"For me that’s a topic to teach, not to simply honor or denounce. I’m revealing myself here as a person whose chords and arpeggios and scales are always the history of political thought: John Stuart Mill’s 'On Liberty' is the place to start. He says that the line between your freedom and its end is where it impacts on another’s freedom. That’s the question with hate speech: When does it do that? I’ll also mention Charles Murray. That’s tricky, because his science has been discredited by his peers, and his conclusions are understood by many as a form of hate speech, because he makes an argument about the racial inferiority of Black people in their capacity to learn and to succeed in this society. It feels terrible to give him a podium and a bunch of students who would sit and imbibe that as the truth. I think if Murray is invited to campus, you can picket him, you can leaflet him, but I don’t think it should be canceled. The important thing is for students to be educated and educate others about the bad science, the discrediting of his position, and then ask, Why does he survive in the academy, and why does that bad science keep getting resuscitated? Those are important questions for students to ask and then learn how to answer. That’s what’s going to equip them in this political world."
Said Wendy Brown, the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, quoted in "Why Critics of Angry Woke College Kids Are Missing the Point" (NYT).
Posts
104 comments:
"Bad science"? There is no "bad" science, just science that is falsifiable. As far as I know, Murray's science has not been convincingly falsified, therefore his remaining in the academic world makes sense. Even if they are too scared to say it out loud, scientists who remain loyal to the scientific method and the philosophy of science are unwilling to boot him out since he has not been discredited.
In the same way, there is no "hate speech". Only speech. Speech may be motivated by hate, but that doesn't change the quality of the speech.
>>That’s tricky, because his science has been discredited by his peers
Which is untrue.
The Important Thing to Remember, is:
Keeping ME from Hearing hate speech doesn't stop hate speech from existing
ONLY the eradication of both the speech, and the speaker; can Stop hate speech
ANYONE that says (or thinks) ANYTHING that is WRONG.. MUST BE ELIMINATED!!!!
This is What FREE SPEECH means! the eradication of ALL non approved thought
LONG LIVE BIG BROTHER!!!
I.Q. is the most studied and verified metric in all of the Social Sciences.
You misrepresent Murray's work and positions.
Many friends of blacks think that it's a problem to be solved that so many are on the low end, far from a problem to be avoided. Murray among them.
Charles Murray's science has not been discredited, in the main. Some pieces have been pulled apart. It has been denounced repeatedly, but that is not the same thing. For anyone to say this shows that they themselves do not know the science. There is no particular shame in that - none of us knows about all things. But it does mean she should not be making public statements about the science.
Notice that not only protestors, but researchers can spread disinformation about Murray and not get cancelled. Nor even close.
I’ll also mention Charles Murray. That’s tricky, because his science has been discredited by his peers, and his conclusions are understood by many as a form of hate speech, because he makes an argument about the racial inferiority of Black people in their capacity to learn and to succeed in this society
In Princeton's faculty lounge, liberal pronouncements like this are considered to be really smart.
One Althouse commentor did me a huge favor by explaining how to cut and paste urls on to archive.ph so as to be able to read these articles. Is there a way to read the comments also?
Judith Butler's wife. Her writing is far more radical than this interview.
Anyone who disagrees with the NYT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC and what most Ivy League students and alums say and think is hate speech.
If you disagree with the above you are a hater and racist. Ask Tucker Carlson. The NYT just ran a very lengthy three-part series on him which can be summarized as follows: Carlson is a racist.
This woman holds an endowed chair at the Institute of Advanced Studies? The place that was home to Einstein and Dyson and other minds of like quality?
How have the mighty fallen. ...I was slightly amused by the slick superficial decoration ("arpeggios and scales" etc) of her statement, but as others note, she has nothing new to say. In fact I'd say she even got Mill wrong, or misapplied his argument.
Free speech is how the system finds and corrects error. If there is no feedback loop (calling BS or just forcing you to show your work) there is no signal to keep you from drifting off course. Those who call speech "hateful" are in fact the hateful ones; their negation of debate is a positive danger to us all.
Charles Murray is NOT hate speech in any form. His data is mainstream, global stuff on race, gender, and intelligence. This work dates back 100 years, and has been validated by all who review it. IQ testing was sharply criticized for cultural biases 50 years ago, so the tests were revised. New tests = similar results.
Murray's topic is rather painful, but that's not hate in any fashion. His conclusions are strategy are his own, but not mine and not hateful either.
Murray's writing has been blindly reviewed, and came out as middle of the road (neutral). Yes, racists grab onto his work to promote racism. But that's not hate.
Here's a very hostile, but still more...even-handed...review of his work.
https://www.newstatesman.com/uncategorized/2020/06/class-race-genetics-science-human-diversity-charles-murray-review
I would like very much to hear a debate between Wendy Brown and Charles Murray. But guess which of them would never agree to it.
A person with “chords, arpeggios and scales”? How risibly grandiose. She revealed herself alright.
>"The most recent example is Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Florida math-book banning...The politicization of academic environments is unhelpful in being able to understand how we teach and orient ourselves to contesting views."<
But of course the example Brown chooses is Ron DeSantis. She is surrounded on her lefty campus by hundreds of Lefties politicizing her very academic environment on a daily basis but she has no ability to perceive their doing so. So it's Ron freakin' DeSantis!
'"Many students today go quickly to the position that there is such a thing as hate speech, that they know it when they see it that and it ought to be outlawed."'
When they hear it? Read it? Saying 'see it' seems odd.
I don't believe anything is hate speech. Bring it on and deal with it.
The same for 'hate crimes.'
An act may be a crime, but the intent does not matter to me at all.
Murray was so soundly discredited that my local library has a book refuting The Bell Curve, but not the book itself.
I had to send to bumfuck Montana to get it.
Joe Smith at 10:37,
I don't believe anything is hate speech. Bring it on and deal with it.
The same for 'hate crimes.'
An act may be a crime, but the intent does not matter to me at all.
-----
Spot on. There is nothing that's sacred in the public sphere. Sacred perhaps to an individual, but that doesn't mean I have to treat as that individual does.
Do you see why we have a problem with Muslims? And that issue is gonna get worse.
Blogger Joe Smith said...
'"Many students today go quickly to the position that there is such a thing as hate speech, that they know it when they see it that and it ought to be outlawed."'
When they hear it? Read it? Saying 'see it' seems odd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
The best and only effective remedy for "bad" speech (however defined by each person) is more speech, speech in response, speech that challenges speech...open debate. Dialogue must be open to all and no topic or idea should be preemptively barred or considered beyond the pale for discussion.
The great left writer (and jazz critic) Nat Hentoff preached this truth for years, up to his death.
It feels terrible to give him a podium and a bunch of students who would sit and imbibe that as the truth.
Notice the pedagogical model she assumes prevails (absent reason, proof and persuasion), and hence fears lest it be extended to viewpoints she disagrees with.
Lots of hate speech is just mansplaining.
Here's the quote:
"I’ll also mention Charles Murray. That’s tricky, because his science has been discredited by his peers, and his conclusions are understood by many as a form of hate speech, because he makes an argument about the racial inferiority of Black people in their capacity to learn and to succeed in this society."
Let's fix it to approximate the truth.
I’ll also mention Charles Murray. That’s tricky, because his critics claim to have discredited his science. His conclusions are misunderstood by many, as a form of hate speech, because they mistakenly believe that Murray argues for the racial inferiority of Black people in terms of their capacity to learn and to succeed in this society.
Enigma said...
Charles Murray is NOT hate speech in any form. His data is mainstream
That Makes it WORSE!!! The Only Thing Worse; Than hate speech.. Is hate data!!!!
Hate Data MUST BE Cancelled!!!!
Gotta appreciate Princeton's sense of humor in choosing someone named Brown to be the UPS Professor.
That’s what’s going to equip them in this political world.
Uh no.
That would have equipped them in the last one. It might equip them in the next.
But they quickly and correctly sense it has no value in the one they inhabit.
I was at Dartmouth when "The Bell Curve" came out. Several people asked if they could read it after I finished it. They did not want to be seen buying it at the Dartmouth Bookstore. Of course it is true. Years of research went into it. Why do you think Affirmative Action is so popular with the left ?
"Many students today go quickly to the position that there is such a thing as hate speech, that they know it when they see it that and it ought to be outlawed."
They know if they don't accept these statements they can't get to the actual class material.
@Carol wrote: "Murray was so soundly discredited that my local library has a book refuting The Bell Curve, but not the book itself."
Charles Murray was the first 'deplatforming' or 'cancellation' of the contemporary era (1994).
His work was said to be discredited on TV, cable TV, and in print before any of those discrediting it read the book. "Flawed" they said, per only reading the topic and hearing direction from the ideological leaders. They then latched onto random details, created straw men to fight against, and avoided the evidence.
The core problem is that the authors Herrnstein and Murray were mainstream Harvard/MIT academics. Herrnstein died before the book was published, so the critics blamed Murray for "butchering the evidence." Ironically, their thesis was a return to left wing thinking only a generation or two prior (1800s to 1950s).
Left wing movements always die because the left eats itself and can't decide on a path forward.
Starting with Mill's utilitarian views is a bad place to start.
the line between your freedom and its end is where it impacts on another’s freedom. That’s the question with hate speech: When does it do that?
To ask that question is to say that it is relevant to freedom of speech, that one person's "hate" has anything to do with another's freedom. It doesn't.
She comes to a reasonable conclusion with a fairly pro-free speech position, but there is a lot of confusion being sowed here.
"I know it when I see it".
I know how porno works, but does hate speech put a pup tent in your pants??
the line between your freedom and its end is where it impacts on another’s freedom
That's bad phrasing that leads to bad thinking--such as we get here from Prof. Brown. Your freedom doesn't end when it impacts another--that attitude makes the other person's freedom superior to yours. Which is philosophically incoherent. No, it doesn't end when it impacts another, it becomes a balancing act where the two freedoms are weighed against each other. And in the case of speech, there are vanishingly few situations where its effect on another's freedom is so profound that it justifies cutting off that right and insisting they do not speak. Freedom of conscience is the greatest freedom. Without it, all other freedoms are threatened.
In that interview Rh linked to the other day with Jordan Peterson (I recommend you all watch it) it was mentioned that the virtual disappearance of God from our collective psyche is creating a power vacuum (doing for us what we can’t do for ourselves) with the state all happy to fill in. That’s the explanation behind the submissive/supine majority behind health authorities overwrought Covid measures, especially among the young, whom, as established early on, where in practically no danger.
Same with freedom of speech.
How someone writes about Murray is a litmus test for intellectual honesty. (A person can disagree with Murray and still be intellectually honest.) This writer failed.
By any sensible definition, a false accusation of racism is "hate speech".
The apparent weighted distribution of athletic ability does not preclude other races from excelling in sport.
A little late to the pile on. Nevertheless.
"his science has been discredited by his peers"
Is that a fact? Seems like an awfully broad, sweeping, and unsupported statement.
"racial inferiority of Black people in their capacity to learn and to succeed in this society."
An uncharitable summary, at best. Lefties love to use that word to sling discredit - "inferiority".
"...the bad science, the discrediting of his position, and then ask, Why does he survive in the academy, and why does that bad science keep getting resuscitated?"
Why? I will be equally uncharitable and assume you don't really want an honest answer to that question.
Until they acquired a firm grip on all the levers of public speech in the US, the left we’re free speech absolutists. Afterwards they are speech control fascists.
Obama set the agenda - fundamental transformation of America. If you told your spouse that you wanted to fundamentally transform him/her, do you think he/she would feel the love. That’s how I view Obama and his fellow travelers - they hate America as it was constituted.
"They did not want to be seen buying it at the Dartmouth Bookstore."
I'm surprised to hear that it was even available at that bookstore.
Murray's 2021 Facing Reality is short and explains the problem of race in this country. Namely, different races have different cognitive abilities and different propensities for criminal behavior. Well documented with stats going back close to 100 years.
The word "discredited" is, unfortunately, loaded and no longer means its dictionary definition, assuming the definition was not changed by an intern overnight which is always a possibility. "Discredited" gets thrown around in the following situations:
1. The argument has been proven false. There is a fatal failure in the argument that makes it clear the argument is no good.
2. The argument has been put through the paces and it is probably incorrect, but there is a possibility that new evidence could change minds. Science is a process.
3. The majority of experts oppose the argument, though there is a sizeable minority that support the argument. Minority opinions have become majority opinions. They have also disappeared.
4. The majority of experts have denounced the argument without actually addressing the argument, actually understanding the argument, and/or actually reading the argument.
5. The story is inconvenient to the government, media, etc. They find one person who disagrees and then immediately start using "discredited" to describe the argument.
6. The person writing the article disagrees with the argument.
7. Someone on Twitter disagrees with the argument.
I tire of experts who know little.
It's concerning that someone whose primary argument is founded upon the premise that Murray's work has been definitively and comprehensively shown to be false, cannot trouble herself to explain where and how Murray has erred, other than in his penchant for systematically giving offense to the woke.
I am impressed with just how high it's possible to get in the academic statusphere by simply saying the things that you know you are supposed to say. Wendy Brown, Professor at the IAS at Princeton. I wonder if she has ever had a thought that ran counter to the academic ideological consensus?
"the line between your freedom and its end is where it impacts on another’s freedom"
Listening to someone impacts your freedom? These people just don't want to hear anything they disagree with.
I am Thankful that I changed my maiden name so that people wouldn't mistake THAT Wendy Brown with me. What an embarrassment THAT would have been!!!
If you are an academic and bring up Charles Murray you have to say something like "his work has been discredited by his peers". Otherwise the mention itself is hate speech.
How is her casual, incorrect commentary on Murray not, itself, hate speech?
I was told -- I should probably transmit this in encrypted form -- that turning off Javascript will allow you to read all sorts of things you might otherwise have to pay for.
Unfortunately, it won't make everything worth reading, so that's still a problem.
I notice that Wendy is still "she" and Judy is "they." Trouble in paradise?
"This woman holds an endowed chair at the Institute of Advanced Studies? The place that was home to Einstein and Dyson and other minds of like quality?"
IAP went off the rails a long time ago. It's not the place it was.
For people like Wendy Brown and most of lefty-academia, hate speech, no matter how they "define" it, includes "facts which make me uncomfortable."
The facts that Charles Murray deals with, like in his more recent work, "Facing Reality", are actually quite hard to dispute or cast in doubt. The population group we call "blacks" do have lower IQ scores, on average, than the population groups we call "white" and "Asian". No one, including Wendy Brown, disputes these facts and shows them to be untrue.
Likewise, for crime, they have higher (much higher) rates for commission of serious crimes (crimes the police investigate the most seriously) than the other population groups. Read the book, and you'll see that he has preempted the obvious objections ("police are biased, people are biased," etc.) by focusing on measures of crime that really can't be affected by bias.
So, just like when Amy Wax at UPenn Law observed that her black students simply didn't perform well at Penn at all, these observations of fact are not met by challenges to the facts themselves, but are simply dismissed as "hate speech."
Hate speech = facts I don't like.
It’s likely that Princeton students need to be shielded from non-approved viewpoints.
They are a sheltered bunch. As are the faculty and administration. The Best and the Brightest.
Murray’s science isn’t bad. Nothing he has published has been discredited on its facts. Only that it hurts people’s feels. His work does not say all black people are below normal, and what a lot of white gender queer minority studies people don’t want to acknowledge is that many of them are below the bell curve. This is the problem with assuming someone is smart because they have a college degree. A degree in what? Engineering? Smart. Political science? 50/50 chance of being below the curve.
This statement is demonstrably untrue "[Murray] makes an argument about the racial inferiority of Black people in their capacity to learn..."
If I presented statistics showing that women, on average, are shorter than men, am I arguing that women are inferior to men?
Are my statistics refuted by the existence of Elle Macpherson, who at 6' 0" is taller than
Tom Cruise at 5' 7"?
And what if I showed the entire distribution of height by sex, showing that
a) women are on average shorter than men (5' 4.3" vs 5' 9.2")
b) the distribution of women's heights has a smaller standard deviation than men (2.6" vs 2.7")
c) that for heights much above the average, let's say 6" and up, that men vastly outnumber women (98 to 1)
am I arguing that women are inferior to men?
"That’s tricky, because his science has been discredited by his peers, and his conclusions are understood by many as a form of hate speech, because he makes an argument about the racial inferiority of Black people in their capacity to learn and to succeed in this society."
She means by her peers. Not his. His views regarding black IQ are entirely mainstream among scientists who actually study the matter. She works in "Social Science", which, like everything that includes "Science" in its name, is not scientific. Conclusions first, evidence later, if at all. And BTW, she's a dissembling courtesan.
Isthere not a a book about Wendy living in Never-Never Land?
Methinks this Wendy also lives in such a place.
@Carol wrote: "Murray was so soundly discredited that my local library has a book refuting The Bell Curve, but not the book itself."
The next edition will not mention the book or the author it purports to refute, lest it entice someone to look for it.
Sorry to pile on.
"the racial inferiority of Black people in their capacity to learn and to succeed in this society"
Well, Murray points out that all the available evidence suggests that blacks are indeed, on the whole, less able to learn and succeed in society than other racial groups. He wants society to face reality.
"Why does he survive in the academy, and why does that bad science keep getting resuscitated?"
He is not in the academy, and would not be tolerated there. Though of course a number of serious academics concerned about inequality do take him seriously. Coming Apart, focused on whites only, is also a lefty issue.
What exactly is the "bad science"? That IQ has a genetic component? But that is the science, and has become more sciency since the 90s. How much group-level variation "genes" account for is, to my knowledge, still uncertain, and, to my knowledge, Murray never claimed otherwise. For the purpose of explaining different life chances, it is secondary anyway.
But what the post illustrates is the pervasive bad faith of the left.
Gabriel,
Lots of things are refuted by the existence of Elle Macpherson.
For instance, the idea that "woman" is difficult to define.
After all, "I know it when I see it."
1.
You could sum it all up by saying that "it's the same old racists talking but now they've got a professor, instead of the Chief Kleagle of the KKK."
They've got professors - they've had professors. And the professors have been refuted. Even if a majority of people alive today cannot repeat the arguments that refuted Professors Burt, Jensen and Murray, the arguments were made, the refutation was done. It isn't right to talk about how "people haven't read the book" when the talkers are "people haven't read the refutations of the book." But it happens constantly - it is the leading intellectual feature of the supporters of Murray.
So, like everyone else here, I've had my say about this utterly trivial failed woman and her entirely predictable screed, published by, of course, the NYT. I'm beginning to wonder if Howard has it right, Althouse. Is this just clickbait, red meat for the snarling hounds of your commentariat? Was there something about this particular regurgitation of Left Fascist paranoia that you felt was noteworthy? Clue me in. Why would anyone give fuck zero for what this stupid bitch had to say?
One of the claims of the supporters of Murray is that he is opposed, not refuted. PC in the Nineties and at present, the opponents of free speech, certainly do oppose without refuting his arguments. But they are not his only opponents. His supporters consistently disregard these other opponents. Here is what the opposition to Murray's "science" said.
1. IQ arguments have a long history of proven error. The basis in the science of psychology of the IQ argument has always been that studies of twins raised apart have shown that nature counts for more than nuture. The discrediting of the alleged scientific basis of the IQ arguments reasts on the discrediting of these twin studies - which has been conclusively achieved twice.
The first psychologist to produce twin studies was Cyril Burt whose work was central from the Thirties to the Seventies. In the Seventies it was shown that his work was fraudulent. Essentially, it was shown that his statistics over a period of thirty years in different studies were always the same to the third place which is not possible with statistics. https://intelltheory.com/kamin.shtml (short article); The Mismeasure of Man. (book on the controversy as seen in the Seventies)
2. All the IQ researchers active in the Seventies had founded themselves on Cyril Burt's work - Arthur Jensen, HJ Eysenck and others. It is true that everyone in the field says the same as everyone else and this is why the fact that they were all repeating the conclusions of fraudulent work is significant. They all went down in flames together.
How magnanimous.
3. All the IQ researchers had a another common nexus in the fact that they were funded by the Pioneer Fund. This was set up by the racist Wickliffe Draper and headed at the start by members of the American Eugenics Society (AES) - Harry Laughlin and then Frederick Osborn. Osborn was President of the Pioneer Fund while President of the AES, while helping found Planned Parenthood of America with Margaret Sanger, and while founding the Population Council with Rockefeller. And the Pioneer Fund continued to fund twin studies and IQ studies which eventually led to new "scientific" data not connected with Cyril Burt. The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund. 2007 William H. Tucker
4. The main twin researcher whose more recent data Murray used was TJ Bouchard of the University of Minnesota. The battle centered around the fact that Bouchard published his conclusions but not his raw data. Other psychologists could not review his statistical assumptions or even his data. Where did he find twins raised apart, how far apart? (Some, it was discovered, lived down the street with an aunt. Some met as adults and might have been copying each other.) How did Bouchard "smooth" his data? Bouchard never really allowed all this to be freely reviewed. This was fatal to any reasoned acceptance of his arguments and, in light of the Cyril Burt debacle, fatal to general acceptance of TJ Bouchard's work as a scientific argument. And then fatal to acceptance of Murray's argument.
All this is available. And most people who lived through these scuffles are aware of the general outline of the argument, the pros and cons. We, who are in our seventies, know the arguments from the Seventies on. But younger people seem to only know the statements made on each side.
The "scientific racist" statement is: The cause of poverty among the blacks is that they have, as a group, genetically-based low intelligence which results in low achievement and poverty. The IQ gap between blacks and whites is one standard deviation, that is, the average black IQ is 85. Half are lower than that which puts them in the remedial schooling category. The average IQ for a repeat criminal is 85. the environment of blacks and whites is the same since desegregation. In particular The public schools do an excellent job of educating in the big cities. Genetic differences in group intelligence are due to evolution in areas over tens of thousands of years.
This statement is racism, nicely touched up with "science". For the reasons given above, the "science" is not just lipstick on a pig but garish, caked, flaking lipstick on a very dirty pig.
Given yesterday's puzzlement regarding "bootstrap", I suppose I should explain "fuck zero". In many computer languages, counting begins with zero, not one. The first item in a list is "item zero". So, to say "I don't give fuck zero" means that I do not give even one single fuck, which would be fuck zero if I did. Plus, of course, there's a certain abrasive ring to the hard consonant in fuck, followed by the more notional aggression of zero. "Ground zero" is where the bomb goes off. Although it would make more sense to say it is where the bomb goes on.
This is partly because this notation allows the compiler to calculate the address of the item by adding the index to the base address. But it also echoes long-standing notations in differential equations and discrete sums, based upon the fact -- well, the convention, I suppose -- that anything to the zeroeth power equals one.
Legally, there is no such thing as “hate speech.”
It is a media term or a political label.
Think of the many ways we use the word “hate”?
I hate pickles...cold weather...the New England Patriots...Muslims, etc.
I hate Susie when she starts teasing her little sister.
It all depends on the context.
Bravo, Cook. We share an admiration for Nat Hentoff. He has been written off by a lot of leftists who are disturbed by his insistence that free speech is a good thing.
"Given yesterday's puzzlement regarding "bootstrap"..."
There was no puzzlement about "bootstrap." The word in question was "bootloader."
Is science the correct term for data about a population >>> that is merely statistics
I can grant Murray has presented data - but not that he has "/performed/" science.
I can also grant that /affirmative action/ and results outcome thereof will not make any change to data - if replication is done.
It would be wonderful if Murray had been shown to be wrong. But that area of research is now taboo. There's none of the back and forth, "this is why your study is wrong" "no, it isn't and here's another data set that supports my hypothesis. The hypothesis that there is any difference in intelligence between "whites" and "blacks" is totally off limits to inquiry.
It's a bleeping shame.
" Professor in the School of Social Science "
That should explain much. "Social Science" is an oxymoron.
"I’m revealing myself here as a person whose chords and arpeggios and scales are always the history of political thought."
My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.
wildswan bring up an interesting point at 12:50 PM. He lists as part of "scientific racism" the belief that, "The public schools do an excellent job of educating in the big cities." Of course, we all know that many public school students in the big cities don't learn much. What many people don't like to talk about is that white students in those big city systems do significantly better (on average) than black students.
Arguments about racial differences in intelligence are about a lot more than Cyril Burt and some old twin studies.
The problem with the Left, particularly self-titled “progressives”, is that speech that is considered very acceptable today is considered hate speech tomorrow. Before you know it, everything that can be said can be considered “hate speech” by anyone on the left. The First Amendment was created as a defense against these authoritarians by our Founding Fathers after living under an authoritarian government. I just hope none of these leftist people become federal judges or Supreme Court justices. If they do, surely one day they will issue rulings that will nullify and essentially strike down the First Amendment because they consider the Constitution a “living document” that can be twisted into whatever they want it to mean, not what is written in plain English.
"Bravo, Cook. We share an admiration for Nat Hentoff. He has been written off by a lot of leftists who are disturbed by his insistence that free speech is a good thing."
He was, also, if I recall correctly, adamantly opposed to abortion and euthanisia. I find abortion regrettable, but I do not oppose it, while I do oppose normalizing euthanasia of the elderly and/or chronically sick. ("DNR" orders provided by the patients are fine.)
@Wildswan:
The results from IQ tests are consistent across time, and in every population tested. For instance a U.S. professor traveled to South Africa and gave university students an I.Q. test. The results were consistent with Black people being a standard deviation lower than White people. The U.S. military has been giving I.Q. tests for almost 100 years, their results are consistent.
The simple fact is despite all efforts to discredit I.Q., no one has scientifically done so. It is the most studied and verified metric in Social Science.
In California public schools, I.Q tests are used to examine students and place them in the proper educational environment. High I.Q. students are directed to gifted programs and A.P. classes. Low I.Q. students are disqualified from special education because their grades match their I.Q.
Except, by law, Black kids.
Apparently I.Q tests are valid for everyone EXCEPT black people.
Wildswan has resurrected the ad hominem arguments that are the centerpiece of the SPLC web page dealing with Charles Murray. Who gives a fig about Cyril Burt or the Pioneer Foundation? Murray is not carrying water for them. His research and writing should be judged on its own merit.
What Wildswan doesn't do is engage with Murray's central contention that some quantifiable thing called human intelligence, which has both genetic and environmental origins, correlates highly with human accomplishment. And human intelligence is not equally distributed. The presence or absence of intelligence is a significant predictor of professional and economic success. These seemingly benign notions are at the center of the woke firestorm because they confound the woke diagnosis of systemic racism, and invalidate the woke program of seeking ethnic congruence as the summum bonum.
Blogger rhhardin said...
Many friends of blacks think that it's a problem to be solved that so many are on the low end, far from a problem to be avoided. Murray among them.
-----
I read the book, and later I had a nurse who was a black woman. I liked her a lot, and she seemed to like me. One day when I left the doctor, she was outside smoking. We talked for a while, and she had a small family: one child and the child's father, and all three lived together. She wanted the best for her family.
I am honestly afraid to talk about this stuff, but I will push ahead.
I told her about The Bell Curve, and all it's claims. When I explained the part of the book that discussed IQ testing and the distribution of scores across demographics, I could see it upset her.
I told her to ignore that part, and to think of the idea that people are sorting themselves by intelligence and education. I said to her that I used that theory to relocate myself to a place where I was surrounded by smart, well educated people, and that had helped me. (I had to get a job delivering pizzas to these fine folks, and it did help me.)
When I returned to the doctor, she told me that her and her partner had read the book together. She seemed happy that she had read it.
The next time I saw her was at a different doctor. She got a job in a better location and relocated her family there. She seemed very happy.
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Thanks to this blog, I check in on John McWhorter and Glenn Loury from time to time. Remember Blogginheads.tv?
When I encounter sensible people on the center left who are in process of evaluating some things previously not evaluated, I recommend althouse, mcwhorter, and loury as people to follow.
A a couple of things about the psychological claims of the book.
I view heredity as nature compounded by time. It makes sense to me that a population would evolve over many generations when exposed to oppression from a second population.
However, something that is often ignored with IQ testing is playing dumb. Poor southerners of all stripes will play dumb for various reasons, but often it is a mark that we eschew elitism.
Sometimes it is for financial game. Imagine home much money Meade and Althouse could make if she wanted to play the dumb blonde in a room full of suckers?
However, playing dumb might be a good tactic to use when one is a member of an oppressed class.
Black nurses are ubiquitous in Atlanta and environs. I once found a forgotten archive about the nurses desegregating at Grady hospital. Fascinating stuff-- white and black sororities were involved.
I have watch three immediate family members die while cared for primarily by black nurses and nurses' aides. I owe them everything, from the Jamaican man who was the only one at my mother's side on her last day, to the elderly aide who was the only person who could get my little brother to swallow food, by feeding him like a baby when the cancer hit his brain. He spent half his life in hospitals and had the greatest quiet and modest respect for black nurses.
God bless them all.
Diversity, Inequity, and Exclusion (DIE) is dogma that progresses under the established, nominally "secular", traditional Pro-Choice "ethical" religion, denies individual dignity, individual conscience, and intrinsic value, and normalizes color blocs, color quotas, and affirmative discrimination. #HateLovesAbortion and other wicked solutions.
Roger Sweeny said...
" Of course, we all know that many public school students in the big cities don't learn much. What many people don't like to talk about is that white students in those big city systems do significantly better (on average) than black students."
Even within the public school systems in big cities there are variations in school districts. In some school districts in Milwaukee a majority of the students are not at grade level in terms of standardized tests by third grade. From then on they are merely promoted without mastering material. 40% of the guys do not graduate from high school even under these relaxed standards. But students of the same race from those same school districts attend non-public schools such as Catholic schools and do well, 90 to 95 % of the graduating classes going on to college. This leads me to say that the public schools serving the black community are not teaching students as well as public schools in other areas or as well as non-public or charter schools. A poor education leads to a poor social outcome.
Got a BA in psych better than fifty years ago. Even then, we were being educated on why the intelligence tests didn't really demonstrate what it looked as if they demonstrated. Which is to say they demonstrated a racial disparity but we were not to take it seriously. The data was too strong and too widely spread to disappear it.
More recently, there has been work on what is variously called "visual memory" " spatial memory" and certain other things. Used to be called a "bump of direction". Highest scores are among Australia's traditional peoples. If the waterhole you just reached turns out to be dry, it helps to be able to go back to the last one you visited.
It's interesting how hard the researchers work to make this a cultural thing, as if traditional people living in town, in the burbs, wherever, take their kids into the Outback Saturday mornings for a spot of orienteering.
The Inuit are pretty good, too. On account of long stories told on winter nights and sentence structure. That's how, after twelve hours wrapped in a polar bear hide in a blizzard, you look out at a new landscape and....find your way home.
Cause it it's not cultural.....then what of the intelligence tests? They're not cultural either?
Askenazi Jews are very high in numeracy and verbal skills but lousy in spatial memory. So they can get along with those as long as there are lots of street signs.
Which brings up a point: Put an Ashkenazic back about five thousand years with his terrific numeracy and verbal skills, in an Aboriginal band. Wouldn't do them any good, getting lost on his way back from the latrine.
So intelligence is considered as what gets you through the current day best. Actual mental horsepower, raw muscle for solving the urgent, unexpected and dangerous...not necessarily the same thing. And what does your current day demand?
gahrie said...
@Wildswan:
"The results from IQ tests are consistent across time, and in every population tested. For instance a U.S. professor traveled to South Africa and gave university students an I.Q. test. The results were consistent with Black people being a standard deviation lower than White people."
The US professor Gahrie is citing is Richard Lynn. He has made IQ his life study and his results are consistent across his own lifetime and are the ones most usually cited. In his studies Nigerians have an average IQ of 84 which is similar to the average IQ of other Africans and of other African-Americans. Yet Nigerian immigrants are one of the most successful groups within the United States. How can the different outcomes from the same IQ be explained?
I have argued that the Raven matrices are not at all culture-free. They are based on recognition of patterns in changed positions in space which is the concentrated essence of the kind of mind best suited to a technological culture. In such a recognition of geometric shapes is essential - think of blueprints, statistical charts, topo maps, geological diagrams nd so on. And I have argued that if pattern recognition is the essence of intelligence then an IQ test based on recognition and recollection of sounds in time would be just as valid a measure of intelligence as recognition and recollection of patterns in space. And I am certain that members of the black community would shine on that kind of test while the majority of members of other communities would struggle. Jazz is a kind of sound/time-based IQ test - and who invented jazz?
@wildswan:Yet Nigerian immigrants are one of the most successful groups within the United States. How can the different outcomes from the same IQ be explained?
Because the population of Nigerian immigrants to the US is not selected randomly from all Nigerians.
It's like saying how can women be shorter than men and looking only at WNBA teams.
@wildswan: It really bothers me that you would say something so nonsensical as this:
"Yet Nigerian immigrants are one of the most successful groups within the United States. How can the different outcomes from the same IQ be explained?"
Either you have very serious misunderstandings about what population averages ARE, or you are lying. Either way, you are not to be trusted to say what's been "refuted".
What you've said is identical to
Black NBA players are one of the most successful groups within the United States. How can it be true that black people are paid less than whites?
Female neurosurgeons are the of the most successful groups within the United States. How can it be true that women are paid less than men?
I have not seen political science referred to a science in a while.
"And I have argued that if pattern recognition is the essence of intelligence then an IQ test based on recognition and recollection of sounds in time would be just as valid a measure of intelligence as recognition and recollection of patterns in space. And I am certain that members of the black community would shine on that kind of test while the majority of members of other communities would struggle. Jazz is a kind of sound/time-based IQ test - and who invented jazz?"
OK. So, you are arguing that some races might be better than others at some mental tasks, as a result of genetic differences? Like how Chinese do better than Europeans on IQ tests devised by Europeans?
@Jupiter:Like how Chinese do better than Europeans on IQ tests devised by Europeans?
White people so dumb their racist IQ tests to "prove" their superiority put an entirely different race at the top. What do you expect?
The reason CRT (and its variants of wokeness such as anti-racism) is being booted from schools isn't to protect free speech, though I suppose that's an indirect benefit. It's being booted because it's based on the premise that whites are racist and minorities are oppressed victims. This premise, per CRT, is not debatable, and if you try to debate it, you're racist. It's basically the Intelligent Design of social philosophy. CRT is being booted because it pushes racial discrimination and harassment while infantilizing the folks it purports to help. Mostly it just acts as cover/excuse for anti-white racism/revenge for historical grievances.
Ampersand said...
"Charles Murray. Who gives a fig about Cyril Burt or the Pioneer Foundation? Murray is not carrying water for them. His research and writing should be judged on its own merit."
Murray's research was a summation of Pioneer Fund research; he was not himself a researcher. He used the research of the following Pioneer Fund grantees: Arthur Jensen (24 separate books and articles mentioned), Richard Lynn (23 separate books and articles cited); JP Rushton (11 separate books and articles cited); TJ Bouchard (The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart); RD Retherford (4 articles cited); RA Gordon (3 books articles cited, and his student, Linda Gottfredson, who led the defense of Murray in WSJ); Daniel Vining (3 books and Articles cited); Seymour Itzkoff, HJ Eysenck, PA Vernon, Lloyd Humphreys.
So you can't just shove aside the Pioneer Fund. Instead get out your trusty copy of the Bell Curve and cross check the significant! authors against the list of Pioneer Fund grantees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund.
Ampersand
What Wildswan doesn't do is engage with Murray's central contention that some quantifiable thing called human intelligence, which has both genetic and environmental origins, correlates highly with human accomplishment.
I think I did engage with the question of what an IQ test tells us about how well a person will do in a literature and math -based technological society and how that might be different from intelligence. I made two proposals. I said Raven's matrices were spatial pattern recognition appropriate to engineering and that sound pattern recognition as in jazz would be just as good a measure of intelligence but not of probable success in a technological society. And I also pointed out that Nigerians have the same low IQ as other Africans but do well anyhow.
something that is often ignored with IQ testing is playing dumb
Are really suggesting that for 150 years successive generations of oppressed people have managed to “play dumb” so consistently that the overall results have remained the same?
How can the different outcomes from the same IQ be explained?
I suspect that upon investigation we might find that immigrants were drawn in large numbers from the upper end of the IQ scale. Just a theory.
Gabriel
It seems that if we assume that the Nigerians who come have higher IQs than the Nigerian average to start with and then benefit from the nutrition bonus of 13 points we can explain their average US IQ of 91. But note that the IQ of those who come must be about 78, higher than the Nigerian average but not by any means as high as the US average or else the "nutrition bonus" of 13 points would give Nigerians an IQ of 113. This feels like fiddling till the numbers come out. Why are Nigerians who are about one standard deviation above the Nigerian average self-selecting in such numbers to come to come? Moreover how does an average which is still below average for US intelligence explain above average Nigerian success. Perhaps somewhere there is another little bundle of IQ points to add in. Waiting.
"racial inferiority of Black people in their capacity to learn and to succeed in this society."
There is no replicable study of 18 year olds that show equal average IQ scores among different races: Blacks, Hispanic, White, Asian. Just like SAT scores, in ascending order.
IQ is related to success, but bad behavior is worse, it's more important to a) avoid being a criminal, and b) avoid having children outside of marriage.
Blacks disproportionally lead in both of these bad behavior categories. More because of bad US Black culture than IQs.
Saying Murray science is discredited doesn't make it so - the critics mostly don't like the truth.
@wildswan 356pm
You have not engaged with Murray's arguments because Murray's arguments do not preclude other measures of intelligence. I have no idea of the merits of the alternative IQ tests that you suggest, but the suggestion misses the point. You seem to concede that there is a quantifiable thing that we can rationally characterize as intelligence. Murray's work says that, given the tests we have, the cognitive thing called human intelligence correlates highly with job success and accomplishment. It's partly genetic, partly environmental. And unevenly distributed.
The fact that we can have a civil discussion on the merits and demerits of his work indicates that Wendy Brown is seriously deluded when she pretends that Murray's work has been comprehensively disproven. Woke-ism is just the latest iteration of the blank slate fallacy, pursuant to which we are all equally sized sponges, equally absorptive of our environment, and thus the prisoners of a destiny that the state can and should rewrite for us.
@wildswan - Talking about the success of students in Catholic schools, I think you make the same mistake as conservatives who tout the success of students in some charter schools. In both cases, there is a self-selection effect. Smarter, more motivated kids with parents who care more about school go to those schools. It's not a random sample by any means.
Those who talk about racial differences in intelligence don't say that races are uniform. Just as Ashkenazi Jews are (on average, always on average) smarter than Poles or Ukrainians or French or Germans, so Igbos (one of the three major Nigerian ethnic groups) are (on average) smarter than Xhosa or San. In fact, the difference between racial sub-groups is often an argument that differences are also possible between larger groups.
conservatives who tout the success of students in some charter schools
Classical liberals, on the right, with respect to market or evolutionary fitness. American conservatives, from the center, too.
Mr. Howard:
How was IQ measured in 1872?
No matter. When laying low is ingrained into culture, yes, it passes down through generations.
--Dave
The "debunking" of Murray is weak sauce, mostly ad hominems. One explanation for his results could be that black parents don't talk to or read to their kids much or expect homework to be done. If so, this can be fixed. Another explanation could be that urban schools are crap. This can be fixed--but charter schools and religious schools, that have actually had a positive effect on black scores, are denounced by teacher unions. If on the other hand, it is genetic, this poses a serious problem that no one is addressing. All of these lines of enquiry are shut down if you call it hate speech.
I know a lot of people of all races. I am smart enough to recognize people who are much smarter than me. I have known lots of people smarter than me who are Jewish, from India, from Iran, and from China (oh and white obviously). I have never personally met a black person who comes close to me. This does not constitute a racist statement.
One thing to consider, is that even if blacks are at an IQ disadvantage, the thug life just makes their situation worse, not better. A lot worse.
One can argue that the chinese immigrants are also a non-random sample of chinese (being smarter) but china for the past 3000 years led the way in art, literature, agriculture, and technology until a few hundred years ago.
What has been shown is that immigrants tend to be bolder, less fearful, which would contribute to success in the US.
Roger Sweeny said...
@wildswan - Talking about the success of students in Catholic schools, I think you make the same mistake as conservatives who tout the success of students in some charter schools. In both cases, there is a self-selection effect. Smarter, more motivated kids with parents who care more about school go to those schools. It's not a random sample by any means.
Don't have time to dig it up at the moment, but there was a study done of a city where there was a lottery among applications for a charter school /.vouchers for private school (I'm not positive I remember which).
Because you had to apply for the lottery, and it was random assignment, it made a great study.
The students who got out of the public schools did better
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