From: dks@eagle.mit.edu
Date: Sat Jul 29 1995 16:49:09
Subject: Re: Solution to Poverty(?)
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Curveball
ataylor@superior.carleton.ca (alex taylor) writes:
> Mark LaRochelle wrote:
> >ataylor@superior.carleton.ca (alex taylor) wrote:
> >
> >> [...] The most significant indicator of success in
> >> the U.S. is the social economic class of the parents.
> >
> > Dead False. Parental SES was the strongest correlate to final
> > SES in the US in the past, and still is in most other
> > countries, but has recently been surpassed in the US by what is
> > now a much stronger correlate: cognative ability, as measured
> > by IQ tests and the like.
> > The statistics are in Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein,
> > *The Bell Curve*
>
>
> Citing a book that was panned by responsible social scientists
> and researchers of other stripes for its poor methodology and
> pseudo-scientific conclusions hardly constitutes a refutation.
> I've read the book in question. It's vile trash.
It is trash.
And even if it were not vile, it would still be trash.
The following article may serve as a short critique of
_The_Bell_Curve_. It is taken from the May/June 1995
issue of _Technology_Review_. The writer also remarks
upon the treatment the book received in the mass media.
Cheers,
Dhanesh
|
|
| "Curveball,"
| by Ellen Ruppel Shell
|
|
| BOOK REVIEW:
|
| _The_Bell_Curve_
| Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein
| The Free Press, $30.00
|
|
| The overnight sensation The Bell Curve, cowritten by social
| scientist Charles Murray and the late Harvard psychologist
| Richard Herrnstein, has provoked the venting of enough
| spleen to send sales of blood-pressure medication through
| the roof. It has been the talk of dinner parties, the
| subject of seminars, and the toast of publishing titans,
| most of whom count their successes not in scholarly awards
| but in dollars, like everyone else. The success of The Bell
| Curve was such that to live "comfortably" (as my mother
| would say), Murray need never put pen to paper again, and
| for that, I suppose, we should be grateful.
|
| Unfortunately, we journalists still have to scratch for our
| suppers, so my guess is that commentary on the book will,
| like the bunny in that annoying battery commercial, keep
| going and going and going. The question is, why? Why was
| The Bell Curve given full, front-page exposure in the New
| York Times Book Review? Why did it command cover-story
| status in news magazines and generous portions of air time
| on talk shows? Why was The Bell Curve a story?
|
| The answer is certainly not to be found in that tiresome
| journalistic bromide, that Murray's ideas are "news." The
| Bell Curve is not news but a rehashing of an old, worn-out
| discussion of the link between genetics and intelligence.
| It argues that intellectuals and policymakers, their hearts
| bleeding into their brains, have underestimated the role of
| intelligence in determining life success. It contends that
| the poor are poor not because they are unlucky, deprived,
| or discriminated against but, darn it, because they are
| dumb. It suggests that rather than trying to educate these
| dullards to the standards required by what Newt Gingrich
| calls our "third-wave information age," society should
| provide them with menial tasks suited to their limited
| talents. And according to Bell Curve calculations, African
| Americans, on average, are dumber than other Americans and
| therefore as a group must regretfully be relegated to the
| bottom of the heap, where, well fed and much appreciated
| for performing the tasks they were born to, they will be
| happier and far less trouble.
|
| These views the authors duly anoint with statistics. By
| converting ideology into charts and graphs, they claim to
| have purged it of subjectivity, to have scrubbed off the
| moldy agenda they say their critics conceal like derringers
| in their boots. But in fact they commit the cardinal sin of
| statistical analysis -- they set out to prove, not
| disprove, their hypothesis. And in so doing they take so
| many gleeful leaps of logic that cascading through their
| arguments is like slipping down Alice's rabbit hole into a
| world that is at once plausible and surreal.
|
| One small example is the manner in which they "prove" that
| low intelligence -- not low motivation, as some argue -- is
| the reason blacks do less well than whites on standardized
| tests. The authors begin by asserting that "smarter people
| process faster than less smart people." One could easily
| quibble with that, but for the sake of argument, I won't.
| They then describe a test in which subjects are asked to
| put their finger on a button in the middle of a circle of
| dimmed lights, and to dart their finger as quickly as
| possible to a button near any light in the circle that is
| suddenly turned on. Blacks, on average, are at first slower
| to react to the light, but move more quickly to extinguish
| it once they do react.
|
| The slight hesitation followed by the rapid hand movement,
| the authors say, indicates both the black subjects' clear
| motivation to perform the task (why do they move quickly if
| they don't care?) and their lower intelligence (if they
| were smart, they would react more quickly in the first
| place). But to accept this interpretation, one must assume
| that blacks were trying their hardest -- we must discount,
| for example, that they might have reacted or moved their
| hands even faster if they really cared about the silly
| test. The authors also ignore the very real possibility
| that blacks and whites have a different reaction style --
| that blacks may hesitate a split second to make sure of
| their choice, knowing they can move rapidly to douse the
| light once they are convinced it is lit. Both
| interpretations have been suggested by other commentators
| on this particular test. However, not by Herrnstein and
| Murray. This trick of putting a complex question before the
| reader and then presenting a possible solution as though it
| were the definitive one is typical of The Bell Curve.
| Naturally, most of the "solutions" put forward are
| supportive of the book's underlying thesis.
|
|
| The Pesky Journalistic Itch
|
| By reducing ideology, the purview of the right-brained, to
| statistics, the domain of the left-brained, Murray
| succeeded in confusing many journalists and talk-show hosts
| long enough to get some serious notice before the ax fell.
| But this only partially explains The Bell Curve's success.
| Perhaps more fundamental was the fact that the book claims
| to take a steely-eyed look at the "facts" about genetics
| and intelligence, a look that reveals some politically
| unpopular but terribly important truths. This is
| particularly appealing to journalists, who today are
| pressured to back down from what is perceived as their
| soft-hearted but muddle-minded liberal agenda. What surely
| would have been laughed off as racist blather a decade ago
| took on a shroud of authenticity in this brave new world of
| "hard truths"; whether we liked it or not, journalists were
| compelled to take The Bell Curve seriously.
|
| This is not to say that we necessarily read its 552 pages
| of text, or pored over its 90-page appendices or 100 pages
| of "notes" -- who had time for that? No, we put the book on
| our desks and stared at it long enough to find a grain of
| truth on which to hang our "objective" response. In some
| cases, such as in the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and
| the Boston Globe, that response consisted of picking up on
| Murray's lament that his theory was wrongfully dismissed by
| serious scholars such as psychologists Howard Gardner of
| Harvard, Robert Sternberg of Yale, and Richard Nisbett of
| the University of Michigan not because it is unsupported
| but because it is politically incorrect. Some journalists
| went so far as to quote Murray, saying that clear-headed
| scientists agreed with his theories in private but would
| not speak out for fear of disturbing the equal-opportunity
| police.
|
| "The science behind The Bell Curve is overwhelmingly
| mainstream," wrote Geoffrey Cowley in Newsweek. "In short,
| cognitive inequality is not a political preference. It's a
| simple fact of life." Cowley provided evidence of this in
| the form of a 1984 survey in which 53 percent of social
| scientists agreed that "the black-white gap involves
| genetic as well as environmental factors." But that finding
| indicates only that a modest majority of social scientists
| think genetics as well as environmental factors influence
| intelligence. The Bell Curve, by contrast, contends that
| genetics swamps environmental effects to such a degree that
| different ethnic groups must approach life with a whole
| different set of expectations.
|
| If political correctness has anything to do with serious
| critiques of Murray's ideas, it is not a lot. Social
| scientists are not so sure that intelligence can be
| measured by any single test, or that it should be -- and
| many are sure that it cannot and should not be measured
| this way. In any case, even psychometricians, psychologists
| who make their living quantifying intelligence and
| designing intelligence tests, would not agree that
| intelligence based on a single measure (what The Bell Curve
| calls "g") can prove one group's intellectual superiority
| over another. That is Murray's idea.
|
| All this was made painfully clear by Gardner, Nisbett, and
| others in letters to the editor and opinion pieces in
| magazines and newspapers. And that analysis was dutifully
| picked up by journalists in a parallel wave of coverage.
| These reports, charging Murray as an opportunistic
| ideologue, seemed, on their face, more thoughtful. But in
| fact, much of the reporting was not thoughtful at all. It
| was simply reactive -- a new way of milking The Bell Curve
| for stories.
|
| The analysts who took a good, hard look at The Bell Curve's
| arguments exposed them not as firebombs but as dried-up old
| chestnuts. These included paleontologist Stephen J. Gould
| in his essays in Discover and the New Yorker, historian
| Adolph Reed, Jr. in his review in the Nation, and
| sociologist Thomas Sowell in an article in the American
| Spectator, a journal noted for, if anything, political
| incorrectness. Sowell dismissed The Bell Curve's rather
| curvy logic by pointing out that "groups outside the
| cultural mainstream of contemporary Western society tend to
| do their worst on abstract questions, whatever their race
| might be." (Mastering abstractions is, according to The
| Bell Curve, the sine qua non of intelligence.) Gould, Reed,
| and Sowell addressed The Bell Curve on its merits, not only
| on what they perceived as its authors' political agenda,
| and all found it sorely lacking.
|
| Had journalists been equally judicious -- less reactive,
| less eager to make as well as report the news -- perhaps
| the tempest would have remained in its teapot. Instead, at
| this writing, the book sits cuddled in its niche on the New
| York Times bestseller list, wedged between an expose on the
| secret life of cats and Barbara Bush's memoir. Murray, like
| Tiny Tim, is a creature of the media, and as such is entitled
| to his 15 minutes of fame. Let's just hope we have the good
| sense not to give him any more than that, because Bell Curve:
| The Movie might be too much for any of us to bear.
|
|
| ELLEN RUPPEL SHELL,
| codirector of the Graduate Program in Science Journalism at
| Boston University, is a widely published science writer.
|
| (c) 1995, _Technology_Review_, all rights reserved.
|
|
This article was reproduced with the publisher's permission.
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