Emergent order forces are at play here, I believe. There’s nature and nurture: families, many of them broken, that don’t place a high value on education and achievement, school environments that are failing. Cultures that lampoon success in academics as somehow “white.” These forces can also be found in lower class white cultures in places in London, as documented by Thomas Sowell in his book Charter Schools and Their Enemies, where he also documents the remarkable academic achievements at places like Success Academy.
ok now do the maths. how many blacks are above that threshold? how many go into econ, and have the other traits (grit, etc) that are required?
so your analogy of Jews in NBA isn't too far off. Certainly for extreme tail events we see this. How many 100m olympic final sprints are of non west african descent? one, in the past 24 years (Chinese, culmination of 1.4 billion peoples effort and likely steroids to find someone to compete.... and he couldn't medal). How many math olympiad finalists do you expect in the US to be of black descent? I'd guess, barring racial quotas.... zero.
That seems too high; the floor is probably closer to 130 or 125.
Steph Curry (height: 6'3") is roughly two sigmas above the mean in height. He is also a two-time NBA MVP winner (awarded to the best player in the NBA that year) and four-time NBA champion.
If he can be the best player in basketball (a sport that clearly rewards height), then it should be possible to be a top economist with an IQ of 130.
No, that's not the right analysis. All that means is that there are many more important factors than just height for being an NBA star, which is obviously true. That fact about NBA stardom doesn't imply that there are also lots more factors for Econ stardom, which is false.
The question is how many factors make important contributions to being competitive at the very top levels of some endeavor.
For something very g-loaded like winning a Clark medal, there isn't much more to look at. The factor of intelligence above an already high threshold counts for a lot. Of course one also has to be good at various social games that help with getting selected by the right places, getting in the right cliques and mutual admiration societies, getting funding, getting published in the right journals, etc.
Skill at those games tends to also correlate with intelligence, but not necessarily with agreeableness, independence of thought, results that are empirically corroborated or replicable, and so forth.
But you still have to be really smart to be really wrong in those really impressive ways.
My analysis isn't wrong, but it is incomplete with missing steps. To complete it, I would have to show that the correlation between height and basketball ability is the same as that between IQ (intelligence) and economics research ability.
As I don't know the correlation between IQ and economics research ability, I can't really perform the more rigorous analysis. But I chose basketball as an intuitive example because we know that height matters a *lot* in basketball. Though other traits contribute to basketball ability as well: coordination, endurance, resilience, work ethic, leaping ability, hand size, and more.
Is economics research ability solely a function of IQ or do other traits matter? To me, clearly other traits matter quite a bit. For one, we know that interest in economics has to factor in; not every high IQ person is interested in becoming an economist. There is also obviously work ethic: to get into a decent econ grad program often requires good grades in both high school and college. That's not even considering the work it takes to publish consistently. That's not even getting into luck and opportunity. My impression (which is open to being corrected) is that getting ahead in economics is unusually based on connections compared to other academic fields like math and physics.
The average NBA player has a height of around 6"6'. That's around 3 sigmas above the mean for height. Do you think economists have an average IQ markedly above 145? We know that theoretical physicist--who have the highest GRE scores entering grad school--have average IQs in the 150s.
Top 10 NBA player = economists in the running for the Bates Clark Medal.
Also, without some psychometric data, I really don't know where you are getting this confidence from. I'm not even against the idea that top economists might have higher IQs than one might deduced based on the GRE scores of Econ grad students.
(For one, there sure are a lot of Jews among top economists; and listening to Larry Summers on a podcast, I thought to myself: "This is the smartest person I've ever heard talk.")
"The question is how many factors make important contributions to being competitive at the very top levels of some endeavor."
You left out single-minded focus, working long hours, actually being productive during those long hours (not daydreaming, not working at half efficiency because you're sleep deprived, etc.). You left out an ability to keep doing what would be difficult for ordinary people and doing it for hours and hours and hours. For example, to be an economics superstar, you have to be willing to read lots of economic articles, which tend to be pretty poorly written, and to figure out what they're actually saying--often, as opposed to what the author asserts.
Now, all of this may be correlated with IQ, but I don't think it's really g.
I have a name for stuff that is important for performance in intellectually-loaded fields but which are independent of g: "CUTS". Complementary Uncorrelated Traits and Skills. Of course all that stuff matters, but that fact is not at all inconsistent with intelligence mattering so much to some competitions that there's a very high floor to be competitive.
It's also worth considering the selection effects for CUTS for those who are even considered to be in the running for such contests. Since we can't (and are still waiting for the AI's that can) zoom in with sufficient granularity at whatever underlying biochemistry might form the basis for any of them, the human features we name as CUTS tend to be fuzzy conceptual abstractions that are hard or impossible to 'measure', model, or estimate by proxy.
As a human judgment it seems certain that, whatever it really is, something like 'moxie' is a real thing that we notice to be a consistent feature of some people's personalities. And it is really easy for most people to tell the difference between a low-moxie person and a high-moxie person in about 60 seconds of exposure. On the other hand, I'd guess that almost nobody - not even people at the highest levels of moxie - can tell the difference between people at the 99th percentile and 999th millentile of moxie. On the other hand it is *easy* and indeed commonplace for smart people to tell the difference between people at those levels of intelligence when talking about or doing intelligence-loaded things with each other. My impression is that the general rule is that for any group selected for high intelligence, 1 in 10 is qualitatively in an entirely different class. Even a bunch of 5-sigmas notice the 6-sigma in the room.
The point is that for an elite group of people at the top of their field and in competition to be the most impressive to peers - who are experts at knowing what achievements are impressive in their field - all of them are going to be perceived as basically maxing out on all those CUTS, and they probably couldn't have gotten to even be in the running if they weren't high enough on all those so as to saturate any capacity of judges to tell the difference.
If blacks are 85 IQ and 13% of the population (we will pretend the other 87% is 100 IQ, we could get infinitely detailed on this) then blacks are only going to be 0.84% of over 130 IQ. That's about 1/15th what you would predict based on population, and pretty close to "hardly any". The statistics get much worse at say 145+.
The same could be said in reverse (low IQs and crime/dysfunction).
I went to a magnet high school. We had one black, one hispanic kid, five white kids, and a bunch of Jews and Asians. I don't know the background of the black kid, but he didn't act like he was from the ghetto (was he even African American?), and he wasn't on the math team.
That's what you would predict based on IQ and population size, given the cutoff for the school. The cutoff was about the same as exists for high end knowledge careers.
There is a magnet school in my new area with similar statistics, perhaps even more Asian.
Both my school in the 90s and that school recently were subject to racial panics over their demographic profile.
I don't know how to defend these institutions in a coherent way without reference to IQ differences. The use of standardized testing is critical to the outcomes they achieve, and they always go right after the test.
Saying "well we need to work better at preparing kids" just pushes it down. These were already magnet high schools. If high school isn't early enough next thing you know they are teaching CRT in elementary schools (or preschool).
As to the broader question of discussing IQ differences in polite society, I don't know if there is an answer. "Soft realism" as Amy proposes was basically the solution in the 80s-2012. Conservatives blamed ghetto culture and told people to watch The Cosby Show. Liberals asked for more school funding. Both had education reform agendas. After a couple of decades of both movements failing we got wokeness.
It may be that it's impossible to discuss racial IQ differences because America is too diverse to handle it. It may also be true that not discussing them makes wokeness inevitable as the default explanation for such differences. In other words, lose/lose.
Personally, I think immigration has made the issue particularly toxic, because the "silent majority" that checked progressive ambitions in that 80s-2012 period isn't a majority anymore. And it's hard to argue against immigration without reference to IQ.
The only world leader I know of to openly argue from an HBD perspective was Lee Kuan Yew. And he was pretty clear that his ability to do so rested on a Chinese supermajority of the voting public with enough solidarity not to try and court the other ethnicities in order to serve factional interests. He felt that if a country ever had the level of racial diversity we have that it would inevitably descend into an ugly ethnic spoils system.
Maybe the recent Harvard example provides some ideas. Jews basically said "we are going to fuck up anyone that messes with Jews." If whites would act that way people would probably stop pushing whites around. If we are destined to have an ugly ethnic spoils system then perhaps Mutually Assured Destruction is the only way to balance out the interests of the different groups.
P.S. Some people say we ignore race in sports, but sports isn't a big enough piece of the economy for a large ethnic spoils system to develop. There is a lot more money in knowledge work than the NFL. In addition, its possible to be a parasite token minority at BigCorp or Government in a way that isn't possible in sports (your underperformance would immediately sink the team in a verifiable and obvious way everyone could see).
P.P.S. According to the census, Roland Flyer grew up in a town that is pretty above average, so his family could afford to live there. It says his father was a math teacher. He doesn't seem particularly dark skinned in the photos. I have no doubt from the rest of his biography that his upbringing was horrible, but it doesn't show that he's low IQ or came from low IQ parents.
One of my best friends also had an alcoholic father who beat and abandoned him, and an alcoholic mother that abused him. But the father was a successful lawyer despite his problems. And now my friend is a successful lawyer too (though thankfully not an alcoholic and a great guy).
When people ask me about how parenting affects people, I say that it usually doesn't impact adult socioeconomic status all that much compared to genes, but it can affect how happy a life you lead. Two successful lawyers both with very different lives.
This is not actually statistics. It is a model that makes assumptions that the formula for a normal distribution applies far away from the mean. I will say more about this in a post tomorrow.
I'm open to a discussion of how the distribution of intelligence might not be exactly a bell curve or that changes the mean or STD, in fact I would expect some variance from that exact formula in all cases. I know of instances in which intelligence probably doesn't represent a bell curve exactly.
But I think Amy is essentially saying "close enough." If my high school had two black kids instead of one black kid, that would double the rate, and it still wouldn't matter all that much to anyone. If you think the answer is supposed to be 13, one or two are both about as racist and unjust. It fails the Kendi test, and it ain't even close.
So unless you are going to whip out some statistical evidence showing that really it could easily be 13 or close to it, I don't know what really changes.
I'll listen to the numbers, I just think you've got to cut Amy some slack. If this was a fact-check, it would come out "mostly correct."
I was prompted to look at Fryer's Wikipedia page and something struck me as interesting. Although he could have played ball for UT-Arlington (not a glorious prospect by any means - it is a commuter school - but football is often the default way for black boys in Texas to "do" college) - it says he chose instead to work at McDonald's full-time, while attending school.
I've often heard time spent working at a McDonald's referenced as useful, formative, etc. Often for people who go on to have successful careers with McDonald's.
Roland Fryer is surely one of the more illustrious recent examples of the McDonald's launchpad.
As for college football - it seems to me it is toxic. Apparently Andre Ware agrees.
I think there's something to the story of early exposure to the workings of certain organizations provides the kind of education in character and in the reality of human management that on average it helps nudge people towards more successful paths in life. I believe this is true for the military.
And in general it's true for McDonald's. But not in this particular case.
In this case, The Law of Nominative Determinism cast its spell on a man named Fryer.
Everyone should have to work a non-glamorous minimum wage job for a little while in high school. Not because it's a great use of time and it shouldn't get in the way of other things, but because you come face to face with reality.
“Andrews grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, the son of Yale-educated economists Marcellus Andrews and Cheryl Smith.
Fryer grew up in Lewisville, Texas, where he had moved with his abusive alcoholic father at the age of 4. Fryer's mother left when he was very young...
So Fryer’s destiny for high achievement does not seem to owe as much to his parents.”
That’s confusing nature and nurture. Both must have had via their inherited genes, a predisposition for higher academic achievement. In the former case it seems likely parental influence (nurture) played a part too, but what nature hasn’t provided cannot be nurtured - silk purses, sows ears. In the latter case he owed his genes to his parents, and it seems parental influence played no positive part, but there probably were other external influences, including an incentive to achieve to escape poverty and not end up like his parents. Genes do not originate with the parents, but are from a line of genetic inheritance, and sometimes their qualities do not exhibit in a particular generation.
I have a different observation: from a sample size of two, it's not clear how much nurturing affects outcome. I'd bet lunch that Andrews had a home environment much more conducive to high academic achievement than Fryer, and yet they both were wildly successful.
I'd love to see a chart showing the distribution of home environments among Clark Medal recipients. My prediction: Fryer is on the long tail of two curves.
Nevertheless, forms of nurture (context) may in some cases make a considerable difference to what nature has (latently) provided - ie potential which may otherwise lie unrecognised / dormant.
The premise is that being selective about which claims to make and expressing them in more sensitive ways makes any difference whatsoever. Sure, there are lot of times in normal social interaction where it pays to shape the way one says things with a wisdom, savvy, art, discretion, and diplomacy.
But this isn't one of them.
For ugly truths and socially-undesirable claims, my impression is that there is little evidence it makes any difference at all, and there is considerable evidence for the null hypothesis, that is doesn't do any good.
And unless you can show that selection of claims and manner of expression produces different outcomes, then you have no basis for criticizing any particular expression or claiming that one manner is superior to another. And if there is no different in outcome, then one can at least admire those with the courage to speak the truth simply, bluntly, plainly, and forthrightly.
A simple natural fact that is nobody's doing and which is totally at odds with the prime ideological premise at the very heart of the corruption of our entire intellectual culture *ought* to be stated in such a manner. "The Emperor is naked; it's plain to see, all who claim otherwise are fools or liars." Period. Then, "Ok, you don't have to throw stones, I'll go without resistance, I even went to the trouble of bringing my own noose, so you can go ahead and escort me to the nearest lamppost now."
I'll back up my claim that it doesn't matter with the best example for this exact issue. One thing to note about Murray (I've met him in person) is that he really is a true class act and "Midwest Nice" kind of guy without a bigoted bone in his body who has been trying in earnest over decades to inject the least provocative and most strongly-evidenced bits of this realism into the discourse in the gentlest and more careful and sensitive way possible, with all the appropriate caveats and disclaimers and so forth. He has gone to such extreme lengths to do this and meet the opposition in their own camp, as it were, that he has occasionally frustrated the people who otherwise agree with him. And in many ways it requires even more courage to alienate one's friends than to challenge one's enemies, yet he did not shy away from the attempt out of commitment to making every good faith effort possible.
That is, he has been trying to do what this post recommends, and he has been doing it as well as it can possibly be done.
And despite all that he has nevertheless still been treated by so-called public intellectuals not just "unfairly" (an extreme understatement) but as a vile bigot and persona non grata deserving to be ostracized, excommunicated from respectable society, and worse.
I say 'despite' but more to my point, it's actually *because* he did this about as perfectly and professionally as anyone could that he posed a level-alpha threat to the 'discursive dominance' (look it up) of The Narrative and thus he went right to the top of the Most Wanted List and was got targeted as a top priority for neutralization by what Weinstein calls the "Distributed Information Suppression Complex". A while back upon merely mentioning the name 'Charles Murray' to a younger person I thought would know better, the disappointing, immediate, media-conditioned knee-jerk word-association was simply 'racist'. I guess that's better than 'white supremacist' which he also gets slimed with. In the manner of "no good deed goes unpunished", that's what Murray gets for all his trouble, and the DISC hangs up its 'Mission Accomplished' banner.
Which raises the question as to *why* it doesn't work, that is, what is the mechanism that prevents it from working.
The reason it doesn't work is because the political formula of leftism absolutely depends on the premise that disparities in identity-group outcomes or representation that favor lower-ranked (i.e. more 'privileged') groups are *never* natural or innocent and instead *always* the result of unjust discrimination. This is the indispensable premise that provides them with the Socially Acceptable Excuse to credibly promise to use state power to violate norms of neutrality to 'correct' these disparities for the benefit of their vote-bank client groups.
As such, it is simply impossible for them to allow anyone to say anything in any manner that threatens to pose any real challenge to the discursive dominance of that premise. Their NORAD early-warning system to spot any such threats is so hypersensitive that they never have a false negative and they don't care at all about the huge number of false positives or the serious damage all this is doing to social harmony and epistemic institutions.
So, if anyone tries anything new and it seems to be be 'working' and gaining any kind of following, it is as if that person had stepped out of the trenches and stood straight up in no-man's-land in front of ten thousand snipers. How many unjust pile-ons and cancellation jihads of just this sort does one have to watch to get the message? The nicest and gentlest Amy Wax in the world would still be losing classes and facing loss of tenure and termination.
Wax's observation that there will be hardly any blacks on the far right of the distribution is correct. Hardly any is equivalent to few, or very few, and this fact is apparently so unwelcome to Arnold that he tries to minimize it by pointing to exceptions. It would be better to face facts than to do what we have done, engage in all manner of absurd contortions to deny reality. The fact that there are average group differences ought not to daunt anybody, just as Arnold is clearly not daunted by the evident superiority of blacks Andrews and Fryer. Average group differences say nothing about any individual.
Frankly the whole racial guilt trip business is a ruthless grift-driven exploitation of people's excessive concern with their status and social leverage at the expense of principle.
WTF? Where does Kling write anything to suggest he doesn't want to accept that hardly any blacks will be in these positions? Where does he minimize it?
Your argument is wholly unconvincing because it rests on the unstated assumption that the backgrounds of the other 30-odd JBC winners who are presumably white men are also split 50-50 into privileged and unprivileged. You really need to do what Charles Murray did in "Coming Apart" and examine the backgrounds of all white male winners. How many of them came from families like Mr. Andrews vs Mr. Fryer's? Answer that question before you declare that "... if you want to predict people who will attain high achievement, the relationship to parental characteristics ... will be tenuous."
And throwing shade at somebody's grammar, especially from an extemporaneous conversation, tends to be the mark of a weak rebuttal.
We have extensive evidence from twin studies that genes are doing the heavy lifting for most outcomes, at least in wealthy countries like the US and western Europe.
It's easy to get led astray by gene-environment correlation: Parents who have genes conducive to success tend to succeed, so most children with genes conducive to high achievement tend to be born into high-SES families. The exceptions are usually children whose parents whose poverty was exogenous, such as immigrants from low-income countries or black children whose parents were denied opportunities due to racism.
"Background" is complicated. The way social scientists try to quantify, estimate, and model things like 'nature' and 'nurture' is often larded up with all kinds of conceptual errors, and there is the additional problem that the kind of social patterns related to cognitive capacity have been changing a lot over time.
For one thing, as Murray touched on, it used to be the case that being born with a lot of raw intellect used to be more predictive that one would be more likely to be successful or make major contributions and rise to the top ranks of any of a large number of ordinary professions, rather than being a good predictor of entry into a much smaller set of much more g-intensive professions.
Except for some extreme cases the economic return to additional intelligence used to be smaller than for other factors of production or contributors to labor productivity. You would see plenty of very smart people go out to become pioneers and do hard manual work on farms because what muscle could produce with cheap land was more valuable than what their minds could produce with thinking. Their kids still grew up 'poor' but it was still richer than their best alternative. When intelligence wasn't as valuable it was also less correlated with class and less attractive or critical of a selective factor in the mating game.
All that changed pretty rapidly during the 20th Century, intelligence became increasingly valuable in the market thus increasingly correlated with jobs, income, class, and status, and thus increasingly an attractor for assortative mating which Murray showed was contributing to the generation of increasingly endogamous de facto castes.
The point is that if a social scientist looks at 'background' across time but without accounting for these major social changes then the analysis is probably bunk.
In fryers family case a lot of them appear to have been entrepreneurial criminals. That’s different from being a low level street dealer.
I’m going on memory but I think studies of drug cartels show that while the bulk of the rank and file are dumb ghetto rats, higher ranking members tend to be of average to above average intelligence. Not geniuses necessarily, but if Roland came from a family of average to above average mulatoes with an entrepreneurial streak his intelligence would be an abnormal jump but not so much as for an average African American.
The point of standardized tests is to identify such people early and get them into legitimate business rather then being drug dealers.
Stephen Dubner wrote an article about Roland Fryer's ancestry in 2005:
Her mother [his maternal grandmother], it turned out, attended Juilliard and played eight instruments. An uncle was a saxophonist with Duke Ellington. Her family, she said, had been a real force in Tulsa, running restaurants and a variety of other businesses.
"They really were the Talented Tenth," Harold said.
Fryer smiled. The concept of the Talented Tenth was promoted by none other than W.E.B. DuBois. It referred to the need for an educated black elite -- the top 10 percent -- that would serve as example and inspiration to their brethren.
Later that night, over Scotch and soda at an airport hotel in Tulsa, Fryer sifted through the discoveries of his trip. He hadn't known that his father was a math teacher. He hadn't known that so much accomplishment ran in his mother's family. "I used to consider myself a genetic aberration or maybe an impostor," he said. "But I actually have some pretty good genes."
If all this racialist obsession is masking a more laudable concern for the economic shift you describe - it is a little hard to square with the same folks, right or left, letting 6 or seven million immigrants stroll across the border year after year.
There is no mask. For the left, the racialist obsession and the open border are the tools they use to win the next election and eventually all the elections, just like they have in every election for every major Blue City for around half a century. In systems like ours there exists an evolutionary feedback between a political faction's ideology and what is politically expedient for that faction, such that everything that helps them win elections is rationalized as - and quickly comes to be sincerely believed to be - a laudable cause on its own merits.
Because elections are zero-sum contests, many of these causes can only help one side at the expense of the other. This is where 'polarization' really comes from. The Feedback mechanism means that one will assess the morality of any cause consistent with its impact on one's faction, and so these moral positions must necessary be polar opposites and fundamentally irreconcilable by their very nature.
A perpetual political war between two factions with ideologies that are necessarily constituted of fundamentally irreconcilable and eternally rivalrous moral principles and judgments and with no possible hope of resolution under the current framework of social institutions is what had emerged, and, well, it's obviously been pretty awful. Getting out of this bad equilibrium is going to be painful.
Why do you assume that's an insult? Imagine if he hadn't noted her mistake. How many people would have noted it? Maybe he wanted to avoid that. ... I guess it didn't work. lol
"it rests on the unstated assumption that the backgrounds of the other 30-odd JBC winners who are presumably white men are also split 50-50 into privileged and unprivileged."
I was befuddled by this claim so I reread what Kling wrote. I'm still befuddled. Where does he even hint at a 50-50 split among white winners?
Wax used a long established colloquialism of the type "not hardly" in saying "there won't be hardly any..." Technically, it is a double negative, but as you say, to fault it in extemporaneous conversation is to be unduly fussy.
There's a lot of 'talking onto the page' these days -- & some of this rushed stuff seems to act as a sort of "hip" credential. When meaning suffers, this is not good.
"Fryer grew up in Lewisville, Texas, where he had moved with his abusive alcoholic father at the age of 4. Fryer's mother left when he was very young...
So Fryer’s destiny for high achievement does not seem to owe as much to his parents.”
I've previously heard two other versions about Fryer's childhood. One worse, one better. All three include the alcoholic father and missing mother and none contradict except I heard Florida, which seems unimportant. Anyway, one story says he was mostly living with his grandmother who nurtured learning,. I think it mentioned specific things she did but I don't remember that detail.
Your essay neglects an important statistical fact about the normal distribution. For a given difference the ratio of the higher to lower group exceeding a threshold increases as the threshold gets higher. At high IQ levels, these ratios get pretty large. Of course your examples exist regardless of these ratios. There are responses one could make, but I will let Hanania and Wax make them if they want to.
We can argue about whether it is necessary, or even helpful, for Kling to include that tidbit. But as long as we are nitpicking, your statement is only true if the lower group doesn't have a flatter bell curve. You neglected that.
We have had the means and standard deviations and relative population sizes for all kinds of definable grouping for a long time, so no need for what might be mathematically possible in theory to undermine our confidence about what we already know empirically.
That being said, there are certainly obvious examples for how standard deviations for certain phenotypes can vary tremendously between ancestral groups. For example, consider eye color. If you count brightest blue as -3 and darkest brown as +3 and "intermediate" as 0, then a group like "Germans" has a standard deviation of about 1 on this scale, whereas going only so far south for "North Africans" will get you an order of magnitude difference in that the standard deviation is more like 0.1, as almost the whole population is bunched up tight around the +2.9 mark. "Icelandic" probably also with a small SD of maybe 0.2 because something like 90% of them have blue eyes.
So, yes, it's at least conceivable that, if you didn't know anything else about some feature at all, that both the means and standard deviations could vary substantially, with flatter curves compensating for lower means when it comes to representation above some threshold. But we do know all that we need to know about the g distributions to make predictions that are corroborated by the data and support the basic model.
It would be hard to overstate how *little* people cared about this stuff in the past. Like, talking about IQ was for Mensa members, who apparently took IQ tests, which it did not occur to the rest of us to do; and who were viewed as weird nerds who were probably doing puzzles.
If a senior in high school, with potential plans to go to college, you took the SAT test. This was like a $20 expense. You didn't take classes to prepare for it! You didn't even use a book to prepare for it! I suppose this was the time to mention IQ, but we didn't. We didn't think of it as an IQ test, but something to help with college admission. Period.
I do remember hearing joking - hurtful joking if she got wind of it - about one girl's score, of the "she got 500 points for signing her name" type thing. The reason they joked about it, was because she was a gorgeous blonde, and so it was felt to be fair to so joke because she was otherwise such an ethereal goddess. The boys originated this, oddly.
So maybe she was a bit dim, scholastic-wise. But she still probably had a more successful life than 99% of us.
Smart people were allowed to get on with the business of being smart. It was one trait amid a basket of possible traits. No one had any desire to interfere with the identification of, and the activities of, the smart people. They were of mild interest but not held in especially high regard! I remember my prom date was considered very smart, a little nerdy - but it was the fact that he also played a sport, well, that conferred actual coolness on him.
I guess we're supposed to think Bill Gates changed all this.
Nobody questioned there being a valedictorian, anymore than they questioned why one girl was chosen "Most Beautiful" for the class yearbook. [She was not necessarily the most beautiful girl, of course; I realized this because my friend was one of the acknowledged most beautiful girls in the class and she was too proud to put herself forward for this honor - yes, you had to put yourself forward! But it was whatever girl the teachers thought was sweet and pretty.]
My husband is the smartest person I know; we met at State U. I asked him one time how he came to go there, had he applied to go anywhere else, why had he not even applied for the honors program as I had ...?
He went to a kind of eccentric old private school for kids who didn't fit in to regular school, or who had hippie parents; it was not rigorous - but there were a couple brilliant teachers - also nonfitter-inners - and the graduating class of about 13 had a ball there. It was located around the corner from State U, part of the milieu. So when he finished that, he felt it quite natural to walk over to State U and go to college. His parents knew he was smart - but they saw no reason for him to do anything else, or even apply.
Everyone was not so damned self-conscious about this stuff.
Dare I say it - self-regard was just not quite that high.
"If a senior in high school, with potential plans to go to college, you took the SAT test. This was like a $20 expense. You didn't take classes to prepare for it! You didn't even use a book to prepare for it!"
This was certainly my experience, too, back in the early 70s.
Of course I want my children to be successful, but I define successful as religious Jewish stable happy people who are part of a family and community. Not getting a PhD. It's wonderful to get a PhD on the way, t just isn't a good goal.
"So Fryer’s destiny for high achievement does not seem to owe as much to his parents."
There was a good New York Times Magazine article about 12 years ago by Steve Levitt's journalist co-author Stephen Dubner on Fryer's ancestors. Fryer and Dubner went to visit some old relative who told him about all his high-achieving ancestors, much to Fryer's surprise. OK, it was from 2005:
Her mother, it turned out, attended Juilliard and played eight instruments. An uncle was a saxophonist with Duke Ellington. Her family, she said, had been a real force in Tulsa, running restaurants and a variety of other businesses.
"They really were the Talented Tenth," Harold said.
Fryer smiled. The concept of the Talented Tenth was promoted by none other than W.E.B. DuBois. It referred to the need for an educated black elite -- the top 10 percent -- that would serve as example and inspiration to their brethren.
Later that night, over Scotch and soda at an airport hotel in Tulsa, Fryer sifted through the discoveries of his trip. He hadn't known that his father was a math teacher. He hadn't known that so much accomplishment ran in his mother's family. "I used to consider myself a genetic aberration or maybe an impostor," he said. "But I actually have some pretty good genes."
I wonder if anyone has studied the attitudes of test takers regarding IQ tests. I can imagine a group of inner-city black kids not interested in school and certainly not interested in being tested vs. upper-middle-class white kids motivated to do well in school. Which group will take the IQ test seriously?
PS When I asked Bing, Claude, and Bard to edit this comment, they all refused.
Research in this area is pretty much taboo in academia. One of the many bad results is that we don't know the answer to questions exactly like this. I am fairly sure that one reason some people do better on IQ tests is that they take the tests more seriously and try harder. Three questions: how much can "taking the test seriously" raise your score?, how much is "taking the test seriously" related to some more general trait like "conscientiousness"?, and how much (if any) does conscientiousness depend on genetics?
Another bad result is that eugenicists like Any Wax, Emil Kirkegaard, and Richard Hanania end up dominating the conversation around IQ. If it weren’t taboo in our woke culture for more mainstream academics to join the IQ field then the borderline-racist pro-eugenics position would be relegated to the neglected fringe.
Their research program consists at least in part of pointing out repeatedly that, for example, Asians and whites on average have a higher IQ than blacks. True, but this persistent focus strikes me as at least borderline racist. And this group, over-focused on genetics in my opinion, tends to promote high IQ reproduction over low IQ reproduction, promoting a soft eugenics as a civilizational imperative. This is not the only possible policy conclusion based on the data, but more mainstream academics won’t touch the field with a ten foot pole.
Of course, to the extent that nature is racist, it is racist. If it is really true, it is important to know. Very, very, important. Everyone knows that American blacks do significantly worse than American blacks. If IQ is the same, there are only two possible reasons for this: whites are brought up better than blacks (fewer single parents, more emphasis on education, deferring gratification, etc.) or America is a terrible racist place, where after 50 years of legal equality but a hardly narrowing gap, the only remedy is reverse racism. The former explanation was somewhat popular decades ago but is now considered very impolite and unacceptable. So you're left with "the only way to be an anti-racist is to discriminate against by whites who are by definition unjustly privileged." It is the only possibility left.
If intelligence is even somewhat hereditary, and smart people reproduce less than stupid people, as a matter of simple arithmetic, the average intelligence will go down. That doesn't automatically imply anything morally. But it will make it harder to "fix the schools" or do anything that requires smart people.
Stepping back a little further, why do we care so much about the intersection of race and IQ? Race is just one thing, and one that should have a negligible impact on how we evaluate an individual. IQ is also just one among many virtues and attributes, and one that we have little control over without implementing some social engineering scheme with unknown consequences. The focus on race and the focus on IQ are both unhealthy for society. The focus on the intersection of the two is doubly unhealthy and totally unnecessary.
You can try a few of the shorter good ones the internet for free: Raven's Progressive Matrices and Wordsum. There used to be some old WAIS and Wonderlics online, and maybe there still are, but Wechsler and the NFL have gotten aggressive about getting those taken down. It doesn't really matter which one you take because one of the big insights of the intelligence literature is that for any individual the results on one test tend to be reasonably well-correlated with the results on any other test, which is why on average the factor analysis points to this one-dimensional 'g' thing instead of lots of separate things.
I respectfully suggest that a reflexive cringe response is more a product of your socialization than a skepticism justified by empirical observations. In the evolution of the human mind consistent with the parsimony of nature, the brain hit upon a very clever and efficient way to avoid doing things or making affiliations with people which would cause one to suffer severe social penalties. The animal brain already has a built-in hard-wired 'aversion' system based upon a 'disgust' reaction that responds to environmental cues and helps prevent an animal from ingesting or otherwise exposing themselves to things posing a strong risk of being harmfully infectious or toxic. Well, when social groups got bigger and social relations more complicated to manage, it used that same aversion-disgust system to generate strong negative emotional reaction to anything or anybody that would prove *socially* toxic as well. Just go on social media and notice how often people use the word 'disgusting' in moralistic condemnations of people and behaviors.
When people make statements that are just wrong on the facts there is usually very little cringing in response. It's when they say something that, if that stink sticks to you, is going to get you into trouble with your reference social group, that your brain throttles up aversion feelings to maximum to get you the hell out of there. Those instinctive defensive walls make it really, really hard for ugly truths to break out of their socially-constructed prison.
Good question. I think my objection is mostly due to her statement: “there won’t be hardly any blacks in positions demanding very high cognitive ability.”
1. It’s hard to ignore her sloppy grammar, but let’s try to forgive her.
2. Her first mistake is not placing a time scale on her prediction. The number of blacks in demanding positions is going to change with time following a dramatic policy change. Under what time frame is her prediction valid? A decade? A century?
In this excerpt she focuses strictly on one causal factor: IQ. That’s an intellectual mistake. Achievement depends on real world skills - cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Character is a strong influence on achievement. https://www.thalesacademy.org/academics/real-world-skills?code=character
4. Why doesn’t she mention non-cognitive skills? Maybe she does somewhere else, but my guess is that she doesn’t because it’s difficult to measure and she doesn’t have good data on it.
So that’s pretty much my objection. To the extent that her statement is an accurate reflection of her opinion on this matter, I tend to think of her statement as sloppy, arrogant, and inaccurate.
Notice that I haven’t questioned or objected to her claim that, on average blacks have lower IQs. That’s interesting. I haven’t studied racial differences in IQ, thus motivating my questions about that topic in asking for names of IQ tests and book recommendations. It certainly could be true.
1. I find that grammer far worse than that is common in podcast transcripts. I'm certain I know what she meant so I see nothing that needs forgiven.
2.,3.&4. "Well, what will happen is there won’t be hardly any blacks in positions demanding very high cognitive ability."
Maybe you are looking at the podcast but in Kling's quote I see a very specific topic that isn't impacted by any of the concerns you list as shortcomings.
<i>What will happen when we have real color blindness? Well, what will happen is there won’t be hardly any blacks in positions demanding very high cognitive ability.</i>
I don't buy this because it assumes that blacks' failure to perform as well as whites in school is genetic. I believe it is a learned behavior of refusing to do one's homework, deliberately taught by the likes of Al Sharpton and by so-called educators who teach blacks that Whitey owes them a free ride. That way lies Idiocracy.
The cure is to expand school choice so that parents who care about their kids can have teachers who do their jobs.
Look at the tremendous achievement of the thousands of black students attending Success Academy schools in NY. Their students outscore many of the elite private schools. What would Amy Wax say about this?
Pondiscio asserts in his book that Success Academy selects for parental buy-in, above average willingness to go out of your way to get your child to do what the school considers necessary. Those who don't are "counseled out". There is some question in the book of what happens to stupid students who play by the rules but just can't cut it. Education Realist thinks they too are pressured to leave. Success Academy has a high attrition rate.
Ed Realist had a whole series of posts on the book, beginning with:
Emergent order forces are at play here, I believe. There’s nature and nurture: families, many of them broken, that don’t place a high value on education and achievement, school environments that are failing. Cultures that lampoon success in academics as somehow “white.” These forces can also be found in lower class white cultures in places in London, as documented by Thomas Sowell in his book Charter Schools and Their Enemies, where he also documents the remarkable academic achievements at places like Success Academy.
How many Clark medals were won by people with IQs, let's say, 115 and lower? There is no way of knowing, of course, but a good guess would be zero.
I would put the floor much higher, closer to 145
ok now do the maths. how many blacks are above that threshold? how many go into econ, and have the other traits (grit, etc) that are required?
so your analogy of Jews in NBA isn't too far off. Certainly for extreme tail events we see this. How many 100m olympic final sprints are of non west african descent? one, in the past 24 years (Chinese, culmination of 1.4 billion peoples effort and likely steroids to find someone to compete.... and he couldn't medal). How many math olympiad finalists do you expect in the US to be of black descent? I'd guess, barring racial quotas.... zero.
Let's be honest about facts here.
That seems too high; the floor is probably closer to 130 or 125.
Steph Curry (height: 6'3") is roughly two sigmas above the mean in height. He is also a two-time NBA MVP winner (awarded to the best player in the NBA that year) and four-time NBA champion.
If he can be the best player in basketball (a sport that clearly rewards height), then it should be possible to be a top economist with an IQ of 130.
No, that's not the right analysis. All that means is that there are many more important factors than just height for being an NBA star, which is obviously true. That fact about NBA stardom doesn't imply that there are also lots more factors for Econ stardom, which is false.
The question is how many factors make important contributions to being competitive at the very top levels of some endeavor.
For something very g-loaded like winning a Clark medal, there isn't much more to look at. The factor of intelligence above an already high threshold counts for a lot. Of course one also has to be good at various social games that help with getting selected by the right places, getting in the right cliques and mutual admiration societies, getting funding, getting published in the right journals, etc.
Skill at those games tends to also correlate with intelligence, but not necessarily with agreeableness, independence of thought, results that are empirically corroborated or replicable, and so forth.
But you still have to be really smart to be really wrong in those really impressive ways.
My analysis isn't wrong, but it is incomplete with missing steps. To complete it, I would have to show that the correlation between height and basketball ability is the same as that between IQ (intelligence) and economics research ability.
As I don't know the correlation between IQ and economics research ability, I can't really perform the more rigorous analysis. But I chose basketball as an intuitive example because we know that height matters a *lot* in basketball. Though other traits contribute to basketball ability as well: coordination, endurance, resilience, work ethic, leaping ability, hand size, and more.
Is economics research ability solely a function of IQ or do other traits matter? To me, clearly other traits matter quite a bit. For one, we know that interest in economics has to factor in; not every high IQ person is interested in becoming an economist. There is also obviously work ethic: to get into a decent econ grad program often requires good grades in both high school and college. That's not even considering the work it takes to publish consistently. That's not even getting into luck and opportunity. My impression (which is open to being corrected) is that getting ahead in economics is unusually based on connections compared to other academic fields like math and physics.
The average NBA player has a height of around 6"6'. That's around 3 sigmas above the mean for height. Do you think economists have an average IQ markedly above 145? We know that theoretical physicist--who have the highest GRE scores entering grad school--have average IQs in the 150s.
I think my analysis was quite fair.
The average economist in the running for the medal has an IQ well over 145.
In my analogy:
NBA player = tenured economist
Top 10 NBA player = economists in the running for the Bates Clark Medal.
Also, without some psychometric data, I really don't know where you are getting this confidence from. I'm not even against the idea that top economists might have higher IQs than one might deduced based on the GRE scores of Econ grad students.
(For one, there sure are a lot of Jews among top economists; and listening to Larry Summers on a podcast, I thought to myself: "This is the smartest person I've ever heard talk.")
"The question is how many factors make important contributions to being competitive at the very top levels of some endeavor."
You left out single-minded focus, working long hours, actually being productive during those long hours (not daydreaming, not working at half efficiency because you're sleep deprived, etc.). You left out an ability to keep doing what would be difficult for ordinary people and doing it for hours and hours and hours. For example, to be an economics superstar, you have to be willing to read lots of economic articles, which tend to be pretty poorly written, and to figure out what they're actually saying--often, as opposed to what the author asserts.
Now, all of this may be correlated with IQ, but I don't think it's really g.
I have a name for stuff that is important for performance in intellectually-loaded fields but which are independent of g: "CUTS". Complementary Uncorrelated Traits and Skills. Of course all that stuff matters, but that fact is not at all inconsistent with intelligence mattering so much to some competitions that there's a very high floor to be competitive.
It's also worth considering the selection effects for CUTS for those who are even considered to be in the running for such contests. Since we can't (and are still waiting for the AI's that can) zoom in with sufficient granularity at whatever underlying biochemistry might form the basis for any of them, the human features we name as CUTS tend to be fuzzy conceptual abstractions that are hard or impossible to 'measure', model, or estimate by proxy.
As a human judgment it seems certain that, whatever it really is, something like 'moxie' is a real thing that we notice to be a consistent feature of some people's personalities. And it is really easy for most people to tell the difference between a low-moxie person and a high-moxie person in about 60 seconds of exposure. On the other hand, I'd guess that almost nobody - not even people at the highest levels of moxie - can tell the difference between people at the 99th percentile and 999th millentile of moxie. On the other hand it is *easy* and indeed commonplace for smart people to tell the difference between people at those levels of intelligence when talking about or doing intelligence-loaded things with each other. My impression is that the general rule is that for any group selected for high intelligence, 1 in 10 is qualitatively in an entirely different class. Even a bunch of 5-sigmas notice the 6-sigma in the room.
The point is that for an elite group of people at the top of their field and in competition to be the most impressive to peers - who are experts at knowing what achievements are impressive in their field - all of them are going to be perceived as basically maxing out on all those CUTS, and they probably couldn't have gotten to even be in the running if they weren't high enough on all those so as to saturate any capacity of judges to tell the difference.
What is missing from your post is.....statistics.
If blacks are 85 IQ and 13% of the population (we will pretend the other 87% is 100 IQ, we could get infinitely detailed on this) then blacks are only going to be 0.84% of over 130 IQ. That's about 1/15th what you would predict based on population, and pretty close to "hardly any". The statistics get much worse at say 145+.
The same could be said in reverse (low IQs and crime/dysfunction).
I went to a magnet high school. We had one black, one hispanic kid, five white kids, and a bunch of Jews and Asians. I don't know the background of the black kid, but he didn't act like he was from the ghetto (was he even African American?), and he wasn't on the math team.
That's what you would predict based on IQ and population size, given the cutoff for the school. The cutoff was about the same as exists for high end knowledge careers.
There is a magnet school in my new area with similar statistics, perhaps even more Asian.
Both my school in the 90s and that school recently were subject to racial panics over their demographic profile.
I don't know how to defend these institutions in a coherent way without reference to IQ differences. The use of standardized testing is critical to the outcomes they achieve, and they always go right after the test.
Saying "well we need to work better at preparing kids" just pushes it down. These were already magnet high schools. If high school isn't early enough next thing you know they are teaching CRT in elementary schools (or preschool).
As to the broader question of discussing IQ differences in polite society, I don't know if there is an answer. "Soft realism" as Amy proposes was basically the solution in the 80s-2012. Conservatives blamed ghetto culture and told people to watch The Cosby Show. Liberals asked for more school funding. Both had education reform agendas. After a couple of decades of both movements failing we got wokeness.
It may be that it's impossible to discuss racial IQ differences because America is too diverse to handle it. It may also be true that not discussing them makes wokeness inevitable as the default explanation for such differences. In other words, lose/lose.
Personally, I think immigration has made the issue particularly toxic, because the "silent majority" that checked progressive ambitions in that 80s-2012 period isn't a majority anymore. And it's hard to argue against immigration without reference to IQ.
The only world leader I know of to openly argue from an HBD perspective was Lee Kuan Yew. And he was pretty clear that his ability to do so rested on a Chinese supermajority of the voting public with enough solidarity not to try and court the other ethnicities in order to serve factional interests. He felt that if a country ever had the level of racial diversity we have that it would inevitably descend into an ugly ethnic spoils system.
Maybe the recent Harvard example provides some ideas. Jews basically said "we are going to fuck up anyone that messes with Jews." If whites would act that way people would probably stop pushing whites around. If we are destined to have an ugly ethnic spoils system then perhaps Mutually Assured Destruction is the only way to balance out the interests of the different groups.
P.S. Some people say we ignore race in sports, but sports isn't a big enough piece of the economy for a large ethnic spoils system to develop. There is a lot more money in knowledge work than the NFL. In addition, its possible to be a parasite token minority at BigCorp or Government in a way that isn't possible in sports (your underperformance would immediately sink the team in a verifiable and obvious way everyone could see).
P.P.S. According to the census, Roland Flyer grew up in a town that is pretty above average, so his family could afford to live there. It says his father was a math teacher. He doesn't seem particularly dark skinned in the photos. I have no doubt from the rest of his biography that his upbringing was horrible, but it doesn't show that he's low IQ or came from low IQ parents.
One of my best friends also had an alcoholic father who beat and abandoned him, and an alcoholic mother that abused him. But the father was a successful lawyer despite his problems. And now my friend is a successful lawyer too (though thankfully not an alcoholic and a great guy).
When people ask me about how parenting affects people, I say that it usually doesn't impact adult socioeconomic status all that much compared to genes, but it can affect how happy a life you lead. Two successful lawyers both with very different lives.
This is not actually statistics. It is a model that makes assumptions that the formula for a normal distribution applies far away from the mean. I will say more about this in a post tomorrow.
I'm open to a discussion of how the distribution of intelligence might not be exactly a bell curve or that changes the mean or STD, in fact I would expect some variance from that exact formula in all cases. I know of instances in which intelligence probably doesn't represent a bell curve exactly.
But I think Amy is essentially saying "close enough." If my high school had two black kids instead of one black kid, that would double the rate, and it still wouldn't matter all that much to anyone. If you think the answer is supposed to be 13, one or two are both about as racist and unjust. It fails the Kendi test, and it ain't even close.
So unless you are going to whip out some statistical evidence showing that really it could easily be 13 or close to it, I don't know what really changes.
I'll listen to the numbers, I just think you've got to cut Amy some slack. If this was a fact-check, it would come out "mostly correct."
I was prompted to look at Fryer's Wikipedia page and something struck me as interesting. Although he could have played ball for UT-Arlington (not a glorious prospect by any means - it is a commuter school - but football is often the default way for black boys in Texas to "do" college) - it says he chose instead to work at McDonald's full-time, while attending school.
I've often heard time spent working at a McDonald's referenced as useful, formative, etc. Often for people who go on to have successful careers with McDonald's.
Roland Fryer is surely one of the more illustrious recent examples of the McDonald's launchpad.
As for college football - it seems to me it is toxic. Apparently Andre Ware agrees.
The Fryer to McDonald's path is another win for nominative determinism.
I think there's something to the story of early exposure to the workings of certain organizations provides the kind of education in character and in the reality of human management that on average it helps nudge people towards more successful paths in life. I believe this is true for the military.
And in general it's true for McDonald's. But not in this particular case.
In this case, The Law of Nominative Determinism cast its spell on a man named Fryer.
Everyone should have to work a non-glamorous minimum wage job for a little while in high school. Not because it's a great use of time and it shouldn't get in the way of other things, but because you come face to face with reality.
Half black, half Jewish kids break this mold.
“Andrews grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, the son of Yale-educated economists Marcellus Andrews and Cheryl Smith.
Fryer grew up in Lewisville, Texas, where he had moved with his abusive alcoholic father at the age of 4. Fryer's mother left when he was very young...
So Fryer’s destiny for high achievement does not seem to owe as much to his parents.”
That’s confusing nature and nurture. Both must have had via their inherited genes, a predisposition for higher academic achievement. In the former case it seems likely parental influence (nurture) played a part too, but what nature hasn’t provided cannot be nurtured - silk purses, sows ears. In the latter case he owed his genes to his parents, and it seems parental influence played no positive part, but there probably were other external influences, including an incentive to achieve to escape poverty and not end up like his parents. Genes do not originate with the parents, but are from a line of genetic inheritance, and sometimes their qualities do not exhibit in a particular generation.
I have a different observation: from a sample size of two, it's not clear how much nurturing affects outcome. I'd bet lunch that Andrews had a home environment much more conducive to high academic achievement than Fryer, and yet they both were wildly successful.
I'd love to see a chart showing the distribution of home environments among Clark Medal recipients. My prediction: Fryer is on the long tail of two curves.
>>>>what nature hasn’t provided cannot be nurtured<<<<
Outstanding. Will steal this conceptual idea.
Nevertheless, forms of nurture (context) may in some cases make a considerable difference to what nature has (latently) provided - ie potential which may otherwise lie unrecognised / dormant.
If Albert Einstein had been born in Zambia, he would never have made any physics breakthroughs.
The premise of this article is false.
The premise is that being selective about which claims to make and expressing them in more sensitive ways makes any difference whatsoever. Sure, there are lot of times in normal social interaction where it pays to shape the way one says things with a wisdom, savvy, art, discretion, and diplomacy.
But this isn't one of them.
For ugly truths and socially-undesirable claims, my impression is that there is little evidence it makes any difference at all, and there is considerable evidence for the null hypothesis, that is doesn't do any good.
And unless you can show that selection of claims and manner of expression produces different outcomes, then you have no basis for criticizing any particular expression or claiming that one manner is superior to another. And if there is no different in outcome, then one can at least admire those with the courage to speak the truth simply, bluntly, plainly, and forthrightly.
A simple natural fact that is nobody's doing and which is totally at odds with the prime ideological premise at the very heart of the corruption of our entire intellectual culture *ought* to be stated in such a manner. "The Emperor is naked; it's plain to see, all who claim otherwise are fools or liars." Period. Then, "Ok, you don't have to throw stones, I'll go without resistance, I even went to the trouble of bringing my own noose, so you can go ahead and escort me to the nearest lamppost now."
I'll back up my claim that it doesn't matter with the best example for this exact issue. One thing to note about Murray (I've met him in person) is that he really is a true class act and "Midwest Nice" kind of guy without a bigoted bone in his body who has been trying in earnest over decades to inject the least provocative and most strongly-evidenced bits of this realism into the discourse in the gentlest and more careful and sensitive way possible, with all the appropriate caveats and disclaimers and so forth. He has gone to such extreme lengths to do this and meet the opposition in their own camp, as it were, that he has occasionally frustrated the people who otherwise agree with him. And in many ways it requires even more courage to alienate one's friends than to challenge one's enemies, yet he did not shy away from the attempt out of commitment to making every good faith effort possible.
That is, he has been trying to do what this post recommends, and he has been doing it as well as it can possibly be done.
And despite all that he has nevertheless still been treated by so-called public intellectuals not just "unfairly" (an extreme understatement) but as a vile bigot and persona non grata deserving to be ostracized, excommunicated from respectable society, and worse.
I say 'despite' but more to my point, it's actually *because* he did this about as perfectly and professionally as anyone could that he posed a level-alpha threat to the 'discursive dominance' (look it up) of The Narrative and thus he went right to the top of the Most Wanted List and was got targeted as a top priority for neutralization by what Weinstein calls the "Distributed Information Suppression Complex". A while back upon merely mentioning the name 'Charles Murray' to a younger person I thought would know better, the disappointing, immediate, media-conditioned knee-jerk word-association was simply 'racist'. I guess that's better than 'white supremacist' which he also gets slimed with. In the manner of "no good deed goes unpunished", that's what Murray gets for all his trouble, and the DISC hangs up its 'Mission Accomplished' banner.
Which raises the question as to *why* it doesn't work, that is, what is the mechanism that prevents it from working.
The reason it doesn't work is because the political formula of leftism absolutely depends on the premise that disparities in identity-group outcomes or representation that favor lower-ranked (i.e. more 'privileged') groups are *never* natural or innocent and instead *always* the result of unjust discrimination. This is the indispensable premise that provides them with the Socially Acceptable Excuse to credibly promise to use state power to violate norms of neutrality to 'correct' these disparities for the benefit of their vote-bank client groups.
As such, it is simply impossible for them to allow anyone to say anything in any manner that threatens to pose any real challenge to the discursive dominance of that premise. Their NORAD early-warning system to spot any such threats is so hypersensitive that they never have a false negative and they don't care at all about the huge number of false positives or the serious damage all this is doing to social harmony and epistemic institutions.
So, if anyone tries anything new and it seems to be be 'working' and gaining any kind of following, it is as if that person had stepped out of the trenches and stood straight up in no-man's-land in front of ten thousand snipers. How many unjust pile-ons and cancellation jihads of just this sort does one have to watch to get the message? The nicest and gentlest Amy Wax in the world would still be losing classes and facing loss of tenure and termination.
Right. Murray is a saintly man.
Wax's observation that there will be hardly any blacks on the far right of the distribution is correct. Hardly any is equivalent to few, or very few, and this fact is apparently so unwelcome to Arnold that he tries to minimize it by pointing to exceptions. It would be better to face facts than to do what we have done, engage in all manner of absurd contortions to deny reality. The fact that there are average group differences ought not to daunt anybody, just as Arnold is clearly not daunted by the evident superiority of blacks Andrews and Fryer. Average group differences say nothing about any individual.
Frankly the whole racial guilt trip business is a ruthless grift-driven exploitation of people's excessive concern with their status and social leverage at the expense of principle.
WTF? Where does Kling write anything to suggest he doesn't want to accept that hardly any blacks will be in these positions? Where does he minimize it?
Your argument is wholly unconvincing because it rests on the unstated assumption that the backgrounds of the other 30-odd JBC winners who are presumably white men are also split 50-50 into privileged and unprivileged. You really need to do what Charles Murray did in "Coming Apart" and examine the backgrounds of all white male winners. How many of them came from families like Mr. Andrews vs Mr. Fryer's? Answer that question before you declare that "... if you want to predict people who will attain high achievement, the relationship to parental characteristics ... will be tenuous."
And throwing shade at somebody's grammar, especially from an extemporaneous conversation, tends to be the mark of a weak rebuttal.
We have extensive evidence from twin studies that genes are doing the heavy lifting for most outcomes, at least in wealthy countries like the US and western Europe.
It's easy to get led astray by gene-environment correlation: Parents who have genes conducive to success tend to succeed, so most children with genes conducive to high achievement tend to be born into high-SES families. The exceptions are usually children whose parents whose poverty was exogenous, such as immigrants from low-income countries or black children whose parents were denied opportunities due to racism.
"Background" is complicated. The way social scientists try to quantify, estimate, and model things like 'nature' and 'nurture' is often larded up with all kinds of conceptual errors, and there is the additional problem that the kind of social patterns related to cognitive capacity have been changing a lot over time.
For one thing, as Murray touched on, it used to be the case that being born with a lot of raw intellect used to be more predictive that one would be more likely to be successful or make major contributions and rise to the top ranks of any of a large number of ordinary professions, rather than being a good predictor of entry into a much smaller set of much more g-intensive professions.
Except for some extreme cases the economic return to additional intelligence used to be smaller than for other factors of production or contributors to labor productivity. You would see plenty of very smart people go out to become pioneers and do hard manual work on farms because what muscle could produce with cheap land was more valuable than what their minds could produce with thinking. Their kids still grew up 'poor' but it was still richer than their best alternative. When intelligence wasn't as valuable it was also less correlated with class and less attractive or critical of a selective factor in the mating game.
All that changed pretty rapidly during the 20th Century, intelligence became increasingly valuable in the market thus increasingly correlated with jobs, income, class, and status, and thus increasingly an attractor for assortative mating which Murray showed was contributing to the generation of increasingly endogamous de facto castes.
The point is that if a social scientist looks at 'background' across time but without accounting for these major social changes then the analysis is probably bunk.
In fryers family case a lot of them appear to have been entrepreneurial criminals. That’s different from being a low level street dealer.
I’m going on memory but I think studies of drug cartels show that while the bulk of the rank and file are dumb ghetto rats, higher ranking members tend to be of average to above average intelligence. Not geniuses necessarily, but if Roland came from a family of average to above average mulatoes with an entrepreneurial streak his intelligence would be an abnormal jump but not so much as for an average African American.
The point of standardized tests is to identify such people early and get them into legitimate business rather then being drug dealers.
Stephen Dubner wrote an article about Roland Fryer's ancestry in 2005:
Her mother [his maternal grandmother], it turned out, attended Juilliard and played eight instruments. An uncle was a saxophonist with Duke Ellington. Her family, she said, had been a real force in Tulsa, running restaurants and a variety of other businesses.
"They really were the Talented Tenth," Harold said.
Fryer smiled. The concept of the Talented Tenth was promoted by none other than W.E.B. DuBois. It referred to the need for an educated black elite -- the top 10 percent -- that would serve as example and inspiration to their brethren.
Later that night, over Scotch and soda at an airport hotel in Tulsa, Fryer sifted through the discoveries of his trip. He hadn't known that his father was a math teacher. He hadn't known that so much accomplishment ran in his mother's family. "I used to consider myself a genetic aberration or maybe an impostor," he said. "But I actually have some pretty good genes."
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/magazine/toward-a-unified-theory-of-black-america.html
If all this racialist obsession is masking a more laudable concern for the economic shift you describe - it is a little hard to square with the same folks, right or left, letting 6 or seven million immigrants stroll across the border year after year.
There is no mask. For the left, the racialist obsession and the open border are the tools they use to win the next election and eventually all the elections, just like they have in every election for every major Blue City for around half a century. In systems like ours there exists an evolutionary feedback between a political faction's ideology and what is politically expedient for that faction, such that everything that helps them win elections is rationalized as - and quickly comes to be sincerely believed to be - a laudable cause on its own merits.
Because elections are zero-sum contests, many of these causes can only help one side at the expense of the other. This is where 'polarization' really comes from. The Feedback mechanism means that one will assess the morality of any cause consistent with its impact on one's faction, and so these moral positions must necessary be polar opposites and fundamentally irreconcilable by their very nature.
A perpetual political war between two factions with ideologies that are necessarily constituted of fundamentally irreconcilable and eternally rivalrous moral principles and judgments and with no possible hope of resolution under the current framework of social institutions is what had emerged, and, well, it's obviously been pretty awful. Getting out of this bad equilibrium is going to be painful.
"And throwing shade at somebody's grammar, especially from an extemporaneous conversation, tends to be the mark of a weak rebuttal."
And where does Kling do this?
Footnote - which I also noticed and sort of didn't think Kling was being charitable:
1. If the transcript is accurate, then she is also using improper English. She meant to say that “there will be hardly any,” not that there won’t be.
Why do you assume that's an insult? Imagine if he hadn't noted her mistake. How many people would have noted it? Maybe he wanted to avoid that. ... I guess it didn't work. lol
"it rests on the unstated assumption that the backgrounds of the other 30-odd JBC winners who are presumably white men are also split 50-50 into privileged and unprivileged."
I was befuddled by this claim so I reread what Kling wrote. I'm still befuddled. Where does he even hint at a 50-50 split among white winners?
Wax used a long established colloquialism of the type "not hardly" in saying "there won't be hardly any..." Technically, it is a double negative, but as you say, to fault it in extemporaneous conversation is to be unduly fussy.
There's a lot of 'talking onto the page' these days -- & some of this rushed stuff seems to act as a sort of "hip" credential. When meaning suffers, this is not good.
"Fryer grew up in Lewisville, Texas, where he had moved with his abusive alcoholic father at the age of 4. Fryer's mother left when he was very young...
So Fryer’s destiny for high achievement does not seem to owe as much to his parents.”
I've previously heard two other versions about Fryer's childhood. One worse, one better. All three include the alcoholic father and missing mother and none contradict except I heard Florida, which seems unimportant. Anyway, one story says he was mostly living with his grandmother who nurtured learning,. I think it mentioned specific things she did but I don't remember that detail.
In that case the, unfortunate, "loss" of his parents may well have worked to his advantage.
Your essay neglects an important statistical fact about the normal distribution. For a given difference the ratio of the higher to lower group exceeding a threshold increases as the threshold gets higher. At high IQ levels, these ratios get pretty large. Of course your examples exist regardless of these ratios. There are responses one could make, but I will let Hanania and Wax make them if they want to.
We can argue about whether it is necessary, or even helpful, for Kling to include that tidbit. But as long as we are nitpicking, your statement is only true if the lower group doesn't have a flatter bell curve. You neglected that.
Do we have any good reason to believe that blacks have a dramatically flatter bell curve than most?
And...that it happens to only be flat in the good way.
It would seem the burden of prove for such an abnormal distribution for a single group would be incumbent on the one proposing it.
We have had the means and standard deviations and relative population sizes for all kinds of definable grouping for a long time, so no need for what might be mathematically possible in theory to undermine our confidence about what we already know empirically.
That being said, there are certainly obvious examples for how standard deviations for certain phenotypes can vary tremendously between ancestral groups. For example, consider eye color. If you count brightest blue as -3 and darkest brown as +3 and "intermediate" as 0, then a group like "Germans" has a standard deviation of about 1 on this scale, whereas going only so far south for "North Africans" will get you an order of magnitude difference in that the standard deviation is more like 0.1, as almost the whole population is bunched up tight around the +2.9 mark. "Icelandic" probably also with a small SD of maybe 0.2 because something like 90% of them have blue eyes.
So, yes, it's at least conceivable that, if you didn't know anything else about some feature at all, that both the means and standard deviations could vary substantially, with flatter curves compensating for lower means when it comes to representation above some threshold. But we do know all that we need to know about the g distributions to make predictions that are corroborated by the data and support the basic model.
Intelligence is over emphasized. You tell people a kid did x, they're like "why don't you put him in specialized classes?"
I'll tell you why. Life is really about resilience, social skills, emotional self management, and being able to experience the joy of duty.
Impressing people is the least important thing.
It would be hard to overstate how *little* people cared about this stuff in the past. Like, talking about IQ was for Mensa members, who apparently took IQ tests, which it did not occur to the rest of us to do; and who were viewed as weird nerds who were probably doing puzzles.
If a senior in high school, with potential plans to go to college, you took the SAT test. This was like a $20 expense. You didn't take classes to prepare for it! You didn't even use a book to prepare for it! I suppose this was the time to mention IQ, but we didn't. We didn't think of it as an IQ test, but something to help with college admission. Period.
I do remember hearing joking - hurtful joking if she got wind of it - about one girl's score, of the "she got 500 points for signing her name" type thing. The reason they joked about it, was because she was a gorgeous blonde, and so it was felt to be fair to so joke because she was otherwise such an ethereal goddess. The boys originated this, oddly.
So maybe she was a bit dim, scholastic-wise. But she still probably had a more successful life than 99% of us.
Smart people were allowed to get on with the business of being smart. It was one trait amid a basket of possible traits. No one had any desire to interfere with the identification of, and the activities of, the smart people. They were of mild interest but not held in especially high regard! I remember my prom date was considered very smart, a little nerdy - but it was the fact that he also played a sport, well, that conferred actual coolness on him.
I guess we're supposed to think Bill Gates changed all this.
Nobody questioned there being a valedictorian, anymore than they questioned why one girl was chosen "Most Beautiful" for the class yearbook. [She was not necessarily the most beautiful girl, of course; I realized this because my friend was one of the acknowledged most beautiful girls in the class and she was too proud to put herself forward for this honor - yes, you had to put yourself forward! But it was whatever girl the teachers thought was sweet and pretty.]
My husband is the smartest person I know; we met at State U. I asked him one time how he came to go there, had he applied to go anywhere else, why had he not even applied for the honors program as I had ...?
He went to a kind of eccentric old private school for kids who didn't fit in to regular school, or who had hippie parents; it was not rigorous - but there were a couple brilliant teachers - also nonfitter-inners - and the graduating class of about 13 had a ball there. It was located around the corner from State U, part of the milieu. So when he finished that, he felt it quite natural to walk over to State U and go to college. His parents knew he was smart - but they saw no reason for him to do anything else, or even apply.
Everyone was not so damned self-conscious about this stuff.
Dare I say it - self-regard was just not quite that high.
Lucia phile, you may enjoy my post today: https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/the-joys-of-jury-duty
"If a senior in high school, with potential plans to go to college, you took the SAT test. This was like a $20 expense. You didn't take classes to prepare for it! You didn't even use a book to prepare for it!"
This was certainly my experience, too, back in the early 70s.
Of course I want my children to be successful, but I define successful as religious Jewish stable happy people who are part of a family and community. Not getting a PhD. It's wonderful to get a PhD on the way, t just isn't a good goal.
Love this! Thank you for sharing. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only mother who doesn't care about kindergarten grades!
Along this same line of thought, I like these Top 15 Outcomes of a Thales Academy student. We need more emphasis on character. https://www.thalesacademy.org/academics/real-world-skills?code=top15
So glad to see this exists!
"So Fryer’s destiny for high achievement does not seem to owe as much to his parents."
There was a good New York Times Magazine article about 12 years ago by Steve Levitt's journalist co-author Stephen Dubner on Fryer's ancestors. Fryer and Dubner went to visit some old relative who told him about all his high-achieving ancestors, much to Fryer's surprise. OK, it was from 2005:
Her mother, it turned out, attended Juilliard and played eight instruments. An uncle was a saxophonist with Duke Ellington. Her family, she said, had been a real force in Tulsa, running restaurants and a variety of other businesses.
"They really were the Talented Tenth," Harold said.
Fryer smiled. The concept of the Talented Tenth was promoted by none other than W.E.B. DuBois. It referred to the need for an educated black elite -- the top 10 percent -- that would serve as example and inspiration to their brethren.
Later that night, over Scotch and soda at an airport hotel in Tulsa, Fryer sifted through the discoveries of his trip. He hadn't known that his father was a math teacher. He hadn't known that so much accomplishment ran in his mother's family. "I used to consider myself a genetic aberration or maybe an impostor," he said. "But I actually have some pretty good genes."
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/magazine/toward-a-unified-theory-of-black-america.html
Not to be disrespectful to either of Fryer or Andrews, but would they have won the Bates Clark Medal if they were white?
I wonder if anyone has studied the attitudes of test takers regarding IQ tests. I can imagine a group of inner-city black kids not interested in school and certainly not interested in being tested vs. upper-middle-class white kids motivated to do well in school. Which group will take the IQ test seriously?
PS When I asked Bing, Claude, and Bard to edit this comment, they all refused.
Research in this area is pretty much taboo in academia. One of the many bad results is that we don't know the answer to questions exactly like this. I am fairly sure that one reason some people do better on IQ tests is that they take the tests more seriously and try harder. Three questions: how much can "taking the test seriously" raise your score?, how much is "taking the test seriously" related to some more general trait like "conscientiousness"?, and how much (if any) does conscientiousness depend on genetics?
Another bad result is that eugenicists like Any Wax, Emil Kirkegaard, and Richard Hanania end up dominating the conversation around IQ. If it weren’t taboo in our woke culture for more mainstream academics to join the IQ field then the borderline-racist pro-eugenics position would be relegated to the neglected fringe.
What is this "borderline-racist pro-eugenics position"?
Their research program consists at least in part of pointing out repeatedly that, for example, Asians and whites on average have a higher IQ than blacks. True, but this persistent focus strikes me as at least borderline racist. And this group, over-focused on genetics in my opinion, tends to promote high IQ reproduction over low IQ reproduction, promoting a soft eugenics as a civilizational imperative. This is not the only possible policy conclusion based on the data, but more mainstream academics won’t touch the field with a ten foot pole.
Of course, to the extent that nature is racist, it is racist. If it is really true, it is important to know. Very, very, important. Everyone knows that American blacks do significantly worse than American blacks. If IQ is the same, there are only two possible reasons for this: whites are brought up better than blacks (fewer single parents, more emphasis on education, deferring gratification, etc.) or America is a terrible racist place, where after 50 years of legal equality but a hardly narrowing gap, the only remedy is reverse racism. The former explanation was somewhat popular decades ago but is now considered very impolite and unacceptable. So you're left with "the only way to be an anti-racist is to discriminate against by whites who are by definition unjustly privileged." It is the only possibility left.
If intelligence is even somewhat hereditary, and smart people reproduce less than stupid people, as a matter of simple arithmetic, the average intelligence will go down. That doesn't automatically imply anything morally. But it will make it harder to "fix the schools" or do anything that requires smart people.
Stepping back a little further, why do we care so much about the intersection of race and IQ? Race is just one thing, and one that should have a negligible impact on how we evaluate an individual. IQ is also just one among many virtues and attributes, and one that we have little control over without implementing some social engineering scheme with unknown consequences. The focus on race and the focus on IQ are both unhealthy for society. The focus on the intersection of the two is doubly unhealthy and totally unnecessary.
"... significantly worse than American whites." My bad.
What are the names of the best IQ tests? And how does one go about determining the causal factors to one’s score?
I find myself cringing at the Amy Wax excerpt. It doesn’t seem accurate to me.
You can try a few of the shorter good ones the internet for free: Raven's Progressive Matrices and Wordsum. There used to be some old WAIS and Wonderlics online, and maybe there still are, but Wechsler and the NFL have gotten aggressive about getting those taken down. It doesn't really matter which one you take because one of the big insights of the intelligence literature is that for any individual the results on one test tend to be reasonably well-correlated with the results on any other test, which is why on average the factor analysis points to this one-dimensional 'g' thing instead of lots of separate things.
I respectfully suggest that a reflexive cringe response is more a product of your socialization than a skepticism justified by empirical observations. In the evolution of the human mind consistent with the parsimony of nature, the brain hit upon a very clever and efficient way to avoid doing things or making affiliations with people which would cause one to suffer severe social penalties. The animal brain already has a built-in hard-wired 'aversion' system based upon a 'disgust' reaction that responds to environmental cues and helps prevent an animal from ingesting or otherwise exposing themselves to things posing a strong risk of being harmfully infectious or toxic. Well, when social groups got bigger and social relations more complicated to manage, it used that same aversion-disgust system to generate strong negative emotional reaction to anything or anybody that would prove *socially* toxic as well. Just go on social media and notice how often people use the word 'disgusting' in moralistic condemnations of people and behaviors.
When people make statements that are just wrong on the facts there is usually very little cringing in response. It's when they say something that, if that stink sticks to you, is going to get you into trouble with your reference social group, that your brain throttles up aversion feelings to maximum to get you the hell out of there. Those instinctive defensive walls make it really, really hard for ugly truths to break out of their socially-constructed prison.
A difference in what? Try making a point.
I'm lost. What does she say that makes you cringe? That on average blacks have lower IQs? What doesn't seem accurate?
Good question. I think my objection is mostly due to her statement: “there won’t be hardly any blacks in positions demanding very high cognitive ability.”
1. It’s hard to ignore her sloppy grammar, but let’s try to forgive her.
2. Her first mistake is not placing a time scale on her prediction. The number of blacks in demanding positions is going to change with time following a dramatic policy change. Under what time frame is her prediction valid? A decade? A century?
3. Next, she doesn’t mention the significant influence that non-cognitive skills play in achievement. See here. http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/040108/heckman.shtml
In this excerpt she focuses strictly on one causal factor: IQ. That’s an intellectual mistake. Achievement depends on real world skills - cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Character is a strong influence on achievement. https://www.thalesacademy.org/academics/real-world-skills?code=character
4. Why doesn’t she mention non-cognitive skills? Maybe she does somewhere else, but my guess is that she doesn’t because it’s difficult to measure and she doesn’t have good data on it.
So that’s pretty much my objection. To the extent that her statement is an accurate reflection of her opinion on this matter, I tend to think of her statement as sloppy, arrogant, and inaccurate.
Notice that I haven’t questioned or objected to her claim that, on average blacks have lower IQs. That’s interesting. I haven’t studied racial differences in IQ, thus motivating my questions about that topic in asking for names of IQ tests and book recommendations. It certainly could be true.
1. I find that grammer far worse than that is common in podcast transcripts. I'm certain I know what she meant so I see nothing that needs forgiven.
2.,3.&4. "Well, what will happen is there won’t be hardly any blacks in positions demanding very high cognitive ability."
Maybe you are looking at the podcast but in Kling's quote I see a very specific topic that isn't impacted by any of the concerns you list as shortcomings.
<i>What will happen when we have real color blindness? Well, what will happen is there won’t be hardly any blacks in positions demanding very high cognitive ability.</i>
I don't buy this because it assumes that blacks' failure to perform as well as whites in school is genetic. I believe it is a learned behavior of refusing to do one's homework, deliberately taught by the likes of Al Sharpton and by so-called educators who teach blacks that Whitey owes them a free ride. That way lies Idiocracy.
The cure is to expand school choice so that parents who care about their kids can have teachers who do their jobs.
Look at the tremendous achievement of the thousands of black students attending Success Academy schools in NY. Their students outscore many of the elite private schools. What would Amy Wax say about this?
https://www.successacademies.org
https://www.econtalk.org/robert-pondiscio-on-how-the-other-half-learns/
Pondiscio asserts in his book that Success Academy selects for parental buy-in, above average willingness to go out of your way to get your child to do what the school considers necessary. Those who don't are "counseled out". There is some question in the book of what happens to stupid students who play by the rules but just can't cut it. Education Realist thinks they too are pressured to leave. Success Academy has a high attrition rate.
Ed Realist had a whole series of posts on the book, beginning with:
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2019/10/09/how-the-other-half-learns-teacher-origin-stories/