Watched a video that's stirred some discussion on YouTube. Thought I would share it here. I think it's easy to recognize physical traits of other people, but might be a little more difficult to accept their might be more there under the surface. Also, I'm curious whether anyone here has read/studied The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.
Interesting if I would post this " bell " would send this to the cesspool and the would penalize for some time. would that be considered racism ?
Sure. Like in phrenology, palmistry, etc. Of course there is. It just isn't what phrenologists and racists and palm-readers think it is. One of the most famously and thoroughly debunked works of faux-science bs in publishing history. It starts by taking IQ test scores as objective measures of intelligence itself, then presumes the sociological races are genetically defined, and then goes right over the obvious cliff deploying mechanism-free correlations for parachutes. Like a kid jumping off the garage roof with a bedsheet parasail. My favorite review was in Scientific American, in the humor column at the back - Steve Mirsky, I think? - who illustrated the book's central "thesis" using the example of graphs comparing "quot score" (the intelligence measure) with hat size according to different designs of hat. Cowboy hats of all sizes had the same quote score - yielding a low horizontal line. Berets showed a quasi-parabolic negative curve, with low quot scores for both small and large berets but higher quot scores for midsize. I've forgotten the rest. Which was, as Mirsky pointed out, all anyone needed to know about that book.
So you have read the book? I only ask because there are claims you need an academic background to truly understand the content. It's nothing i would read, but am curious about it. I appreciate your reply.
What would be racist is that this bell curve defines any Race as absoulute . Meaning ; no ability to grow , intellectually , ever . Which is non-sense .
I agree. We acquire skills as we age and as long as we are curious. However, there might be some innate limitations which make certain skills harder to learn. I also believe people are different in that they have a natural aptitude, depending on the individual.
I think the video provokes conversation. It's not just the issue of race and intelligence, but a host of other issues... Why is (if true) Africa such a shit hole? Why is (if true) violent crime a problem in the black community? Is tribalism in black communities a thing? Do blacks truly have a problem with self-worth?
Chapters and excerpts. The basic structures of the arguments are not that complex, or technically deep - they don't, for example, justify their assumptions rigorously, and they haven't got a mechanism in sight, so the invalidity of the whole mess is right there in the open. The book is not meant for experts, but the less easily you are bamboozled by sciencey looking stuff the better. None of their IQ test correlations are corrected for lead exposure, epigenetic effects of gestational stress, diet and vitamin D issues, stereotype threat, any of that stuff. They offer no mechanism whereby this or that genetic factor influences IQ (via lead exposure?). And so forth. The whole thing is slipshod. And the big problem is not that the arguments are wrong, though they are - the problem is that they are making wrong and invalid arguments in an area where there is no excuse for doing so, where even if they were right about stuff they would have to be careful to explicitly and in detail forestall misuse of their findings. IQ alone is bad enough, enough of a quagmire - combine it with race? Lord. They weren't. That's not just slipshod - that's injury. Malpractice.
And right about here the audience starts to lose patience. What the fuck is wrong with the racial bigots of the US? Where does this butt ugly moronic bs even come from in the goddam 21st century in a Western society boasting basic literacy as a norm? OK, short version: 1} Read Guns, Germs, and Steel. Then read a standard history of the colonization of Africa, beginning with the removal of tens of millions of its population, disproportionately from the healthiest and most productive of the young adults, to be sold as slaves. Tens of millions from a fairly lightly populated continent, with agricultural and pastoral food supplies almost totally dependent on human labor. Followed by violent, extreme colonial oppression and exploitation of pressed labor, at gunpoint, in Africa itself. 2} There is no "the black community". Violent crime in most communities - black and other - has been decreasing lately, starting about 18 years after the abolition of leaded gasoline in the US (at the same time, and this is a correlation with a mechanism right at hand, the IQ gap between blacks and whites in the US has closed by about four points). The crack epidemic launched by privileged and well-connected southern gangs in the black ghettos of the border States has partly burned out. We're getting to the point we can - if well motivated - start to pick up the pieces. 3} Tribalism in all human communities is a thing. 4} Everyone not sociopathic has a problem with self-worth. Blacks face greater challenges than most. And so forth.
Defense of the book or claims of "what is actually in The Bell Curve as opposed to what people think is in it" often come from conservative think-tanks like the American Enterprise Institute: "The Bell Curve Explained". But even if it such assertions of misrepresentation carried weight or were non-biased, the book was published in 1994. Which was well before the psycho-social sciences finally began to acknowledge how sloppy their standards are.[*] And as if that's not bad enough, the authors never submitted it before publication to the quasi-dysfunctional peer review of that era, anyway! - - - - - - [*] That is, even once accepted, non-controversial published papers and literature of former decades are now potentially suspect. It was the aftershocks of Daryl Bem's work (excerpt below) and more deliberate exposés by others which only recently have started engendering reforms in psychological research. (Supposedly!) Daniel Engber: [...] In 2005, while Bem was still working on his ESP experiments, medical doctor and statistician John Ioannidis published a short but often-cited essay arguing that “most published research findings are false.” Among the major sources of this problem, according to Ioannidis, was that researchers gave themselves too much flexibility in designing and analyzing experiments—that is, they might be trying lots of different methods and reporting only the “best” results. Bem’s colleagues in psychology had, for their part, been engaged in methodological debates for decades, with many pointing out that sample sizes were far too small, that treatments of statistics could be quite misleading, and that researchers often conjured their hypotheses after collecting all their data. And every once in a while, someone would bemoan the lack of replications in the research literature. [...] Even by the mid-2000s, the darker implications of these warnings hadn’t really broken through. Certain papers might be sloppy or even spurious, but major swaths of published work? Only Chicken Little types would go that far. “You felt so alone. You knew something was wrong, but nobody was listening,” says Uli Schimmack, a psychologist at the University of Toronto Mississauga and something of a Chicken Little. “I felt very depressed until the Bem paper came out.” [...] These dodgy methods were clearly rife in academic science. A 2011 survey of more than 2,000 university psychologists had found that more than half of those researchers admitted using them. But how badly could they really screw things up? By running 15,000 simulations, Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn showed that a researcher could almost double her false-positive rate (often treated as if it were 5 percent) with just a single, seemingly innocuous manipulation. And if a researcher combined several questionable (but common) research practices—fiddling with the sample size and choosing among dependent variables after the fact, for instance—the false-positive rate might soar to more than 60 percent. “It wasn’t until we ran those simulations that we understood how much these things mattered,” Nelson said. “You could have an entire field that is trying to be noble, actively generating false findings.” To underline their point, Nelson and the others ran their own dummy experiment to show how easy it could be to gin up a totally impossible result. [...] Wagenmakers would later write that psi researchers such as Bem deserve “substantial credit” for the current state of introspection in psychology, as well as for the crisis of confidence that is now spreading into other areas of study. “It is their work that has helped convince other researchers that the academic system is broken,” he said, “for if our standard scientific methods allow one to prove the impossible, than these methods are surely up for revision.” --Daryl Bem Proved ESP Is Real - Which means science is broken
well. thanks for taking the time to respond. I read that the success of Europe had much to do with environmental factors that proved advantageous to the inhabitants of the area. Agriculture thrived in the region, giving them more time to develop cultural and technological advances. I remember the gang wars. Though I might be wrong, it does seem to be a non-issue these days. I believe that correct, but has it been more pronounced within the black community. Do you want to define those challenges? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve
I checked it out on Wiki. The brief overview was interesting, and I'm thinking I might buy a copy on Amazon--read it myself. There were some ideas that I thought curious. I think measuring success is subjective. I mean, you can be the wealthiest person and still be the most miserable. Also, most successful people I know worked their asses off to achieve their goal. Working hard goes a long way. As for race and IQ? I don't know. Is it environmental? I don't know. I lean towards ambition and personal effort. Life in itself is a career, I think.
The creator of linked video--RageAfterStorm--is a real gem. On her twitter account she's promoting a fab Oi! band (seriously!): https://twitter.com/RageAfterStorm/status/882267215369834498
The recommendation stands: start with Guns, Germs, and Steel - it deals with that question directly, in the material aspects. http://www.jareddiamond.org/Jared_Diamond/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel.html Then a decent, even-handed history of the continent - or failing that, any region of the continent, even any major city of any region of the continent. No, it hasn't. Forget that entire line of approach. Waste my time? No. Do you doubt the claim?
