still waiting …

Samchevre, “g” might be a perfectly valid predictor of the performance of an individual in a job task requiring the manipulation of abstractions. But people try to use it to predict the potential of entire races for intellectual, economic, and cultural advancement, over a period of a generation or more. That sort of predictive use is totally unsupported by any kind of scientific evidence. That’s the point, and Cosma’s evidence bears on it.

weren’t IQ tests designed to help identify areas in which young people have trouble learning?

The Slate article also draws heavily on papers by Philippe Rushton. I don’t know whether all these criticisms of Rushton are on-target — it’s Wikipedia — but the reprimand by UWO is well documented. I’d trust Ahmed Chalabi first.

If I write a long piece showing that Rudolf the rednosed reindeer really does have a shiny nose – and it glows, just like the model of economic rationality! – will you publish it, Henry? Or are you one of those liberal creationists afraid of science.

“The data demand addressing”? Is this English?

Yes, and better English than yours.

But science isn’t politically correct! I’m not afraid to speak truth to power! Er…as an affluent white male, I *am* power.

Come back, Stephen Jay Gould. Your country and your discipline need you.

Actually, “data” is a mass noun in English (otherwise “data processing” and many similar constructions would be ungrammatical). It’s derived from a Latin plural, but so is the singular “agenda”.

If you need a count noun, there’s either the nearly obsolete “datum” or, much more standard, “data point”

So, if you don’t mind the anthroporphism, it would be better to write “the data demands addressing”

Isn’t the point that “the data must be addressed” would be better?

ps – oh, I should say that according to P. Rushton’s “Correlation of penile girth to moral i.q. quotient of tooth fairies”, that tooth fairy was a bit of all right – a real race superior creature! And talk about head size – much superior to tinkerbell.

Brett, that’s too bad. You should be more impressed by ridicule. Ridicule is a great weapon in the world – it worked for Jonathan swift and Thomas Paine, it exposes congealed injustices without casuistry, it picks open logical fallacies, and it exposes bigotries. I’m much more impressed by successful ridicule than I am by, say, intense linking to far out journals run by eugenicists that actually do attempt to summarize penis length – one of Rushton’s obsessions.

My real problem with “The data demand[s] addressing” is that the sentiment is dated. Research the subject if you want. But Andrew Sullivan’s obsession with race and IQ is not only unhealthy, it’s a flashback to the worst of the 90s. It’s doing the timewarp again – just like Creationism – and just as dodgy. Get over it, already.

But of course he can’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if Andrew Sullivan started blogging on the latest advances in Phrenology.

Actually, “data” is a mass noun in English

Not in good print journalism. Online, certainly.

Sullivan is, of course, fully aware that there are plenty of crackpots out there who have scientific proof–not speculation, mind you, but scientific proof–that gay men are, by nature, pedophilic. Sure, the so-called mainstream has proven them to be utterly wrong on all counts, but that just means they’re being SILENCED! by the forces of political correctness who fear science when it doesn’t suit their ideology.

My hunch is that Sullivan does not regularly “engage” these folks “on the merits.” Anybody have any evidence to the contrary?

Who needs it? As Andrew would apparently have us believe, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence…

27: unfortunately not.

@22: Jane Eyre has quite a few references to phrenology, which was the hip and trendy pseudo-science of Charlotte Bronte’s day. Now, of course, we look back and laugh that people actually believed that the bumps on your head indicated your innermost character.

I wonder if our 22nd century descendants are going to shake their own heads in wonder that people believed such things as “IQ” and “race,” let alone “racial variations in IQ?”

14:

Actually, “data” is a mass noun in English

ITYM that “data” are a mass noun in English.

Saletan’s deliberately missing the point, right? I mean, everybody knows it’s not head size that matters. It’s the shape and placement of the lumps.

Henry: “Brett – you have exceeded your one-comment-a-day – I have deleted those in excess of the limit.”

Posted by rilkefan: “Is this a joke?”

Are you going to try to claim that you haven’t noticed that Brett loves this sort of thread, and will kudzu the whole thing up like a zombie Hernstein?

@ #4
“weren’t IQ tests designed to help identify areas in which young people have trouble learning?”

It has been a while but, if memory serves the answer is no. IQ tests were designed, though certainly used, to justify racism. The military didn’t want blacks and whites mixing and so they used various IQ and personality tests as a pretext to keeping different racial groups separated. And again, if I recall correctly, when the tests proved insufficiently useful for this purpose they simply changed the questions until they did.

I believe this is from S.J. Gould’s “The Mismeasure of Man” but I don’t have it with me and I haven’t checked to be sure. I hope someone will correct me if I’m wrong.

The IQ test was invented by Alfred Binet in France, 1904, solely to identify children who might need special education. Binet never intended it as a general-purpose ranking device.

@ Uncle Kvetch, 26: I surmise that Sullivan thinks he’s some kind of unique and special gay snowflake and no-one is going to think he’s a pedophile. Just like Ann “Women shouldn’t be allowed to vote” Coulter is convinced that she, alone of all her sex, will keep her voting rights after the great right-wing takeover. And Clarence Thomas thinks no-one ever refers to him with that “n” word.

Did you know that Irish really are stupider? See Table 1. They score 11 points lower than the British (not English, British). That is the same difference between Hong Kong and Britain which, supposedly, has a genetic origin

the question of the genetic differences between the Irish and the English was a live issue in (English) science up until surprisingly recently. I’m pretty sure I remember Francis Galton having a few opinions on it. Learned opinion was divided between those who believed that the Irish were an intermediate race between Europeans and Negroes, versus those who believed that the Irish were intrinsically created equal to the English but had degenerated over time due to the potatoes they ate. The really frightening thing is that I’m not making this up (although the author of the biography of Carlyle that I read it in might have been, cos I haven’t seen this sourced anywhere else).

But Sullivan is a good conservative.

Shouldn’t we ignore his racism?

All the smart people left Ireland, that’s why it’s low.

The Navigator: “Hell, Yglesias lets Steve Sailer post freely, and his blog carries on just fine.”

Posted by Matt Weiner: “Yeah, but his comment threads are often disastrous, especially when Steve Sailer carpet-bombs them.”

Sailer doesn’t carpet-bomb anywhere near like Brett.

Navigator, if you haven’t noticed the effect of Brett – well, then, you probably believe ‘The Bell Curve’.

Kevin, I realise that you’re joking, but you did notice that Ray wrote “Irish people”, not “Irish catholics”? They’re not synonyms.

This comment by John H. Morrison over at Brad deLong’s site was interesting:

—– I hope that this exercise illustrates how unlikely it is that IQ or IQ variability has actually been shown to be genetic. Imagine creating a “musicality quantity” (MQ) that would measure the inherent musicality of an individual independent of his upbringing.

Consider a set of quintuplets (five identical twins) raised in five different ways. Twin one starts at age two on the violin or piano with the Suzuki Method, and music of all types infests her upbringing.

Twin two is surrounded by CDs of music from her birth. At age six or seven, she begins piano lessons which continue through her childhood and youth.

Twin three takes ordinary music classes in elementary school, and begins band in fifth grade on clarinet.

Twin four grows up listening to various forms of popular music. She sometimes dances socially, and parties quite a bit in her teens.

Twin five grows up in a cave, with virtually no exposure to the outside world.

Now, give the five twins at age fifteen the test that measures their respective MQs. Up to statistical fluctuations, all their MQs should be the same.

Imagine trying to come up with such a test. It would have to be musical and independent of the environment of a person’s upbringing — a contradictory pair of requirements. Most likely, the test would try to estimate the subject’s background and discount for that. Then verifying the MQ test would be a project of monstrous proportions.

The problem is that intelligence is at least as nebulous a thing as musicality. Producing and verifying an IQ test is at least as difficult as producing and verifying the hypothetical MQ test. It would have to account for differences in education and family attitudes towards being smart, to begin with. —–

Brett, although it is pleasant to think we are like the guys on the X files, searching for the truth that is out there, I have my doubts that the ‘truth’, here, functions so simply. In fact, in the discussion of the racial determination of I.Q., two themes almost always emerge. One, the explicit theme, is the “you can’t take the truth” theme. Thus, the only reason the evidence just staring before us that blacks are inferior intellectually is that one is a liberal. A liberal creationist type. And the bringer of this truth is violating a liberal taboo. Which implies not that the truth is out there, but that the truth is hidden, and that the attitude of the bringer of truth is one of unparalleled bravery. The implicit theme is that though we can talk about the ideology and prejudices of the person, the liberal, who denies the truth, we can never question the ideology or the motives of the person who brings the truth to us. Because, apriori, a member in good standing of the media elite like Sullivan or Saletan can’t, just can’t, be motivated by bigotry. Their standing shows, in itself, their objectivity – for the system they have arisen in has gloriously and valiantly done the most it could to combat bigotry in the country, even though, of course, the bigots were and are right and blacks are inferior.

Now, I find those two themes to be not only untrue, as the hypothesis that whales are fishes is untrue, but also ridiculous, as the hypothesis that whales are big birds is ridiculous. And ridicule thus seems to be the best response to it.

Comment #54 gets to the fundamental set of intellectual problems behind the very idea of “IQ”. It’s reifying some intellectual capacity like it’s a physical thing, when in fact intelligence is the product of a complex interaction between individual capacities, individual tastes, collective culture, and opportunities in the surrounding environment.

At best, it’s a tool for short-term prediction of individual performance in certain tasks. The equivalent for crankyobservers “MQ” would be an audition playing a musical instrument.

“Respectable” racists like Sullivan and Saletan will clutch at any straw that seems to offer the possibility of validating their racism, even when it comes from the very unrespectable likes of Rushton. In other news, dog bites man. Yawn.

Now Ross Douthat is on it

Re: #54 by Cranky Observer – IIRC, when orchestras went to blind auditions, women suddenly became fully competitive; thier success rate sky-rocketed. Demonstrating that it was, indeed, just sexism.

And (again, IIRC), musical ability and mathematical ability are supposed to be linked.

This is why I’ve come to the conclusion that there are *no honest, informed Bell Curvists* – because we can throw a vast quantity of contrary data at their thesis (group-level, changes in time, national and international, down to many replicable controlled experiments).

And in the end, they shrug off the data like a duck shrugging off water, and continue paddling their way, peddling their sh*t.

Kevin @62,

Moreover I have no data showing that the propensity to take the mickey out of psychologists who come bearing psychometric kits correlates with religious affiliation. But would Sir Cyril Burt have let that stop him?

Ah, well now I am happy to kick Sir Cyril with any foot of your choosing.

Linking to Shalizi’s post does not actually constitute a rebuttal to Sullivan, since Sullivan bases his statements on data not considered by Shalizi, namely the correlations between head-size and performance on IQ tests.

Some commenters have called into question the reputability of J.P. Rushton, who published some papers on these correlations. I want to point out it isn’t just J.P. Rushton publishing correlations between head-size and intelligence – see here, here, and here for examples of peer-reviewed research by others with the same punchline.

the same punchline.

They don’t mention race, do they? The Abiola Lapite post I linked quoted Cernovsky criticizing Rushton specifically on the brain size-race link:

Rushton implied that Beals et al. presented large-scale evidence for racial inferiority of the Blacks with respect to cranial size. De facto, extensive statistical analyses by Beals et al. showed that cranial size varies primarily with climatic zones (e.g., distance from the equator), not race. According to Beals et al., the correlations of brain size to race are spurious: smaller crania are found in warmer climates, irrespective of race.

And, although Rushton misleadingly reported Tobias’s (1970) and Herskovits’ s (1930) surveys of cranial data as confirming his theory, their data are more consistent with the model presented by Beals et al. As already mentioned, in their reviews, cranial size and number of excess neurons of North American Blacks compared favorably to those of Caucasoids. It is only by pooling their data with data for Negroids from countries in hot climatic zones (notorious for famine and infant malnutrition) that Rushton obtained an illusory support for his postulates.

So even if the papers you link are right, reliance on Rushton is still a bad idea.

Also, I don’t think it follows that if there’s a link between brain size and performance on a test, that the test measures something fundamental about the brain — at least not something fundamental about intelligence.

Also, I don’t think it follows that if there’s a link between brain size and performance on a test, that the test measures something fundamental about the brain—at least not something fundamental about intelligence.

I don’t agree. Of course, it depends on what you mean by “intelligence.” This is hypothetical, but – if brain size were correlated with scores on a test – and moreover, this correlation existed even when you narrowed your study to people raised in the same environment, for example, siblings – then the simplest explanation would be to posit the existence of some quality related to brain function which explains the ability of people to solve the sort of problems found on that test efficiently. And furthermore, we’d have to conclude that this test is a measure of that quantity.

Now if the test contained a collection of logical, verbal, spatial, mathematical puzzles, then that would bring us pretty close to what people normally mean when they say “intelligence.”