Re: nbc Jeff Jacoby on the looters nbc

On Sun, 11 Sep 2005 23:23:21 GMT, Evan Z
<evanz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'tspam> wrote:

>Ukes wrote:
>> On Sat, 10 Sep 2005 23:26:30 -0500, "Gumboman" <noemail@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>> wrote:
>
>[...]
>
>> http://tinyurl.com/betd7 (a September 2005 article examining the
>> evidence concerning male-female and white-black differences in IQ and
>> the taboo associated with discussing them)
>
>I don't have the energy or the smarts to respond fully to this thread,
>but I know enough to know that a Charles Murray article in Commentary,
>of all places, doesn't feel all that credible. This is not a science
>publication and it's not refereed, either. It's essentially a
>conservative organ of a kind (albeit one with a rich history and (at one
>time) some great writers).
>
>It happens that I was taking a required college psych course
>(developmental) when The Bell Curve was published. The course quickly
>turned into a semester-long examination of "Why Charles Murray is
>wrong." Psychology was boring to me, anyway, so I didn't pay very close
>attention. But based on what I know of his other writings, Murray isn't
>what I'd call a credible figure.

Evan - So you're dismissing Murray's article, not because you can
prove that his assertions are wrong, but on the basis of a logically
fallacious ad hominem argument?

You know better than that.

And it takes an incredible amount of effort to not realize that Murray
does cite to peer reviewed studies to support his position.

>
>> The study of intelligence wouldn't be of much importance if it were
>> not for the fact that intelligence contributes significantly to
>> outcomes people experience in life.
>
>I should hope that's true. Otherwise we'd need to reinvent our idea of
>intelligence. It is, after all, man-made or, as people in my line of
>work put it (regrettably), socially constructed. There's no reason to
>think that our current notion of intelligence will last; as the world
>changes in ways we can't possibly predict, the skills needed to thrive
>in it will also change, and we'll need a revamped IQ test. (I'm not
>conceding that IQ tests ever measure anything useful about our native
>smarts, only saying that even if they do measure something useful today,
>our definition of intelligence is necessarily fluid and thus so too is
>the test.)

Intelligence is generally defined as g, the general factor of
intelligence that emerges from diverse tests of mental ability.
Charles Spearman discovered g through factor analysis after noting
that students who did well on one subject tended to do well on other
apparently unrelated subjects. IQ tests are typically highly
"g-loaded" and therefore are good measures of g.

If intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is merely a "social
construct", why are variances in it 70%-80% determined by genes in
adult Americans? And why do tests involving elementary cognitive tasks
(which are simple timed tasks that involve some mental processing,
such as pressing one of two buttons that lights up) show that
intelligence correlates significantly with mental processing speed?

The "intelligence is a social construct" argument reminds me of
something Francis Crick once said. Crick spent the second half of his
career searching for a neurobiological explanation for consciousness.
Consciousness was a field that had traditionally been ignored by
scientists, but which was studied by philosophers as part of the
mind-body question. In commenting on why he, a scientist, was studying
consciousness, Crick observed that philosophy didn't have a
particularly good track record at correctly explaining natural
phenomena. With the "intelligence is a social construct" argument, one
can barely get out of the box to consider intelligence and it's
practical importance.


>
>Of course, in my line of work we also say that race is socially
>constructed (that is, a category invented by people for their own
>purposes, not an inherent, essential way to distinguish people. One of
>the purposes of inventing the category of race, of course, was to
>rationalize or justify the enslavement of darker-skinned people.)

That's a better point, and one that Murray addresses in section III of
his article.

If those in your line of work say that race is socially constructed,
do they therefore oppose affirmative action?




> It's not as though there's one barrier to scientific progress,
>and that's left-wing identity politics.

Agreed.

Jerry
.