Reddit reviews The Bell Curve Debate

https://www.amazon.com/Measured-Lies-Bell-Curve-Examined/dp/0312172281

https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Genes-Success-Scientists-Statistics/dp/0387949860

https://www.amazon.com/Inequality-Design-Cracking-Bell-Curve/dp/0691028982

https://www.amazon.com/Bell-Curve-Debate-Russell-Jacoby/dp/0812925874

https://www.amazon.com/Bell-Curve-Wars-Intelligence-Republic/dp/0465006930

>Spoils system dates from 1830, and if you saying "as currently practiced" AND using spoils system as an argument against it is acknowledgement that both today's version of democracy and yesterday's version of democracy is flawed then I can easily infer that democracy is intrinsically flawed.

No argument from me on that front. All forms of governance are intrinsically flawed. To think that we can devise an ideal system that applies across all time and space is a fool's errand.

>It is not.. If anything, this demonstrates that social inequalities cannot be amended through social policies. Meritocracy is by definition a system which promotes stark inequality....(snip)

Meritocracy is generally thought to be linked to social mobility. I can't say I've read Clark's book, though it does look interesting. Perhaps I will put it on my to read list, with the caveat that said list is already fairly long. I'm not so sure about using surnames as a way to trace mobility, though. In any case, this skirts the point that hereditary aristocracies prohibit any mobility to the top echelons of power. But if meritocracy by definition promotes "stark inequality," there is no way to debate this point. You have just defined it to be true -- it is circular.

>Aristocracy may be incompatible with meritocracy in the practical sense, but it is compatible in the theoretical sense.

Great, so aristocracy is not meritocratic in the real world. State socialism sounded great on paper too, until Stalin and co. showed up on the scene.

>Furthermore, hereditary aristocracies are not refuted, but instead confirmed, by the increasing insight in what constitutes intelligence and how it is heritable by people such as Clark and Wade (and the infamous Bell Curve).

First, see my comment above on the misuse of heritability figures. I will not comment further on Clark since I am not familiar with the book. As far as Wade goes, I can't say I've read that either. However, H. Allen Orr, a biologist I find to be trustworthy in his reviews, has written a fairly negative review of the book. I think the most important point in there is that Wade himself notes that his work in the second half of the book is built on speculation and is not backed by hard evidence. As for Herrnstein and Murray, I have read that one (granted, a long time ago), but it has been dissected in numerous books and an APA task force, so I won't flagellate that dead horse into a bloody pulp.

But, none of this is even relevant if you admit that aristocracy and meritocracy are incompatible in "the practical sense." This seems obvious from how well our allegedly hyper-intelligent inbred aristocratic overlords governed in the Medieval and early modern periods. So you can have your theoretical debates about the magic of monarchy, I won't begrudge you that. But this debate seems increasingly pointless.

> Can you give me a source of someone who disproved him and summarize their findings?

Yeah. Just so we're clear, we're talking about Herrnstein & Murray's 1994 book, The Bell Curve. As I'm sure you already know, this book, and its co-author Charles Murray, are among Stefan Molyneux's favorite sources of information about inherited racial differences in IQ.

If you've only heard of The Bell Curve from right-wing pundits, then you may not know that the book generated a brief but intense debate when it was first published. The debate was intense because the authors' claims were controversial. And the debate was brief because everyone quickly realized that the book was trash. The authors probably already knew this, because they declined to publish any of their findings in peer-reviewed journals. In fact, they declined to permit any kind of review prior to the book's publication. In the world of science, this is extraordinarily shady behavior.

As far as I know, The Bell Curve hasn't been in press for at least ten years. Which is a good indication that no one (on the left or the right) cared at all about what Herrnstein and Murray had to say. And that was the state of affairs until a few years ago, when the book's sections on racial differences in IQ seemed to capture the imagination of Stefan Molyneux.

Anyways, for those engaged in the practice of statistics and/or social science, The Bell Curve is infamous as a case study in bad science. The key issues are as follows:

• General intelligence. Herrstein and Murray's conclusions are based on Spearman's notion of "general intelligence" or g, which dates back to 1904. The science has always been dodgy, and the psychometric validity of g was questioned long before The Bell Curve. Psychologists were already moving toward multi-dimensional models of intelligence by the time the book was written. The best critique of g is probably still Stephen Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man. The revised edition from 1996 has a couple chapters that directly disprove claims about g made by Herrstein and Murray.
  
  
• Statistical and psychometric methods. Complex data analysis always involves subjective decisions. It's the responsibility of the analyst to provide solid rationale for these decisions. Or in the absence of such rationale, to provide what's known as a "sensitivity analysis" to assess the impact of these decisions. Herrstein and Murray did neither of these. Instead, they analyzed data with arbitrary weighting schemes and with arbitrarily chosen subscores from an aptitude test called the AFQT. And they provided inadequate justification for their choice of weights and subscores. Perhaps unsurprisingly, their findings disappeared when different weights and subscores were used in the same analysis. (That work is documented in this book and in this paper.) These days, we'd call this "p-hacking." And it is a serious breach of scientific ethics.
  
  
• Intellectual laziness. No one disagrees that there are racial differences in IQ. That's obvious from the data. The key issue is whether these differences are due to genetic inheritance, or whether they are due to factors like income, education, and environment. In a rare moment of intellectual honesty, Herrnstein and Murray say: It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not justify an estimate. Which is a nice way of saying "please believe us even though we don't know what we're talking about." That's an acceptable thing to say in some contexts, but not when you're arguing in favor of IQ-based public policy. This quote is taken directly from the book, so I'm not going to provide a link.
  
  During the mid-to-late nineties, a lot of smart people wasted a lot of time disproving nonsense in the The Bell Curve. If you're curious about this stuff, I suppose you could start with this book from 1995.
  If you'd like to see a more recent genomics-based disproof of some of Herrstein and Murray's claims, here is a paper from three years ago. The upshot is that there is way more science opposed to the book than in favor of it. And this would be obvious to any "intellectual" who took a moment to learn about his or her sources. Of course I'm referring specifically to Stefan Molyneux, who has no reservations about accepting The Bell Curve at face value, despite the fact that it is full of outdated science, bad statistics, and sheer fantasy.
  
  Now do you understand why I question anyone who takes The Bell Curve seriously?

https://www.amazon.ca/Mismeasure-Man-Stephen-Jay-Gould/dp/0393314251

https://www.amazon.ca/Bell-Curve-Debate-Russell-Jacoby/dp/0812925874

This is an old idea that was discredited before a lot of redditors were born.