[flagged]
Murray himself takes that set of beliefs and follows it in a direction that quite explicitly replaces "heredity" with "race", and associates a great deal of our nation's class differences to it. It's not really clear to me whether Scott's beliefs lead him in that direction too, or maybe if they do so to a lesser extent. I do know that many people on rationalist-adjacent boards like The Motte (used to be part of the SSC subreddit) have drawn some pretty unpleasant and unjustified opinions on this matter, which is one of the reasons that people asked Scott to remove that discussion group from the subreddit. (He did so, but only under duress and while denouncing the people who asked him to.)
Find me an honest person who is knowledgeable about IQ and denies that IQ is somewhat heritable, and there is some meaningful (not completely determinative!) causal relationship between intelligence and class indicators such as income. That's all Scott has ever "aligned" himself with from Murray.
Is this now a forbidden hypothesis? If IQ has a large effect on life outcomes (it does) and is significantly heritable (it is), then it would be surprising if that were not the case.
Presumably, it is possible to believe both that IQ is highly heritable and that it is very important for success in the modern world, while also concluding, "this is why we need full communism now," but you rarely encounter those people at all, at least outside of SSC-adjacent places.
So? When did that became illegal? Or news?
> So? When did that became illegal? Or news?
What does illegality have to do with anything in this context?
I mean holding an idea can be both legal and abhorrent/wrong at the same time.
And isn't bringing up legality here kind of a Motte & Bailey fallacy? (I'm genuinely asking, I only learned about that the other day.) People condemn Murray's ideas because they're distasteful and wrong, but it's certainly far easier to defend their legality.
Then rephrase the above question: since when did that become abhorrent or wrong?
We know that IQ is hereditary. This is a simple statistical fact: there is positive correlation between the IQ of children and their parents. And if cognitive ability translates into higher incomes, this would mean income is hereditary
I think what people find abhorrent are the perceived implication rather than the message itself. I'm going to hazard the guess that you're perceiving the implication that saying class differences are hereditary is implying that inequality isn't a problem, or some social groups won't ever have high incomes, or something else.
In reality saying these differences are hereditary is saying nothing about that. Saying IQ is hereditary isn't saying some people will never be smart. Obesity is hereditary, too. That doesn't mean the children of obese parents can never be a healthy weight. Nobody's body cheats thermodynamics. Likewise people's IQ can be improved by exercising mental tasks.
The problem is the IQ fetishists go past this into kind of speaking about it as a virtue or lack.
It gets a little closer to someone who really really thinks height is important and short people are holding things back. They put way too much societal importance on height as a measure of success, when people of all sizes can lead fulfilling, comfortable lives. There's always something off when they discuss it, which is why I kind of got tired of those people in rationalism. It's like caring that you are only 5'7" instead of 6 foot tall.
My point is that people are perceiving a very different implication than what Murray or SSC are actually saying. E.g. saying cognitive ability is genetic evokes images of Gattaca-like society where people's fate is determined by their genome. In reality, IQ is far more malleable and can be developed through exercise or atrophy through lack of it.
This does seem to be murray's contention. I don't think SSC agrees though. And this is actively harmful if you subscribe to the view that it is malleable: claiming that it can't be changed and that someone is "inferior", as Murray does, probably isn't going to set them up for success.
Taking a step back though, I'll trust you on obesity, but we do t have hard evidence that I'm aware of that intelligence is genetic. For example, cognitive ability and IQ aren't the same, and even if they were, there are all kinds of things (like language) that are clearly heritable but obviously not genetically so.
Regardless,
> This does seem to be murray's contention. I don't think SSC agrees though. And this is actively harmful if you subscribe to the view that it is malleable: claiming that it can't be changed and that someone is "inferior", as Murray does, probably isn't going to set them up for success.
This statement seriously makes me doubt whether you've read Murray . The central thesis of his book The Bell Curve is that society needs to do a better job helping people on the lower end of cognitive ability lead fulfilling and productive lives. The notion that less intelligent people are inferior is the complete opposite of what he actually wrote.
No, it's like picking one of those and using it as the measure. If you pick 10k running time, you'll be biased towards mid-length endurance athletes. If you pick deadlift, you'll be biased towards raw strength athletes. The question of if Usain Bolt or Hafthor Bjornsson is more athletic is malformed, it requires us to ask which athletic talents we value more highly (not to mention comparing to someone like Kobe Bryant or Tom Brady, where social interaction is a component of the athletic achievement).
Similarly, most measures of IQ contain implicit assumptions about what intelligence means, and those assumptions are based on western cultural norms. Even tests designed to be less culturally biased, such as Raven's Progressive Matrices, aren't free of this issue. And this ignores cultures where decision making is often a team sport, so being forced to take a test without aid is an unusual environment, and may be, culturally, a malformed question.
> The central thesis of his book The Bell Curve is that society needs to do a better job helping people on the lower end of cognitive ability lead fulfilling and productive lives.
Right, the unstated assumption here being that they are genetically predisposed to having lower cognitive ability (and further that this ability is highly correlated along racial lines). That they are genetically inferior and society needs to cater better to their inferiority: "we should be more willing to help the cognitively disabled". Not that they may be just as well equipped as everyone else, and we should address the biases in society that mismeasure their intelligence, such as biased IQ tests and other cultural assumptions about what intelligence is.
The Bell curve doesn't engage with any of this criticism (it predates some of, but by no means all of it). It assumes that the measure is objective and valid. I've read enough of Murray, and enough criticism of him, to understand how he's wrong.
Not even remotely true. The intra-race differences are much larger than the inter-race difference. The difference along racial lines is a fraction of a standard deviation. They almost entirely overlap. Murray emphasized, repeatedly, that the IQ distributions between race almost entirely overlaps. "Highly correlated along racial lines" is the total opposite of what was actually written in the book.
I'm sorry but this just about confirms my suspicion that you are not familiar with what Murray actually wrote. I'm sure the version Murray's message you have in your mind is highly racist. But that is a very different message than the one that exists in reality.
> I'm sure the version Murray's message you have in your mind is highly racist. But that is a very different message than the one that exists in reality.
I haven't yet claimed he's racist. I've claimed he's wrong about measurement of cognitive ability.
That said, since you bring it up, I do think he's racist. The book itself isn't about race, per say, it's a Social Darwinist policy-paper aimed at reducing welfare on the argument that welfare for childcare encourages low-income (and, as the book suggests, presumably cognitively-lesser) women to have more children.
It also, plainly a succinctly states that immigration is bad, and that modern immigrants are "less able":
> The other demographic factor we discussed in Chapter 15 was immigration and the evidence that recent waves of immigrants are, on the average, less successful and probably less able, than earlier waves.
This is blamed on the low cognitive ability of modern immigrant populations compared to previous ones, and not structural and systemic factors that make it more difficult for immigrants to be high-achieving.
So I find it highly suspicious that the book lays out policy suggestions that will predominantly harm low income black women, and prevent immigration, and that he complains in particular about the harms of nonwhite immigration when he says "Latin and black immigrants are, at least in the short run, putting some downward pressure on the distribution of intelligence.", and then proceeds to suggest that we should reduce immigration from Africa and Latin America to address this.
Tell me how that isn't racist. I mean in a sense you're right: whether or not one believes that these policy proposals are based on a genetic or environmental understanding of cognitive heritability isn't really relevant. They're still pretty racist. And they get even more racist when you recognize that there are flaws in how Murray chooses to measure cognitive ability, flaws that systematically favor those with significant exposure to Euro-American culture.
Choosing to measure people's athleticism solely on their powerlifting ability, and then proposing to ban anyone who doesn't perform well enough is fairly prejudiced against long distance runners.
Anyway, this has gone far enough and is going deeper into the reply chain than I think is productive. All I really care about is highlighting several key incorrect claims you've made about Murray's work:
> As far as in know, murray claims that the hereditary nature is [primarily] due to genetics, which is certainly more controversial than observing that it is hereditary.
No. Murray repeatedly emphasizes the role of environmental factors like schooling and parenting. He does so explicitly, "In any case, you are not going to learn tomorrow that all the cognitive differences between races are 100 percent genetic in origin, because the scientific state of knowledge, unfinished as it is, already gives ample evidence that environment is part of the story."
> claiming that it [IQ/cognitive ability] can't be changed and that someone is "inferior", as Murray does, probably isn't going to set them up for success.
The book has an entire chapter called "Raising Cognitive Ability". Furthermore, much of the book explores how parenting, education, and other factors affect cognitive ability. This is not at all something Murray is claiming.
> Right, the unstated assumption here being that they are genetically predisposed to having lower cognitive ability (and further that this ability is highly correlated along racial lines).
Again, this runs entirely contrary to what is written in the book. Even before adjusting for different socio-economic contexts, mostly overlap. And after adjusting for socio-economic factors the differences are much smaller. "Highly correlated along racial lines" is far from the truth.
There's definitely valid criticisms to be made. Especially on the influence of IQ on divorce rates, and other observations that go outside of Murray's area of expertise. But please make those criticisms on what was actually written. The reality is that Murray's claims about IQ are not nearly as controversial or inflammatory than people make them out to be. Relating back to my original comment, people criticize Murray more out of perceived implication than about concrete claims.
This is, as I've repeatedly noted, not really true. There's some great criticism of the kinds of IQ tests he uses in the book, in fact, some of them weren't even IQ tests, which makes any conclusions drawn from them about academic achievement really quite silly. If you're asking trigonometry questions (as one test he uses does!), well you aren't testing innate knowledge, but academic progression.
See for example https://bolesblogs.com/1998/03/23/a-review-of-the-bell-curve..., which discusses the multitude of both logical and psychological errors in the book's analysis of IQ and intelligence.
Murray's response to this type of criticism is wholly unsatisfactory.
> No. Murray repeatedly emphasizes the role of environmental factors like schooling and parenting
Saying that he claims environmental factors have some effect, does not contradict that he claims that genetic factors are the majority. Those are, in fact, both true statements!
It's also a bit self contradictory: if he says that socio-economic factors have an impact on measured IQ, then what's the point of IQ as distinct from socio-economic factors? If improving educational access and such improves the measured values, it clearly isn't any sort of innate measure, and is obviously culturally influenced, which is precisely the point I'm making. I'm glad he agrees with me ;)
> The reality is that Murray's claims about IQ are not nearly as controversial or inflammatory than people make them out to be.
I agree! They're just scientifically inaccurate.
The odious things are the policy suggestions he pushes for based on the bunk science! And when one uses bad science to push racist policies, listeners (rightly) start to wonder if perhaps the science is being done to push the policies, and not vice versa. He starts from the conclusion and works backwards, and does so to justify inequalities that exist today. That is racist.
> people criticize Murray more out of perceived implication than about concrete claims.
Another way to put what I'm getting at here is that the scientific claims Murray makes are broadly not false, but they are often vague and underspecified. The policy proposals he suggests only make sense under a particular interpretation of his scientific claims, a particular interpretation he never explicitly states. That interpretation isn't supported by his data, and contradicts much of the softening he places in the book.
It doesn't make sense to advocate for removal of the social safety net as a "solution" to the problem of low IQ individuals reproducing too much[0] if you believe that IQ can be raised through policy that improves socio-economic outcomes. It is logically inconsistent to both believe that childhood economic status improves IQ, and that we should reduce government assistance to those with the lowest IQs. In fact, you'd want to do the opposite: stabilize them with additional income such that their economic status, and with it, IQ, increases.
His policy proposals only make sense if he believes that IQ is primarily genetic and that things like schools and socio-economic environment don't have a significant impact.
[0]: Let's ignore the giant question being begged here.
There's a personal upper limit that can be improved only when one is a child from what I've read. Whilst at the same time, damaging one's cognitive intelligence is doable at any age, yes. And to some extent, undoing the damage
You wrote elsewhere:
> The book has an entire chapter called "Raising Cognitive Ability"
Makes me interested in reading the book :-)
That does not mean that those genes affect my cognitive ability. It may mean they affect my eye color and people are biased against dark eyes, so I can't get into college.
In fact, from my reading of the paper, their major conclusion was only for those of European ethnicity (and even then only accounted for a small percentage of the overall difference in attainment), so they didn't try to address questions about racial influence, for example.
Specifically, for people of European descent, their method is about as predictive as a socio-economic predictor. For a multi-ethnic group, their method is 3-5x less predictive than a socio-economic predictor. Saying that people should retract claims of environmental heritability is ridiculous: those methods are still far more predictive.
To use your example, if a gene still has the same correlation even among non-brown eyed people or the same correlation appears even in societies that don't discriminate against people with brown eyes that's a different story.
Thats what these researchers are doing. These observations aren't made in one environment. They happen across different cultures, different classes, different societies, etc. Factors like parental educational attainment can be adjusted for.
Including religion and language as part of the definition seems to be overloading it.
In any case, is it really controversial that intelligence is at least partially influenced by genes?
That said, there's also epigenetics, which hurts my brain.
> In any case, is it really controversial that intelligence is at least partially influenced by genes?
Broadly speaking, no (like obviously, in some sense it is, right?), but most common attempts to measure intelligence don't really do a good job of deciding what intelligence is. This can be fine if you're trying to draw conclusions about individuals that are generally culturally homogenous (if you're comparing solely amongst a group of pro basketball players, the one with the best bench press is probably above average, even if it isn't really a great judge of basketball skill), but not when trying to compare athleticism between a group made up of basketball players and powerlifters.
I think there's something there. I'd add to that the kinds of ideologies that latch on to the idea that IQ is heritable are another reason to treat the idea as abhorrent. It would be one thing if the question was just one of intellectual curiosity, but it's very much not that. The idea has a looong history of being used to justify racial prejudices.
Irrespective of the correctness or incorrectness of the idea, it's totally legitimate to make it taboo for the above reason alone. Sort of like it's legitimate to make garden-variety political flamebait taboo. Everyone knows where it leads.
That is, everyone except sometimes people who imagine themselves to be "above it all" due to their identification with "reason," or "intelligence," etc.
If some people take a true fact and abuse it to push unjust claims, the focus on addressing the abuse of facts. Not the facts themselves. And Slate Star Codex has done a good job of this. His explorations of these controversial ideas almost invariably entail refutations of abusive use of those ideas.
This is not a good thing for egalitarianism!
Coming at this from the left, I feel it might be better to suggest alternative interpretations of those results than to just avoid any discussion on the whole area.
Another thing that correlates really strongly with black people in the US is their ancestors having lived in slavery. Those ancestors were restricted in their freedom to pick a partner compared with the white population of the US at the time. This could result in genetic differences between the two groups.
A lot of people have done this. The Bell Curve is full of problems, both in the sourced research being completely false (for example, straight up lies about populations being tested) as well as Murray's conclusions drawn from research. Papers and books have been published. What else do you want from the community?
Murray's ideas aren't "new". Not even a little. And they aren't "truth".
Your local university can do it if you really care. A ton of material has been written about Murray's work. Taboo? Humanity has been using science to break the backs of minorities for centuries. People aren't hiding the corner quivering and afraid to touch Murray's work.
I attended grad school with people who studied sociology and history, who were able to synthesize the state of the fields for me. I'm married to a professor and good friends with other professors who study topics in this space. None of them have good things to say about Murray's work.
Yes, and the way to attack this is not to insist that there are zero heritable differences in people's talents for various economically renumerable activities. There are lots of heritable differences. There are also lots of environmental effects.
The way to attack it is to do the thing the NYT cannot do, and attack meritocracy as the basis of our political economy. For instance, plainly the Trump children got where they are due to heredity! Their whole damn family is coasting off Donald's father, who made the money. But as we all saw, their "very good genes" made them, well, terrifically incompetent, feckless morons.
The NYT's criticism of SSC isn't that he expressed an idea that Murray also had, but that he name-checked Murray. (I haven't read his books so I don't have my own opinion, but I gather he's considered Problematic by some.)
It's said that great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss people. When you're writing for the public, you'll have all 3 kinds of readers. Journalists are very aware of this, and make sure their stories work on all 3 levels. Actually, mostly just the last 2. A journalist who has trained himself to think this way might read SSC as "blah blah agree Douglas Murray blah blah blah".
It is lame of the NYT to try to hold other publications, that are trying to discuss pure ideas, to the same constraint? Yes.
Obviously, saying “I agree with Hitler on vegetarianism” does not mean also supporting Nazism or the Holocaust or whatever. But it does invite pretty reasonable suspicion as to why, out of all the vegetarians in the world, you decided to compare yourself to that particular one.
Even the NYT, in an article on Thanksgiving arguments, has acknowledged that it's much more persuasive to point out where you agree before getting into where you disagree.
Some folks seem to think it virtuous to shun their opponents and ignore, or performatively disagree with, 100% of what they say. It isn't - it's just a way to signal tribal loyalty.
The point I’m making is that the way in which one makes an argument can reveal more than a strictly logical reading of its premises and conclusion. So it’s possible that even if Scott wrote his whole FAQ and came out against whatever it is, people are still justified in thinking he’s more sympathetic to it than he lets on.
Like, to use your analogy, if I were writing an article on someone and they threw references to Hitler into otherwise innocuous topics like vegetarianism? Maybe I wouldn’t describe it as “aligning themselves”, but I’d probably find it suspicious enough to include.
It doesn't matter if you think yourself justified to read between the lines. Reporting should be factual, otherwise it's just your opinion, people can't trust you to help form their opinion, and they have to go to the source material themselves to see what it really says.