so their
graphs do not show anything about the strength of the relationships?that is,
the amount of variation in social factors explained by IQ and socioeconomic
status. Indeed, almost all their relationships are weak: very little of the
variation in social factors is explained by either independent variable (though
the form of this small amount of explanation does lie in their favored
direction). In short, their own data indicate that IQ is not a major factor in
determining variation in nearly all the social behaviors they study?and so
their conclusions collapse, or at least become so greatly attenuated that their
pessimism and conservative social agenda gain no significant support.
Herrnstein and Murray actually admit as much in one crucial passage, but then
they hid the pattern. They write, "It [cognitive ability] almost always
explains less than 20 percent of the variance, to use the statistician's term,
usually less than 10 percent and often less than 5 percent. What this means in
English is that you cannot predict what a given person will do from his IQ
score.... On the other hand, despite the low association at the individual
level, large differences in social behavior separate groups of people when the
groups differ intellectually on the average." Despite this disclaimer, their
remarkable next sentence makes a strong casual claim. "We will argue that
intelligence itself, not just its correlation with socio?economic status, is
responsible for these group differences." But a few percent of statistical
determination is not causal explanation. And the case is even worse for their
key genetic argument, since they claim a heritability of about 60 percent for
IQ, so to isolate the strength of genetic determination by Herrnstein and
Murray's own criteria you must nearly halve even the few percent they claim to
explain.
My charge of disingenuousness receives its strongest affirmation in a sentence
tucked away on the first page of Appendix 4, page 593: the authors state, "In
the text, we do not refer to the usual measure of goodness of fit for multiple
regressions, R2, but they are presented here for the cross?sectional analyses."
Now, why would they exclude from the text, and relegate to an appendix that
very few people will read, or even consult, a number that, by their own
admission, is "the usual measure of goodness of fit"? I can only conclude that
they did not choose to admit in the main text the extreme weakness of their
vaunted relationships.
Herrnstein and Murray's correlation coefficients are generally low enough by
themselves to inspire lack of confidence. (Correlation coefficients measure the
strength of linear relationships between variables; the positive values from
0.0 for no relationship to 1.0 for perfect linear relationship.) Although low
figures are not atypical for large social?science surveys involving many
variables, most of Herrnstein and Murray's correlations are very weak?often in
the 0.2 to 0.4 range. Now, 0.4 may sound respectably strong, but?and this is
the key point?R2 is the square of the correlation coefficient, and the square
of a number between zero and one is less than the number itself, so a 0.4
correlation yields an R?squared of only .16. In Appendix 4, then, one discovers
that the vast majority of the conventional measures of R2, excluded from the
main body of the text, are less than 0.1.
These very low values of R2 expose the true weakness, in any meaningful
vernacular sense, of nearly all the relationships that form the meat of The
Bell Curve.
Like so many conservative ideologues who rail against the largely bogus ogre of
suffocating political correctness, Herrnstein and Murray claim that they only
want a hearing for unpopular views so that truth will out. And here, for once,
I agree entirely. As a card?carrying First Amendment (near) absolutist, I
applaud the publication of unpopular views that some people consider dangerous.
I am delighted that The Bell Curve was written?so that its errors could be
exposed, for Herrnstein and Murray are right to point out the difference
between public and private agendas on race, and we must struggle to make an
impact on the private agendas as well. But The Bell Curve is scarcely an
academic treatise in social theory and population genetics. It is a manifesto
of conservative ideology; the book's inadequate and biased treatment of data
display its primary purpose?advocacy. The text evokes the dreary and scary
drumbeat of claims associated with conservative think tanks: reduction or
elimination of welfare, ending or sharply curtailing affirmative action in
schools and workplaces, cutting back Head Start and other forms of preschool
education, trimming programs for the slowest learners and applying those funds
to the gifted. (I would love to see more attention paid to talented students,
but not at this cruel price.)
The penultimate chapter presents an apocalyptic vision of a society with a
growing underclass permanently mired in the inevitable sloth of their low IQs.
They will take over our city centers, keep having illegitimate babies (for many
are too stupid to practice birth control), and ultimately require a kind of
custodial state, more to keep them in check?and out of high IQ
neighborhoods?than to realize any hope of amelioration, which low IQ makes
impossible in any case. Herrnstein and Murray actually write, "In short, by
custodial state, we have in mind a high?tech and more lavish version of the
Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation's population,
while the rest of America tries to go about its business."
The final chapter tries to suggest an alternative, but I have never read
anything more grotesquely inadequate. Herrnstein and Murray yearn romantically
for the good old days of towns and neighborhoods where all people could be
given tasks of value, and self?esteem could be found for people on all steps of
the IQ hierarchy (so Forrest Gump might collect clothing for the church raffle,
while Mr. Murray and the other bright ones do the planning and keep the
accounts?they have forgotten about the town Jew and the dwellers on the other
side of the tracks in many of these idyllic villages). I do believe in this
concept of neighborhood, and I will fight for its return. I grew up in such a
place in Queens. But can anyone seriously find solutions for (rather that
important palliatives of) our social ills therein?
However, if Herrnstein and Murray are wrong, and IQ represents not an immutable
thing in the head, grading human beings on a single scale of general capacity
with large numbers of custodial incompetents at the bottom, then the model that
generates their gloomy vision collapses, and the wonderful variousness of human
abilities, properly nurtured, reemerges. We must fight the doctrine of The Bell
Curve both because it is wrong and because it will, if activated, cut off all
possibility of proper nurturance for everyone's intelligence. Of course, we
cannot all be rocket scientists or brain surgeons, but those who can't might be
rock musicians or professional athletes (and gain far more social prestige and
salary thereby), while others will indeed serve by standing and waiting.
I closed my chapter in The Mismeasure of Man on the unreality of g and the
fallacy of regarding intelligence as a single?scaled, innate thing in the head
with a marvelous quotation from John Stuart Mill, well worth repeating:
The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a
name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own,
and if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for
that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something
particularly abstruse and mysterious.
How strange that we would let a single and false number divide us, when
evolution has united all people in the recency of our common ancestry?thus
undergirding with a shared humanity that infinite variety which custom can
never stale. E pluribus unum.
--
SR
by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray
reviewed by
David Lethbridge
For at least twenty-five years, Dr. Herrnstein pretended to be a scientist.
The disguise apparently worked quite well. There is no record that the
administration of Harvard University, where he worked for so long, ever
questioned the pretense. But Herrnstein was not a scientist, he was an
apologist for racial inequality and class oppression. In the past, it might
have been questioned whether he knew consciously, what he was objectively - a
fascist propagandist - but, with the publication of The Bell Curve, little
doubt remains. The majority of sources to which Herrnstein refers his readers
are the work of a cabal of pseudoscientists whose primary motive appears not
to be scientific truth, but the advancement of a white supremacist and
fascist agenda.
In a 1971 article on the IQ (intelligence quotient), published in the
prestigious US magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Herrnstein was already claiming
that "the tendency to be unemployed may run in the genes of a family about as
certainly as bad teeth do now. ... As the wealth and complexity of human
society grow, there will be precipitated out of the mass of humanity a low-
capacity residue that may be unable to master the common occupations..."
Simply put, Herrnstein's claim is that the working class tends toward poverty
because they are genetically inferior, and the exploiting class tends towards
wealth because they are biologically superior. That the wealthiest
individuals in industrialized western society are overwhelmingly white does
not go unnoticed by Herrnstein: the genes of the "upper class" are the genes
of white people, and so the language of class oppression and racism comes
together in classic fascist style.
In the same article, Herrnstein reveals his support for the most naked forms
of political reaction: "It is hard to argue that the 'class struggle' can be
resolved by a redistribution of wealth and capital, if it should turn out
that something more than economics distinguishes the contending classes." Not
only is Herrnstein scornful of the basis of socialist revolution, he is
equally opposed to Jefferson and "the vision of a classless society [that]
was the keystone of the Declaration of Independence."
Given this background, it should come as no surprise that The Bell Curve
continues to claim that class division is based on genetic differences and
that black people are biologically inferior to whites, or that much of the
basis for these claims arises from pro-fascist sources. Many of the
"scientists" referred to by Herrnstein as authorities, have been connected to
a journal called Mankind Quarterly. The founder and editor of this journal,
Robert Gayre, was a champion of apartheid and has stated his belief that
blacks are "worthless." Other prominent scientists associated with the
journal have included the anti-Semite and racist Henry Garrett of the White
Citizens' Council, Corrado Gini, a leading biologist in Mussolini's Italy and
author of The Scientific Basis of Fascism, and Ottmar von Verschuer, a mentor
of Josef Mengele and a race scientist in Nazi Germany.
Even more significantly, Mankind Quarterly has been in control of Roger
Pearson for the last twenty-five years. Pearson was a leader of the pro-
fascist Northern League, which included a number of former Nazi SS officials,
and a member of the international World Anti-Communist League, described by
former member Geoffrey Stewart-Smith as a collection of "nazis, fascists,
anti-Semites, and vicious racists." Pearson co-hosted the 1978 WACL
conference, in Washington, DC, with Earl Thomas, a former American Nazi Party
stormtrooper.
The link between The Bell Curve and the racist and fascist group surrounding
Mankind Quarterly is neither accidental nor coincidental. Murray and
Herrnstein are at special pains to acknowledge the guidance and literature of
Richard Lynn, a professor of psychology in Northern Ireland. Lynn is an
associate editor of Mankind Quarterly, whose work is cited in The Bell Curve
no less than twenty-four times. Murray and Herrnstein note Lynn's assertion
that the IQ of blacks in Africa is 70. Given a statistical average of 100 as
an abstract universal benchmark, an IQ of 70 would be at the low end of what
is considered "educably retarded." Although Lynn maintains that an IQ of 70
is a valid approximation of black IQ throughout Africa, it is based on a
single 1989 study of 1000 sixteen-year-olds using the South African Junior
Aptitude Test. Furthermore, the actual author of this 1989 study was not Lynn
but Dr. Ken Owen, who maintained explicitly that the results of the study in
no way su! ggested a biological inferiority of black people, but were the
result of poorer education of black children under the racist system of
apartheid. Yet both Lynn, and Murray and Herrnstein, insist on drawing racist
implications not only from the Owen study, but from a number of other such
reports conducted under apartheid.
It is, of course, impossible in the context of a review to evaluate and
refute the large body of tainted evidence that Murray and Herrnstein employ.
But it is tainted. On one occasion, they compare the IQ of less than 200
Japanese children with a sample 64,000 Americans taken thirteen years
earlier. The small sample of Japanese was not taken in any way which could be
said to represent Japanese society as a whole, and the 13 year time
difference between the studies was artificially adjusted by the distribution
of extra statistical points. This is just plain bad science.
And that, fundamentally, is the crucial point about The Bell Curve. The
function of science is to reveal the truth, and all science worthy of the
name serves the people as it serves the truth. What Murray and Herrnstein
have done is the opposite of science. They have assembled a body of work by
racists and fascists whose function is to promote racial hatred and class
exploitation, by ideologues so committed to racialism that every difference
noted between ethnic groups within racist societies, such as the US and South
Africa during apartheid, is almost automatically attributed to alleged
biological inferiority rather than racial exclusion, enforced poverty, mass
unemployment, poor education, and the many other forms of ruling class
ideology and oppression.
The Bell Curve is not science. It serves neither truth nor the people. Who
then does it serve? The answer lies in part in the fact that Mankind
Quarterly is funded by the Pioneer Fund, established in 1937 by the US
millionaire Wickliffe Draper and others who were supportive of Nazi racist
policies in Germany. In the 1950s and '60s, the Pioneer Fund aligned itself
with white racists opposed to the desegregation of education, while its
leaders sat on the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee. Pioneer
Fund money in the hundreds of thousands of dollars has supported such
psychologists as Arthur Jensen and, in Canada, Philippe Rushton, both of whom
have trumpeted the claim that black people are genetically inferior to whites
in intelligence, and has bankrolled the racist physicist William Shockley who
has proposed a scheme to pay black people to have themselves "voluntarily
sterilized."
The list of Pioneer Fund recipients is a long one and is not restricted to
individual racists and fascists. It also supports, among others, the
Foundation of Human Understanding, and the American Immigration Control
Federation. In the early 1970s, the Foundation of Human Understanding
distributed hundreds of free copies of both Herrnstein's and Jensen's work to
the registrars' offices of colleges and universities across the US in a
blatant attempt to influence administration policy against the admittance of
black students.
Like the American Immigration Control Federation, The Bell Curve draws the
conclusion from its own unreliable sources that current North American
immigration policies are destroying the intellectual gene pool of the nation.
Murray and Herrnstein claim that recent immigration is composed largely of
ethnic groups whose average IQ is claimed to be lower than white Americans.
Such non-white immigration is "putting downward pressure on the distribution
of intelligence." In the end, the hand is laid down and the cards are
revealed: The Bell Curve advocates a restrictive policy against non-white
immigration. From the beginnings of the Pioneer Fund in the 1930s, to the
publication of Murray and Herrnstein's present book the message is the same;
white people are the intellectual master race, America must be kept free of
the genetic pollution of the Third World. Fascist violence is again on the
rise in Canada, the US, and Europe. Fascist ideas are gaining increased
respectability within! the scientific community. The Bell Curve, and the
vigorous marketing campaign that has made it somewhat of a bestseller, is an
attempt to legitimize the social policies that make fascism possible.
March 1995
Roedy Green
<cice...@rogers.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :
>Mr. Williams is disgusted with the continuing failure of a dysfunctional
>"liberal" education system the U.S.
There is something seriously wrong if first year university students
cannot spell or compose a grammatical sentence. That is not just
black students with that problem.
There is something wrong when foreigners have to instruct first year
university students on the history of their own country.
It seems to me the very first thing you have to do is provide a SECURE
environment for kids to learn -- no guns, drugs, bullying or violence.
Many kids don't have a suitable place or time at home to study. If
you live in crowded, noisy conditions with parents who want you to act
as their servants rather than doing homework, you are not going to do
well with home study. Kids need to be given the option of a couple of
hours after school to work in well lit desks in quiet surroundings in
school to do their homework.
--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green, http://mindprod.com
Who's in charge Cheney or Bush? Ask the people who work for them:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/
dan
> On Fri, 7 Jul 2006 08:40:33 -0400, "Mark Mushette"
> <cice...@rogers.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
> said :
>
>> Mr. Williams is disgusted with the continuing failure of a dysfunctional
>> "liberal" education system the U.S.
>
> There is something seriously wrong if first year university students
> cannot spell or compose a grammatical sentence. That is not just
> black students with that problem.
>
> There is something wrong when foreigners have to instruct first year
> university students on the history of their own country.
>
> It seems to me the very first thing you have to do is provide a SECURE
> environment for kids to learn -- no guns, drugs, bullying or violence.
>
> Many kids don't have a suitable place or time at home to study. If
> you live in crowded, noisy conditions with parents who want you to act
> as their servants rather than doing homework, you are not going to do
> well with home study. Kids need to be given the option of a couple of
> hours after school to work in well lit desks in quiet surroundings in
> school to do their homework.
For once I actually almost agree with you. I don't understand the last
paragraph; but ....well said.
Dan
Reformation
> university students on the history of their own country.
Who ask you to do that ?
Also your comments prove to me you haven't a clue as to what's going
on here.
I find this the norm among foreigners, they THINK they know
America....
they don't.
Our movies, our media, they can't communicate the truth. Those forms
are hoeplessly distorted, political slanted, projections and flat out
propoganda.
History is largely in the eyes of the author.
So please, foreigner, don't embarrass yourself.
And I won't lecture you about Canada.
> It seems to me the very first thing you have to do is provide a SECURE
> environment for kids to learn -- no guns, drugs, bullying or violence.
>
> Many kids don't have a suitable place or time at home to study. If
> you live in crowded, noisy conditions with parents who want you to act
> as their servants rather than doing homework, you are not going to do
> well with home study. Kids need to be given the option of a couple of
> hours after school to work in well lit desks in quiet surroundings in
> school to do their homework.
See, this is where many people just can't understand. This is where
Liberals exhibit their incredible blind spot.
"...no guns, no bullying or violence."
Is it possible that the reason that there is so much violence is
exactly the same reason that there is poor school performance ?
Let me just come right out with it.....
These people we talk of are violent because they are stupid.
They also can't learn because they are stupid.
You egalitarian Leftist simply refuse to face the obvious.
You pretend that the violence has no connection with the stupidity.
You pretend the violence and other sociopathologies have somehow been
thrust
upon these people by the (white) West.
This is all a lie. And after...what 50+ years of this BS lie, I'm very
happy to say that
people simply aren't buying it anymore.
"Well if we just give them equal opportunity of education." replies the
Liberal.
This is code for surround black students with white people and
somehow, intelligence will transmitted through the ethers and stick
onto the black students.
Just how you Liberals got away with this obviously racist concept for
so long is beyond me.
So blacks can't learn left among themselves is exactly what you are
saying.
What you intended is to bury the below average black performance among
the white scoring, therefore diluting the sub-par blacks scoring.
You think that little bit of creative book keeping actually solved the
problem.
It made it worse. You infected whites with black sociopathologies.
Of course you don't give a damn about that. In fact it fits you
hellish egalitarian
nightmares perfectly. You can't raise people up....bring the high down
to join the bottom.
Ghastly filth !!
cice...@rogers.com
been snipped)
More lies from the anonymous Remailer, a modern-day Marxist-Fascist
bullshitter and Goebbels-like propagandist. He knows he cannot refute
the content of his adversaries on the Usenet so he futiley responds
with silly personal attacks and venomous rhetoric. His tactics are that
the bigger the lies the more often they are repeated, the more likely
they are to be believed. But he is wrong. Such rhetoric did not work
for Goebbels or Stalin and it is not working for Commies like Remailer
or Mark Mushet today.
Here goes the silly little socialist prick Remailer again. If this
despicable
AIDS-infected faggot from Vancouver, Canada isn't masturbating,
being sodomized or giving fellatio to a male, he is flaming, under
another alias, one of my posts with lies, distortions, calumny and
outrageously scurrilous "liberal" rhetoric. What a bore and asshole
this little liar is. And he has been doing this on the Internet for 12
years.
His poison-pen posts can be recognized under the signature
"free.teranews.com"
Or "http:www.teranews.com".
Chris P
--
tyreen...@hotmail.com
Reformation wrote:
> It made it worse. You infected whites with black sociopathologies.
> Of course you don't give a damn about that. In fact it fits you
> hellish egalitarian
> nightmares perfectly. You can't raise people up....bring the high down
> to join the bottom.
>
> Ghastly filth !!
And in the end you get 16 PIECE OF SHIT NEGROES repeatedly physically
and sexually assaulting a white girl at a Catholic High school here in
Toronto.
That's the future for the white race in western countries thanks to the
fucking Liberals.
Oh yeah,and not one of the black garbage spent even 1 day in jail after
being coonvicted for their heinous crimes!